"The success of students and the vitality of a community depend on school curricular decisions which place diverse, progressive educational opportunities above the limited focus that too often results from over-testing and under-funding. The state of arts education in any community often reflects its commitment to complete educational opportunity and demonstrates the quality of life to which its citizens aspire." Dr. Kenneth L. Liske

Pasadena Independent School District Was Named One of  the "Best Communities in America for Music Education"

 

  The Pasadena Independent School District's Fine Arts Department has many performances throughout the school year. You are invited to attend these performances to witness the excellent work being done by both the students and our teaching staff. Be sure to check the Fine Arts Calendar throughout the year for a current list of scheduled performances and activities across the school district.

 Read an important letter from Mr. Arne Duncan, Secretary, U.S. Department of Education, pertaining to the importance of arts education in our schools.

  "The arts can no longer be treated as a frill."- US Education Secretary Arne Duncan's Remarks at the Arts Education Partnership National Forum April 9, 2010

  The Fine Arts Department of the Pasadena Independent School District includes the areas of elementary music, band, choir, orchestra, visual arts, theatre arts, and dance. There are a total of 251 certified fine arts teachers employed by Pasadena ISD. 

  The Pasadena Independent School District is committed to the education of the whole child and as a component of that education believes that every student should have a basic knowledge, skills, and appreciation of the fine arts. The Texas Coalition for Quality Arts Education sites the following information about the importance of fine arts education:

Why the Fine Arts Are Important

  The arts make a contribution to education that reaches beyond their intrinsic value as direct forms of thinking. Because each arts discipline appeals to different senses and expresses itself through different media, each adds a special richness to the learning environment. As students imagine, create, and reflect, they are developing both verbal and nonverbal abilities necessary to school progress. At the same time, they are developing problem-solving abilities and higher-order thinking skills. Research points toward a consistent and positive correlation between a substantive education in the arts and student achievement in other subjects and on standardized tests. A comprehensive, articulated arts education program also engages students in a process that helps them develop the self-discipline, cooperation, and self-motivation necessary for self-esteem and success for life.

  The arts teach students to:

	Understand human experiences, both past and present;
	Adapt to and respect others' ways of thinking, working, and expressing themselves;
	Learn artistic modes of problem solving, which bring an array of expressive, analytical, and developmental tools to every human situation;
	Understand the influence of the arts, in their power to create and reflect cultures, in the impact of design on virtually all we use in daily life, and in the interdependence of work in the arts with the broader worlds of ideas and actions;
	Make decisions in situations where there are no standard answers;
	Analyze nonverbal communication and make informed judgments about cultural products and issues; and,
	Communicate thoughts and feelings in a variety of modes, giving them a vastly more powerful repertoire of self-expression.

Source: National Standards for Education in the Arts

The following are findings reported in Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning  (Fiske, 1999) that should be noted by every parent, teacher, and administrator:

	The arts reach students not normally reached, in ways and methods not normally used.  (This leads to better student attendance and lower dropout rates.)
	It changes the learning environment to one of discovery.  (This often re-ignites the love of learning in students tired of just being fed facts.)
	Students connect with each other better.  (This often results in fewer fights, greater understanding of diversity, and greater peer support.)
	The arts provide challenges to students of all levels.  (Each student can find his/her own level from basic to gifted.)
	Students learn to become sustained, self-directed learners.  (The student does not just become an outlet for stored facts from direct instruction, but seeks to extend instruction to higher levels of proficiency.)
	The study of the fine arts positively impacts the learning of students of lower socioeconomic status as much or more than those of a higher socioeconomic status.  (Twenty-one percent of students of low socioeconomic status who had studied music scored higher in math versus just eleven percent of those who had not. By the senior year, these figures grew to 33 percent and 16 percent, respectively, suggesting a cumulative value to music education.)

What the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities Says About Arts Education

	Research in multiple intelligences, the brain, and how the emotions strongly effect learning, supports hands-on, experiential learning through the fine arts.
	A quality fine arts education program provides students opportunities to acquire basic skills in kinesthetic, musical, spatial, and visual intelligence, applicable to learning in all other subject areas.
	Almost all of the information we receive in the learning process is acquired kinesthetically, auditorally, and visually.
	The fine arts help children better understand concepts measured on the TAKS tests. The fine arts "essential knowledge & skills" correlate with, support, and reinforce reading, language arts, science, and math. They help teach shapes, color recognition, size differentiation, letter and number recognition, phonic recognition, sequencing, following directions, hand eye and motor coordination, kinesthetic and spatial relationships, and direction and location.
	The fine arts develop valued higher order and creative thinking skills such as memory, various forms of communication, and the ability to compare and contrast, group and label, explain cause and effect, assess significance, make predictions, and frame and test hypotheses.
	The fine arts improve many students' self-concepts and self-actualization, attitude towards school and, as a result, the students' attendance improves, and the special needs of the "at risk" student are met.
	Research shows not only that the fine arts are beneficial in themselves, but also that their introduction into a school's curriculum causes marked improvement in math, reading, science and other subjects.
	The College Board reported that SAT scores are considerably higher for students involved in the arts, and that the fine arts are key to student success in college. Test scores, attendance, and college entry are higher, and drop-out rates are lower, in arts-centered schools in Texas.
	The fine arts are vastly important to technology and multimedia production, as evidenced in their use in books, magazines, advertisement, television commercials, music videos, video games, and blockbuster films such as Jurassic Park, Twister, Toy Story, Mission Impossible, Independence Day, Space Jam, Lost World, Men in Black and Titanic.
	The arts generate over $300 billion annually as an industry! The arts represent 6% of the Gross National Product (GNP).

Source:National Assembly of State Arts Agencies

The Pasadena Independent School District believes that a quality arts education program will enable students to develop self-esteem, self-discipline, self motivation, and cooperation necessary for success in life.

Ten Lessons the Arts Teach

by Elliot Eisner
Professor of Education
Stanford University

• The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
• The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
• The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
• The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
• The arts make vivid the fact that words do not, in their literal form or number, exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
• The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
• The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
• The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
• The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
• The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

Source: Originally published at http://goarts.org/

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