Advocating for Visual Arts Education

There is that famous old saying that “for true believers no proof is necessary and for non-believers, no proof is adequate.” 

I just don’t accept that, especially when it comes to advocating for arts education.  

I just heard an unsettling trend from colleague Christina DePaul who is the Executive Director of the Miami-based Arts Recognition and Talent Search, the organization that finds and recognizes our nation’s most accomplished artists, musicians and writers who are seniors in high school.  She and her program staff told me that a significantly higher percentage than ever before of the young artists who receive the highest level of recognition in the ARTS program are home schooled. This trend had even appeared in The Scholastic Awards in my last years as Executive Director.  This seems to corroborate Dr. Robert Sabol’s conclusions about the negative impact on arts education of No Child Left Behind.

 Abdi, Kathleen, Angela, Amanda and Calvin at the US DoE. All top Recipients of The Scholastic Awards and ARTS Awards.

I wrangled the remarkable group of talented young artists pictured above to appear at a meeting of the Arts Education Partnership in the summer of 2005 at the U.S. Department of Education.  Their voices and their stunning achievements in the arts gave convincing testimony to the impact of a high quality arts education.  

We simply can’t be vocal enough about our cause.  Making the case for high quality arts education is as much a part of the responsibility of a professional arts educator as making sure brushes are cleaned and that our NAEA memberships are current.  And like any routine maintenance job, it’s usually less effective and more costly in terms of impact if we wait until the storm clouds of impending budget cuts roil through our schools. We need to take bold, preventive action before our kids have even less access to arts education, and only home-schooled kids with unique resources can gain the 21st century skills that high quality arts education engenders.

I will offer some specific points for how to become a vocal arts education advocate in my next post!

-BJ Adler