In schools across the country, educators recognize the power of the arts to change young lives. They know that students’ sustained engagement with enriching, high-quality experiences in the arts promotes essential skills and perspectives—like the capacity to solve problems, express ideas, harness and hone creativity, and persevere toward a job well done. And yet today, educators at many schools that operate with conventional schedules are forced to choose between offering their students valuable opportunities to pursue the arts and focusing on other rigorous core classes that also are necessary for success in the 21st century.

Read more about arts education on Giving Compass

Around the country, a growing number of schools are finding ways to respond to this question through the power of a redesigned and expanded school schedule. The schools in this study, each of which serves a predominantly low-income student body, offer their students substantially more learning time than conventional schools, which operate with, on average, just 180 six-and-a-half-hour days. Although each of the profiled schools has come to allocate more time and implement a specific educational model via different paths, these expanded-time schools—and the more than 1,000 expanded-time schools now spread across the American educational landscape— do share one overriding attribute.

With more time, these schools gain the potential both to improve academics and to provide students engaging, high quality arts programs. Educators at these schools believe that the arts can contribute appreciably to students’ capacity to solve problems, acquire and apply knowledge, deepen engagement, and develop the persistence and dedication that are hallmarks of good scholarship and learning.

While these educators are certainly proud of their students’ strong (or improving) test scores, and while they assert that such results offer proof that the intensive focus on arts does not take away from academic learning and accomplishment, these outcomes are not what justifies their strong commitment toarts education. Indeed, the practitioners do not generally believe that there is a direct (that is to say, causal) relationship...Rather, their rationale encompasses the more intangible benefits of arts education, benefits that operate on two levels:

First, educators in these schools highlight some of the very same underlying instrumental advantages of arts education that researchers have put forward. In arts classes and activities, they observe their students developing persistence and a willingness to work hard, gaining self-confidence and an improved capacity to express themselves clearly, while honing their abilities to solve problems.

Second, the principal and teachers at these schools also extol how arts education supports what they take to be their own broader mission: to provide the children and adolescents in their charge with opportunities that teach them about the wider world, help them to discover and nurture their passions, and enliven their spirits.

Arts education, when it is approached with the seriousness of purpose exemplified by the schools profiled in this report, can be a powerful medium through which students come to love learning, strive for excellence, and imagine a fulfilling, purposeful life.

Read the source article at wallacefoundation.org