Evaluators visited more than one hundred elementary schools—many repeatedly—over a seven-year period to assess how DBAE programs are being implemented. They observed many exemplary programs and concluded that schools with successful programs have a decidedly different look from those where programs are less effective.

While the ideal DBAE elementary school is still rare, it emerges because administrators, art specialists, and classroom teachers have been willing, collectively, to assume new instructional roles and new responsibilities for coordinating the curriculum in which art plays a central role.

In contrasting the ideal with the less-successful DBAE elementary school, evaluators explored a series of key issues about what kinds of art programs should be offered in the elementary school and who should teach them.

They learned that in strong DBAE schools, an entirely new role has been created for the art specialist. No longer isolated, the specialist has become a team member and consultant, knowledgeable about the instructional programs of colleagues and about how the study and creation of works of art might make significant contributions to those programs. Both art instruction and the general curriculum benefit.

One of the most promising patterns evaluators observed is when elementary classroom teachers and art specialists jointly plan and teach units of instruction that are centered on works of art and the content of art. This is occurring in about 43 percent of the DBAE schools and represents a marked change in the role of the art specialist.

Evaluators believe that when teachers plan and teach art collaboratively, there is a much greater likelihood that art will have a substantial character, will be taught regularly, and will be taught well.

As DBAE principles were implemented, art was soon seen to have importance both in its own right and for the contribution it could make to the overall instructional program. For example, themes derived from works of art became the core of a school's yearly curriculum.

Although exemplary practices proliferate, evaluators expressed concern that virtually no elementary school yet offers a comprehensive art curriculum consisting of six or seven years' worth of exemplary integrated units of art instruction. Units of instruction in kindergarten through sixth grade still remain isolated, and the challenge of developing a comprehensive DBAE curriculum with a sequence of art-based instructional units looms large. When art is integrated into classroom teachers' existing instructional units, too often artworks are still used to merely illustrate nonart themes and topics, rather than serving as a focus for teaching and learning.

(Return to beginning of Executive Summary)