Learning in and through the arts develops the essential knowledge, skills, and creative capacities all students need to succeed in school, work, and life. As the top building-level leaders, school principals play a key role in ensuring every student receives a high-quality arts education as part of a complete education.

In a time of shrinking budgets and shifting priorities, what can school principals do to make and keep the arts strong in their schools? This guide offers three concrete actions school principals can take to increase arts education in their schools:

A -establish a school-wide commitment to arts learning;

B -create an arts-rich learning environment; and

C - rethink the use of time and resources.

Each action is supported with several low-cost or no-cost strategies that other school leaders have used and found to be effective -- whether it's beginning an arts program where none exists, making an existing program stronger, or preserving an arts program against future cuts. While many of the strategies are drawn from elementary schools, they are likely to be applicable in a variety of grade levels.

Mounting research evidence confirms that students in schools with arts-rich learning environments academically outperform their peers in arts-poor schools. Where the arts are an integral component of the school day, they positively impact student attendance, persistence and engagement; enhance teacher effectiveness; and strengthen parent and community involvement. Research also shows school principals serve as the primary decision makers as to whether and to what extent the arts are present within a school.

The Arts Education Partnership (AEP) prepared this guide, with support from the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH). The increasingly critical role of school leaders, along with the growing body of evidence on the benefits of arts learning, summarized most recently in a new report published by the PCAH prompted the development of the guide.

AEP staff reviewed the relevant literature as well as conducted personal interviews with school principals and with practitioners who work closely with principals. School principals and other leaders interested in increasing arts education in America's schools can adopt any of these actions and strategies one at a time or implement several at once. When taken together as part of an overall approach, however, their effects are more likely to be cumulative,

The arts embody one of the oldest forms of knowledge and knowing and action research provides opportunities to experiment with art as an integral part of the creation and dissemination of knowledge.

This report is a personal account of a teacher with 16 years' experience as an elementary classroom teacher, who found that young children are drawn to an arts-based approach of inquiry, one that is grounded in arts practices. He describes many incidences inhis classroom where there have been many instances of students using methods to enhance their learning experiences that were similar to those found in artsbased learning and arts-based educational research settings.

Every day, American young people spend more than four hours watching television, DVDs or videos; one hour using a computer; and 49 minutes playing video games. In many cases, youths are engaged in two or more of these activities at the same time. Little wonder this era has become known as the "digital age," and Americans born after 1980 have become known as "digital natives."

Yet it might be equally accurate to refer to the current era as a visual age. Although many digital tools rely on sound and text, most disseminate images, and youths who spend a third of their waking hours in front of a screen are saturated with images. The ubiquity of images in young people's lives has transformed the way they learn and perceive the world. And their use of images has created a demand for new skills to enable all young people to make sense of the visual world.

The predominance of visual images and demand for new abilities has also transformed the workplace. In the "flat" world that the journalist Thomas L. Friedman describes in his influential book, The World Is Flat, aesthetics and creativity are just as important as technical knowledge in the new economy. "The secret sauce comes from our ability to integrate art, music, and literature with the hard sciences," Friedman says. "That's what produces an iPod Revolution or a Google. Integration is the new specialty. That is what we need to prepare our children to be doing."

These transformations place a premium on the types of abilities visual arts educators develop: visual-spatial abilities, reflection, and experimentation. They suggest that schools and their community partners need to strengthen visual arts education as a content area and to integrate the arts into other areas of learning to ensure that all young people become knowledgeable and skillful in the visual age.

Yet in a short-sighted effort to help make children competitive in a global economy, many schools have reduced visual arts instruction in favor of a greater emphasis on mathematics and science. These actions in some cases have resulted from accountability policies that measure school performance on a narrow set of abilities

This report is the result of a year-long -- and ongoing -- conversation within NAEA that included discussions in board meetings, conversations with Association members, and a three-day summit of leading educators from across the nation (held in August 2008 in Aspen, Colorado). This document examines evidence about the capacities that art education develops in students and what it can prepare them to do. It explores what high-quality instruction looks like and takes a look at some environments in schools and in other settings in which excellent visual arts instruction takes place. The report concludes with recommendations for federal policy makers that will strengthen visual arts education to help ensure that all young people can thrive in the visual age.

The impetus for Arts for All's Leadership Fellows Program was a brainstorming session in July 2008 on how best to move the Arts for Allcollaborative toward its goal of restoring arts education into the core curriculum for each of Los Angeles County's 1.6 million public K-12 students.

Session participants repeatedly circled back to Arts for All's need to engage school district leaders in order to be successful. The goal of the program, the first of its kind in the country, was to increase the capacity of school district leadership to advance quality, access and equity of arts education within their respective school districts.

This report focuses on the work and results of the leadership fellows program in the 2009-2010 school year.