Supporting Reading Goals through the Visual Arts

Pressures are great upon public school teachers and administrators in secondary school systems to insure their students perform well on state and national achievement tests. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) puts an extreme amount of emphasis on students' performance on subject area tests. NCLB (2002) requires that at least 95% of the students in each grade level and sub group be evaluated by the Subject Area Testing Program (SATP). It has been argued that some schools seek methods that might put more emphasis on test scores rather than true learning (Dobbs, 2003). Many schools tend to focus on the core curriculum that their students are required to pass, thus placing little emphasis on arts programs in these schools.