TETAC
Transforming Education Through The Arts Challenge

Starting in the Fall of 1996, The National Arts Education Consortium embarked on a five-year national education reform initiative, the Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge, to link comprehensive arts education wih national and local efforts to reform our nation's schools. The Challenge project is being supported primarily through funds from the Walter H. Annenberg Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust.

The main mission of the National Arts Education Consortium was to create school environments that ensure positive and rigorous intellectural development in the arts for all learners. Through the Challenge project, the Consortium has broadened its work by integrating comrehensive arts education with other elements of whole school reform to show the power of the arts to better the total learning environment in the partner schools and, in turn, to improve student achievement.

Comprehensive Arts Education, also known as Discipline-Based Arts Education, is:

1. Knowing theories of art (aesthetics)

2. Responding to art (art criticism)

3. Knowing contexts of art (art history)

4. Creating art (art production/performance)

Improving student achievement and the learning environments of the partner schools through the arts is the main outcome expected of the Transforming Education Through the Arts Challenge. To realize this outcome, the goals for the Challenge project are to:

1. Institutionalize support for comprehensive arts education as a part of the basic core of learning in a schooled curriculum

2. Demonstrate how comprehensive arts education when integrated with other elements of school reform can transform a school's culture and the lives of its students and teachers

3. Support the active engagement and involvement of parents, communities, arts organizations, school reform networks and resources, funders, the broader public, and education professionals in this reform effort.

4. Create an effective combination of documentation, assessment and evaluation strategies that will ensure rich and reliable ways of knowing what has been accomplished, what has not, and why.

5. Create a means to disseminate information and successful practices learned from this effort among educators, local communities and ohers to inform their interest in school reform and the arts.

The partner schools are: Newton D. Baker School of Arts, Cleveland, Ohio, Elida High School, Elida, Ohio, Fair Arts IMPACT Alternative Elementary School, Columbus, Ohio, Windermere Elementary School, Upper Arlington, Ohio, and Malabar Middle School, Mansfield, Ohio.