This erosion chipped away at the constituencies that might have defended the arts in the era of NCLB - children who had no music and art classes in the 1970s and 1980s may not appreciate their value now. Arts education has been slipping for more than three decades, the result of tight budgets, an ever-growing list of state mandates that have crammed the classroom curriculum, and a public sense that the arts are lovely but not essential. Evidence supports this contention - we'll get to the statistics in a minute - but the reality is more complex. It has become a mantra in education that No Child Left Behind, with its pressure to raise test scores, has reduced classroom time devoted to the arts (and science, social studies, and everything else besides reading and math). "Arts education enables those children from a financially challenged background to have a more level playing field with children who have had those enrichment experiences,'' says Eric Cooper, president and founder of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education. And strong arts programming in schools helps close a gap that has left many a child behind: From Mozart for babies to tutus for toddlers to family trips to the museum, the children of affluent, aspiring parents generally get exposed to the arts whether or not public schools provide them. A 2005 report by the Rand Corporation about the visual arts argues that the intrinsic pleasures and stimulation of the art experience do more than sweeten an individual's life - according to the report, they "can connect people more deeply to the world and open them to new ways of seeing," creating the foundation to forge social bonds and community cohesion. Arts learning can also improve motivation, concentration, confidence, and teamwork.
Involvement in the arts is associated with gains in math, reading, cognitive ability, critical thinking, and verbal skill. Years of research show that it's closely linked to almost everything that we as a nation say we want for our children and demand from our schools: academic achievement, social and emotional development, civic engagement, and equitable opportunity. Arts education, on the other hand, does solve problems. In fact, Rayl (1995) and Martin (1995) have reported that adolescents with formal training in music tend to have higher achievement in mathematics."Art does not solve problems, but makes us aware of their existence," sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz has said. According to Wenger and Wenger (1990), neuroscientists suspect that when children exercise cortical neurons by being actively involved in music, they are potentially enhancing their intelligence, namely mathematics capability, spatial reasoning skills, and the ability to handle complex reasoning tasks. Numerous studies have focused on the relationship between training in a musical instrument and youths' achievement level. For example, Nisbet (1991) has pointed out that there is a close relationship between the musical symbolism used in setting the time signature and the mathematical symbolism used in fractional concepts. The association of music with mathematics has been noted. These results are discussed in relation to previous research on music training and mathematics achievement. In addition, students who received lessons on the keyboard had significantly higher ITBS mathematics scores than did students whose lessons did not involve the keyboard.
Analyses indicated that students who had private lessons for two or more years performed significantly better on the composite mathematics portion of the ITBS than did students who did not have private lessons. Comparisons also were made between students whose lessons were on the keyboard versus other music lessons. Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) mathematics scores of eighth graders who had received music instruction were compared according to whether the students were given private lessons.
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