Arts, Continued

Per Chad below, new results from the NAEP 8th grade Arts & Music test show very little change over time. So little change that's it's really kind of fascinating. In 1997, respondents got 42 percent of the art questions right. In 2008, they also got 42 percent of the questions right. Of the 12 listed questions / tasks, there was no statistically significant change on 11 of them. The only difference: "Identify a compositional feature of a medieval artwork" dropped from 39 percent to 32 percent. Music was a little worse but still very similar. Overall the, the percent correct dropped from 53 to 51 percent, a small but statistically significant difference. Of the 21 questions / tasks, there were statistically significant changes in only six -- five down, one up. All of this is with the caveat that only the multiple choice questions are comparable across years--the constructed response portions of the tests are not.

A lot has changed since 1997. Eighth graders then were only dipping their toes into the Internet then; now they don't know anything else. And of course, eighth graders in 2008 bore the full brunt / enjoyed the full benefit of No Child Left Behind, having completed six consecutive years in which their schools were tested and rated under NCLB. During that time, roughly 6.8 billion articles and news stories were published stating unequivocally that NCLB is responsible for a drastic narrowing of the curriculum, arts teachers being taunted by students and beaten up in the faculty lounge, etc., etc. And yet arts and music scores stayed virtually the same.

I'm not even sure these unchanged numbers are obviously a good thing. Shouldn't there have been some tradeoffs, some substitution of results in focused-upon subjects like reading and math for everything else? Math results for 13-year olds got better during roughly the same time period while reading results stayed flat. In some ways this is all an argument for humility among federal policymakers in their aspirations for magnitude and pace in changing a massive, decentralized K-12 education system.