Advancing Arts Education Through An Expanded School Day

Today, NCTL and The Wallace Foundation are releasing Advancing Arts Education through an Expanded School Day: Lesson from Five Schools, which highlights schools that are finding ways to build a robust curriculum that integrates the arts without sacrificing the necessary time for other subjects, including literacy, mathematics, and science. By expanding learning time, these schools are able to design an educational program that sets high expectations for academic learning, including high-quality arts education.  

Through a series of case studies the report explores how schools are utilizing the longer student and teacher days to prioritize time for arts education as they work to improve overall academic instruction and focus on individual student achievement. 
 
"Education in the arts is more important than ever," said Margo Lion, Co-Chair of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. "To succeed at school and in the workforce, America's children need to be creative thinkers and problem solvers. Arts education fosters those skills at a critical time in childhood development. We applaud schools like those featured in this report, which are taking the arts seriously and treating them as the tools for success that they are."