This article reports on an interview with Marcia McCaffrey, the state arts consultant for the New Hampshire Department of Education and current president of the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE). The discussion revolved around how the new arts standards may interact with evolving structures of arts teacher evaluation…

Visual arts teachers engage in complex work on a daily basis. This work is informed by practical knowledge that is rarely examined or drawn on in research or in the development of policy. Focusing on the work of secondary visual arts teachers, this article reports on a research program conducted in a regional area of New South Wales, Australia.…

School reform and teacher evaluations have become primary concerns for education policymakers in recent years. However, a standard one-size-fits-all method of evaluation, such as value-added evaluation, may not give an accurate assessment of all teachers. This article proposes an alternative to the general evaluation of visual arts educators by…

Teacher professional development is a chief concern of states, districts, and schools in the wake of high-stakes accountability measures such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). The goals and practices of professional development are often disconnected, and this misalignment affects art teachers in unique ways. Art teachers are often "left…

The recruitment and retention of the highest-quality artist educators in colleges and universities is a key element in supporting strong K-12 arts education programs. Artist educators must be expert in at least two disciplines: their art forms and education. However, the peer review processes commonly employed to recommend higher education faculty…

The purpose of this study was to investigate advocacy influences that may impact school arts programs using data from the 2009-10 National Center for Education Statistics elementary and secondary school surveys on arts education. Regression models were employed to assess the relative effectiveness of variables representing community support,…

An immediate critical task of the arts education field is to resolve the polarities of low-quality integrative and overly marginalized discipline-specific approaches to teaching in schools. In pursuing this challenge, the author defines three teaching approaches--arts as craftsmanship, arts as play, and arts as inquiry--and calls for re-weighted…

This study investigates teaching artists whose work is rooted in dance and theater. Although the term remains both ambiguous and debated, teaching artists provide a good deal of arts education delivery in P-12 and afterschool programs throughout the United States. Based on survey data from a range of teaching artists across the nation (N = 133),…

This article provides an initial look at Race to the Top as it relates to professional development for arts educators. Topics include the philosophy of Race to the Top education reform, data informed professional development, performance pay, and how these changes may affect arts educators.

This article raises questions about the breadth and depth of content-area expertise in initial licensure programs for art teachers, K-12. An analysis of some of the promises made in the name of art education suggests that art teachers need a high level of expertise and deep understanding of art in order to deliver on these promises. To consider…

This article explores the process of using lessons learned about high quality, effective arts education programs to help local educational leaders and practitioners create their own policy statements. It raises questions about policy implications from those lessons and connects them to the readers' own experience. It provides an intellectual…

Exploring the complicated issues of assessment in the arts, the authors discuss assessment of arts education and arts programs from a qualitative perspective: experiential, naturalistic, and ethnographic interpretation. With special attention to the practices of teaching, learning, and administration of education in the arts, quality is sought…

In this article, the author discusses current challenges to the idea of teamwork in fine arts teams, redefines the terms team and collaboration using a business management perspective, discusses the success of effective teams in the business world and the characteristics of those teams, and proposes the implementation of the business model of…

Profound differences exist between the ways in which arts educators and artists personally value the arts and the rationales offered via arts advocacy campaigns for public arts support. The author argues that those discrepancies carry grave consequences for K-university arts education. The author describes means by which to better reconcile…

Approaches toward teaching art in schools and methods of teaching art vary according to the teachers' perceptions of the major goals. As the Israeli school curriculum does not set clear guidelines for art teaching, the teachers themselves are free to formulate their aims, curricula, and teaching methods. The purpose of this study was to…