Artists Bring What Schools Need
Submitted by Steve on February 3, 2012
From Nick Rabkin for The Huffington Post:
The practice of teachers in classrooms is what matters most when it comes to students learning in school. The principle strategies of school reform — 'higher' standards, school and teacher 'accountability', intensified testing, and 'choice' — may affect teacher practice indirectly, but the the relatively poor record of school reform over the last three decades, especially in schools serving low-income students, suggests that those strategies are of no great consequence to the quality of teaching. They may even be counterproductive.
Could arts education and teaching artists — artist/educators who have entered schools in significant numbers in the last three decades, after more than a century of educational work in other kinds of community venues — be a strategy for improving the quality of teaching in American schools? My three-year study of teaching artists suggests that the answer to that question is likely to be yes.