Education Reform in and through the Arts

William H. Kolberg, President, National Alliance of Business

As recently as a few years ago, no representative of a major national business organization would have felt comfortable confronting issues of education reform, let alone the role the arts play in achieving such reform. But the business world has changed immeasurably. Corporations are experiencing radical changes in the definition of work and in their needs for information, knowledge, and technology. Therefore, if businesses are going to have the types of workers needed to thrive in this changing environment, then the reform in public education must be equal to the change in business. Leading the charge in advocating necessary education reform is the National Alliance of Business.

American business is evolving. It can no longer rely on the mass production of goods and services or on a work force that may be functionally illiterate (reading at less than a seventh-grade level and performing arithmetic at less than a firth-grade level). Today's global market and technological growth require every worker to solve problems, to work in teams, and to be creative. Now, more than ever before in our history, the success of U.S. business is dependent upon the quality and flexibility of the American work force. Business managers must be able to lead their workers into ever-higher levels of performance and productivity. Yet, with American businesses facing ever-increasing competition, the inability of the current educational system to turn out a world-class work force is well-known.

American students consistently rank last or near last in international comparisons measuring competency in math, science, and biology. Approximately 25 percent of all high school students drop out of school, and many having high school diplomas are functionally illiterate. Without additional investment of considerable time and money on the part of business, these people are virtually unemployable.

American business believes that a radical education reform strategy must begin now with a set of national standards and assessment systems and corresponding curriculum frameworks. These three elements, set at internationally competitive levels, need to be voluntary and adopted on a state-by-state basis. The United States is alone among industrialized Western countries in that it does not have national standards or assessments.

The American business community further believes that there are certain skills and abilities that all students need if they are to be successful in our society. Curriculum content should reflect high expectations for all students, even if it means employing varied methods of teaching students according to their individual learning styles.

A two-year study entitled "What Work Requires of Schools," undertaken by a commission appointed by the secretary of labor, defines what skills businesses require of entry-level workers. The findings serve as an introduction to the challenge business brings to arts education in seeking education reform. Three groups of skills were identified:

1. reading, writing, and mathematics;
   
2. creative thinking, decision making, and problem solving, including knowing how to reason and how to learn; and
   
3. personal qualities, such as a sense of responsibility, self-esteem, sociability, self-management, and honesty.
   

It is interesting to note that this foundation rests heavily upon skills that business has never before considered a part of the goals of education. The study also describes "five competencies" that all students must attain:

1. the ability to manage resources;
   
2. interpersonal skills, such as teamwork and leadership;
   
3. information acquisition and application skills;
   
4. system skills; and
   
5. technological skills.

Within the study, the importance of the three "foundation" skills and the five "competencies" is described as:

...essential preparation for all students, both those going on directly to work and those going on to higher education. Thus, the foundation and the competencies should be taught and understood in an integrated fashion that reflects the workplace context in which they are applied. After examining the findings of the cognitive sciences, the most effective way of learning skills is in context, placing learning objectives within a real environment rather than insisting that students first learn in the abstract what they will be expect to apply.

The challenge, therefore, from business to arts education is embodied within the overall challenge to the education system as identified by the secretary of labor's study. It must be determined what changes need be made to teaching methods and curricula in order that the eight foundation and competency skills are achieved for each student. And, although we in business sometimes see ourselves as the primary customers of elementary and secondary education, it is not for business to determine school curriculum content.

Nonetheless, those of us in business believe that education reform should start from, and build on, what people need to know and do in nonschool settings. Schools should not be making distinctions between knowing and doing, or between what we think with our heads and what we make with our hands, or between abstract and applied learning. And herein lies the most powerful argument for the role of the arts in the reform of education. The study of the arts provides an opportunity to learn how to work with ideas, with knowledge, and with information. This has a useful application throughout a lifetime.

Recent studies indicate that most students flourish when knowledge is conveyed in an applied rather than a theoretical setting. Through art, children learn to learn. Because art is, by and large, a hands-on activity, it holds the promise of increasing the learning ability of our future work force.

In his autobiography, Walter Chrysler, automobile company founder, wrote of his apprenticeship, "My fingers were an intake valve through which my mental reservoir was being filled. Of course, my eyes and ears were helping in the process, but what I learned with my fingers and my eyes together I seemed never to forget." What is arts education if not what you learn with your fingers and your eyes together? And how could anyone, especially a businessperson today, miss the connection between arts education and the modern world of work?

There are engineers who say that invention, the conversion of an idea to an artifact, is more the product of art than of science. To design is to invent. The creative genius of America is the result of our investment in our creativity. Our large businesses depend upon it, and our small businesses will surely close their doors if they can't compete through innovation.

Yet, despite all of this evidence, few business leaders put a high priority on arts education as a key element of education reform. This is because, historically, too much of arts education has been separate and focused on training tomorrow's artists and arts teachers. For today's front-line worker, this emphasis is elitist or, at best, extraneous. The business challenge to arts educators is to find creative ways of focusing the arts curriculum on all students in the new world of a reformed twenty-first century educational system. The bywords of arts educators should be relevance and interdisciplinary participation, and the essential tools should be teamwork, enthusiasm, and egalitarianism.

The radical reformation of public education has only just begun. We have only begun to set national standards in core academic subjects as well as in the arts. We have yet to begin the difficult process of driving those standards into all 83,000 of our public schools. But, if there were ever a community perfectly equipped to meet our educational challenge, it is that of the creative arts. The arts break new ground every day and imagine and produce the unimaginable. If arts educators were to add the integration of the arts into public education reform, then education, business, and political leaders doubtlessly would respond. The time to make it so is now.

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