Americans for the Arts

Although the timing of congressional votes keep getting kicked around, it remains a crucial time in Washington for arts education.

Anything’s possible^*, but what’s most likely is a U.S. Senate floor vote and amendment consideration this week—as well as a long-delayed House floor vote—on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization.

The whirlwind of recent congressional activity on reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), ultimately culminating in the Senate’s passage of the bipartisan Every Child Achieves Act (S. 1177) and the House’s Student Success Act (H.R. 5), has sparked a great number of questions from music and arts educators, as to the implications of these pieces of legislation, both in policy and practice. For those interested, a thorough legislative analysis of what exactly the bills WOULD do for music and arts (primarily as a result of their listing as core academic subjects) is available from Americans for the Arts. I am routinely asked by music educators, however, about several bigger picture issues, and how they pertain to the Senate bill, in particular, with regard to what it WOULD NOT do. As such, I thought it would be useful to try and speak to those concerns directly, all at once – and try to outline the limits of a new ESEA.

Can Title I funds be used to support arts education?

Yes - Title I funds have had the ability to support supplemental arts education programs in our nation’s public schools since the current bill (No Child Left Behind) became law in 2002. The arts are listed as a core academic subject in Title IX of the law, and Title I supports this by requesting schools to create research-based Title I programs linked to quality standards in core academic subjects. 

Doug Israel

After years of school budget cuts due to the economic downturn, and a decade of No Child Left Behind-inspired education policies, there is a movement afoot in districts across the country to reinvigorate the school day with a rich and engaging curriculum.

Parents, students, and educators have been beating the drum about the narrowed curriculum and are making the case to expand access to arts, music, foreign languages, science, and other core subjects that have been marginalized in schools in recent years. Now candidates to be mayor in the country’s largest school district are weighing in on what arts education would look like under their leadership.

Narric Rome

Ever since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) authorization formally ended in 2007, Congress has been trying to reauthorize it, but with very little success. You remember NCLB? It passed Congress with whopping margins of 381-41 in the House and 87-10 in the Senate and President Bush signed it into law with big smiles from education champions like Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) and House committee leaders John Boehner (R-OH) and George Miller (D-CA). That was then.

Since then, NCLB has been attacked each year by education advocates on all sides and the Obama Administration has gone so far as to grant waivers to 37 states allowing them to opt out of many of the law’s regulations, which will remain in place until the law is reauthorized. It’s been sad as education leaders, in and out of Congress, proclaim the “urgent” need to end the labeling of failing schools, to curb the “unintended consequences” that have been a fundamental problem with NCLB. Years have passed without even a floor vote on replacement legislation.

I’ve known Capitol Hill staff who were hired to work on the reauthorization (now referred to as the Elementary & Secondary Education Act (ESEA)) who have given up waiting and moved to jobs off the Hill.