Common Core or Not, the Arts Have This Covered!

Maybe I should have titled this post The Swinging Pendulum.  Anybody who has been in education more than five years knows what I'm talking about.

The old news is that everybody was jumping on the Common Core State Standards bandwagon.  Today, Indiana, South Carolina, and Oklahoma have repealed the standards, and legislation is pending in many states.  Whether or not you like the standards, it is clear that the debate is increasingly political rather than educational.

Educators have to rise above the politics.  PLC Question #1 asks, "What knowledge, skills, and dispositions do our students need?"  The Common Core may answer some of these questions well.  Certainly, many of our state and national standards documents answer this question well.  We had high-quality curricula that answered this question well before the standards movement began.  Plato answered this question well.

Regardless of where your state lands, arts educators can be confident that our best practices will support any initiative that is delivered from your capitol steps.

The College Board created a comprehensive alignment document that is a must read for all arts educators (http://nccas.wikispaces.com/file/view/Arts%20and%20Common%20Core%20-%20final%20report1.pdf/404993792/Arts%20and%20Common%20Core%20-%20final%20report1.pdf).  There are dozens of charts showing the alignment between the arts and the CCSS, but a few highlights are worth pointing out.

The arts use at least four major creative practices:  imagining, investigating, constructing, and reflecting.  These practices are found everywhere in the English Language Arts standards.

The arts require students to make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.  They require students to attend to precision.  These expectations are cornerstones of the CCSS for Mathematics.

Indeed, if you expand your definition of "text" to include non-verbal communication, the arts cover virtually all of the English Language Arts standards.

It is essential to point out that the arts do this without abandoning their intrinsic and unique value.  It's simply a fact that the arts naturally teach the kinds of processes that ELA and mathematics education hope to achieve on a wider scale.  Those are strong words, but I believe them.  The arts do not have to move towards the core - the core has to move towards the arts.

Arts educators - stand firm and stick to the center.  Your best practices meet any initiative that comes down the pike.

References

Charleroy, A. (2012). The arts and the common core: A review of connections between the common core state standards and the national core arts standards conceptual framework. New York, NY: The College Board.  Retrieved from http://nccas.wikispaces.com/file/view/Arts%20and%20Common%20Core%20-%20final%20report1.pdf/404993792/Arts%20and%20Common%20Core%20-%20final%20report1.pdf