Abstract

Today, art and education have precarious statuses. Arts programs are being cut from the curriculum at an alarming rate. While the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 acknowledged the arts as a core academic subject, the arts were quickly eclipsed by the push toward quantifiable improvements on standardized tests. How should art educators respond to this urgent situation? While some might retreat back to an art-for-art’s-sake perspective, others find new justifications for the arts through the discourses of high-stakes testing that have put the arts at risk in the first place. In this second approach, the arts have utility in that they raise test scores.In this essay, I will chart another option, one that does not make...