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Home › Articles › Back to School Headquarters › Advocating for the Arts

Advocating for the Arts

Building Morale, Attendance and Educational Skills With the Arts

Part One

By Kim Byrum Skinner

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imulates attendance and interest levels.

"Art trains people to think critically and creatively, and that's where invention comes through critical thinking and creativity," Katz says. "Invention has driven the development of the world. It's driven world economies since the beginning.

"I also think you can't ignore the fact that involvement in the arts stimulates certain students within the normal day's curriculum and can definitely lead to better attendance and better behaviors in school, which are bound to lead to increases in performance in other topics as well," he says. "It's just another way of hooking students into school. If arts are offered, then that's something they want to show up for, and I think that sort of thing has been proven."

An important off-shoot of visual literacy, known as media literacy, allows us to recognize, filter and analyze hidden agendas in what we read, see or hear a key consumer skill given that the average child is bombarded by more than 100 ads per day. Not even Saturday-morning cartoons are immune.

"There are covert messages, subliminal messages, injected into advertising that turn us all into consumers," Hatfield says. "And there's nothing wrong with consumerism, but the point is that they're selling something. If you have a command of that visual language, you're able to discriminate. You're able to understand what's taking place. If we don't give this [interpretive knowledge and understanding] to kids, they miss out."

The relative health of arts education in public schools varies widely from state to state. Experts report that many programs are being hindered by the underfunded mandates of No Child Left Behind, as money allocated for art education is being siphoned to improve ever critical test scores in reading and math.

"With some of the schools, it's the cost of tests that are holding them back," Hatfield says. "With others, it's the cost of scheduling and meeting the requirements. Nearly 30 states have some kind of formal amendments or legislation because they are either not real happy with, or against, No Child Left Behind."

While Sanders believes that No Child Left Behind could be used to assure the public that art teachers are well prepare

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