Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.
This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska
Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.
This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska
Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
In 2008 the Alaska State Council on the Arts collaborated with the Alaska Arts Education Consortium and the Alaska School Administrators Association to conduct a statewide, comprehensive survey to look what is happening with the arts in our schools.
This first-of-its-kind study was designed to provide useful, baseline data to policy makers, district administrators, parents, teachers, University faculty, business leaders, arts advocates arts organizations and the Alaska community at large. This report dramatically illustrates that there is much to do, to ensure that the #1 goal for all Alaskan students - access to high quality arts experiences as a basic component of their K -- 12 education -- is truly met.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Western) / Alaska
Education and Literacy;Employment and Labor
Historically, teacher evaluation in Chicago has fallen short on two crucial fronts: It has not provided administrators with measures that differentiated among strong and weak teachers -- in fact, 93 percent of teachers were rated as Excellent or Superior -- and it has not provided teachers with useful feedback they could use to improve their instruction.
Chicago is not unique -- teacher evaluation systems across the country have experienced the exact same problems.Recent national policy has emphasized overhauling these systems to include multiple measures of teacher performance, such as student outcomes, and structuring the evaluations so they are useful from both talent management and teacher professional development perspectives. Principals and teachers need an evaluation system that provides teachers with specific, practice-oriented feedback they can use to improve their instruction and school leaders need to be able to identify strong and weak teachers. Required to act by a new state law and building off lessons learned from an earlier pilot of an evidence-based observation tool, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) rolled out its new teacher evaluation system -- Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago's Students (REACH Students) -- in the 2012-13 school year.
The REACH system seeks to provide a measure of individual teacher effectiveness that can simultaneously support instructional improvement. It incorporates teacher performance ratings based on multiple classroom observations together with student growth measured on two different types of assessments. While the practice of using classroom observations as an evaluation tool is not completely new, REACH requires teachers and administrators to conceptualize classroom observations more broadly as being part of instructional improvement efforts as well as evaluation; evaluating teachers based on student test score growth has never happened before in the district.
REACH implementation was a massive undertaking. It required a large-scale investment of time and energy from teachers, administrators, CPS central office staff, and the teachers union. District context played an important role and provided additional challenges as the district was introducing other major initiatives at the same time as REACH. Furthermore, the school year began with the first teacher strike in CPS in over 25 years. Teacher evaluation was one of several contentious points in the protracted negotiation, and the specific issue of using student growth on assessments to evaluate teachers received considerable coverage in the media.
This report focuses on the perceptions and experiences of teachers and administrators during the first year of REACH implementation, which was in many ways a particularly demanding year. These experiences can be helpful to CPS and to other districts across the country as they work to restructure and transform teacher evaluation.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Midwestern) / Illinois / Cook County / Chicago
Arts and Culture, Education and Literacy
This report examines the academic and civic behavior outcomes of teenagers and young adults who have engaged deeply with the arts in or out of school.
In several small-group studies, children and teenagers who participated in arts education programs have shown more positive academic and social outcomes in comparison to students who did not participate in those programs. Such studies have proved essential to the current research literature on the types of instrumental benefits associated with an arts education.
A standard weakness of the literature, however, has been a dearth of large-scale, longitudinal studies following the same populations over time, tracking the outcomes of students who received intensive arts exposure or arts learning compared with students who did not. This report is a partial attempt to fill this knowledge gap. The report's authors, James Catterall et al., use four large national databases to analyze the relationship between arts involvement and academic and social achievements.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America-United States
Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
Artful Citizenship is an arts-integrated social studies curriculum project designed to provide third- through fifth- grade students and teachers with the tools necessary to:
* develop visual literacy skills;
* implement social science content across academic content areas;
* create opportunities for integrated artistic response.
Artful Citizenship is a pilot educational program funded by the US Department of Education, Arts in Education, Model Development and Dissemination Grant Program. It was developed by The Wolfsonian-Florida International University (FIU) in partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a non-profit organization that develops learner-centered methods that use art to teach critical thinking and visual literacy, faculty from the FIU College of Education, and a team of independent education researchers and evaluators from Curva and Associates, a private research and evaluation firm.
The Wolfsonian and its partners recently completed the three years of funded activities that included development, field testing, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of Artful Citizenship as part of the core social studies and language arts curricula in the third, fourth and fifth grades at three Miami-Dade County public elementary schools. All three schools have high percentages of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who are at risk of academic failure. An additional school with similar demographics was included to serve as a comparison group for evaluation purposes.
The evaluation addresses the central objectives of the program: teaching visual literacy in order to influence children's character and social development, and, ultimately, to improve academic achievement, as measured through norm-referenced tests and criterion- referenced test (Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test). The psychosocial dimensions included in the evaluation were Art Self-Concept, Art Enjoyment, Academic Self-Concept, and School/Civic Orientation
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
Artful Citizenship is an arts-integrated social studies curriculum project designed to provide third- through fifth- grade students and teachers with the tools necessary to:
* develop visual literacy skills;
* implement social science content across academic content areas;
* create opportunities for integrated artistic response.
Artful Citizenship is a pilot educational program funded by the US Department of Education, Arts in Education, Model Development and Dissemination Grant Program. It was developed by The Wolfsonian-Florida International University (FIU) in partnership with Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), Visual Understanding in Education (VUE), a non-profit organization that develops learner-centered methods that use art to teach critical thinking and visual literacy, faculty from the FIU College of Education, and a team of independent education researchers and evaluators from Curva and Associates, a private research and evaluation firm.
The Wolfsonian and its partners recently completed the three years of funded activities that included development, field testing, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination of Artful Citizenship as part of the core social studies and language arts curricula in the third, fourth and fifth grades at three Miami-Dade County public elementary schools. All three schools have high percentages of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who are at risk of academic failure. An additional school with similar demographics was included to serve as a comparison group for evaluation purposes.
The evaluation addresses the central objectives of the program: teaching visual literacy in order to influence children's character and social development, and, ultimately, to improve academic achievement, as measured through norm-referenced tests and criterion- referenced test (Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test). The psychosocial dimensions included in the evaluation were Art Self-Concept, Art Enjoyment, Academic Self-Concept, and School/Civic Orientation
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States
Arts and Culture;Education and Literacy
Data from the 2006-12 Annual Arts Education Surveys and other NYCDOE databases for 2006-12 have yielded valuable information to school leaders, teachers, parents, and community-based organizations to expand students' access to and participation in the arts. Under the leadership of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott, the NYCDOE maintains a strong commitment to arts education for all students. The success of our endeavor to build the quality of arts instruction and equity of access across all schools, as articulated in the Blueprints for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, will depend on our continued collaboration with the arts and cultural community, the higher-education community, and other city and state agencies.
Working with the New York State Education Department (NYSED), the arts and cultural community, and the higher-education community, along with school leaders and parents, the NYCDOE is fully committed to supporting quality arts education, even in the face of the most severe fiscal crisis in 40 years, and will continue to:
- ensure student achievement in the arts;
- support school leaders to plan and provide comprehensive, sequential Blueprint-based instruction for all students;
- build capacity of teachers to deliver quality teaching and learning in the arts; and
- support all schools to meet ArtsCount/NYSED requirements.
The Office of Arts and Special Projects (OASP) -- within the Office of School Programs and Partnerships, Division of Academics, Performance, and Support -- continues to analyze arts education data to refine and develop strategies to address the findings of the Annual Arts in Schools Report and support arts education citywide.
August 1970
Geographic Focus: North America / United States (Northeastern) / New York / New York County / New York City
