Art for our Sake School Arts Classes Matter More than Ever-But Not for the Reasons You Think

Editors note. Reprinted with permission from the authors. Previously featured in The Boston Globe, September 2, 2007.hy do we teach the arts in schools? In an educational system strapped for money and increasingly ruled by standardized tests, arts courses can seem almost a needless extravagance, and the arts are being cut back at schools across the country. One justification for keeping the arts has now become almost a mantra for par-ents, arts teachers, and even politicians: arts make you smarter. The notion that arts classes improve children’s scores on the SAT, the MCAS, and other tests is practically gospel among arts-advocacy groups. A Gallup poll last year found that 80 percent of Americans believed that learning a musical instrument would improve math and science skills. But that claim turns out to be unfound-ed. It’s true that students involved in the arts do better in school and on their SATs than those who are not involved. However, correlation isn’t causation, and an analysis we did several years ago showed no evidence that arts training actually causes scores to rise. There is, however, a very good rea-son to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum–and that far from being irrelevant in a test-driven education system, arts educa-tion is becoming even more important as standardized tests like the MCAS exert a narrowing influence over what schools teach. The implications are broad, not just for schools but for society. As schools cut time for the arts, they may be losing their ability to produce not just the artis-tic creators of the future, but innovative leaders who improve the world they inherit. And by continuing to focus on the arts’ dubious links to improved test scores, arts advocates are losing their most powerful weapon: a real grasp of what arts bring to education. It is well established that intelligence and thinking ability are far more com-plex than what we choose to measure on standardized tests. The high-stakes exams we use in our schools, almost exclusively focused on verbal and quan-titative skills, reward children who have a knack for language and math and who can absorb and regurgitate information. They reveal little about a student’s intel-lectual depth or desire to learn, and are poor predictors of eventual success and satisfaction in life. As schools increasingly shape their classes to produce high test scores, many life skills not measured by tests just don’t get taught. It seems plausible to imagine that art classes might help fill the gap by encouraging different kinds of thinking, but there has been remarkably little careful study of what skills and modes of thinking the arts actually teach. To determine what happens inside arts classes, we spent an academic year studying five visual-arts classrooms in two local Boston-area schools, video-taping and photographing classes, ana-lyzing what we saw, and interviewing teachers and their students. What we found in our analysis should worry parents and teachers facing cut-backs in school arts programs. While students in art classes learn techniques specific to art, such as how to draw, how to mix paint, or how to center a pot, they’re also taught a remarkable array of mental habits not emphasized elsewhere in school. Such skills include visual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today’s standardized tests. In our study, funded by the J. Paul Getty Trust, we worked with classes at the Boston Arts Academy, a pub-