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The field of art education has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic in complex ways. Art educators have been challenged with teaching visual arts skills, practices, and concepts, to students in virtual classrooms using non-conventional means. Their principal goal has been to provide quality education in the visual arts for all students. They recognize that having a visual arts education impacts the quality of life of everyone and their ability to understand and communicate in our complex world. In their efforts to provide meaningful and effective education, art educators have had to manage new instructional delivery systems and to ensure the health and safety and social emotional learning of their students and themselves in their educational spaces. They responded by using social media, video conferencing, and other digital technology to deliver instruction. The National Art Education Association provided a wealth of digital resources to support virtual instruction during this time. These resources enabled art educators to successfully address the educational needs of their students. The long-term impact of the pandemic will require research to understand the nature of the impact of the pandemic on education and how educational policy needs to be adjusted to reflect the new post-pandemic educational landscape [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this concluding article for the special issue on COVID-19 and K-12 arts education, the authors look forward to some positive possible changes for the delivery of arts education as students return to school past COVID-19 and will address some of the barriers to these positive changes, including policy opportunities and implications. The barriers discussed are not new to arts education – resource and funding challenges, a focus on remediation pulling students from arts classes, and a continued inequitable access to arts education for students in poverty and students of color. The article will discuss how the pandemic has exacerbated some of these long-standing challenges, as well as ways to address those challenges from a policy perspective as well as through advocacy work at the federal, state, and local levels. The article suggests ways to rethink how we approach areas of educational policy, particularly the accountability structures of public education, in order to address inequitable access now and in the long term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To start off this special issue on COVID-19 and K-12 arts education, this article places the impact of COVID-19 on public education into context, and drills down to how the pandemic affected the delivery of arts education. The article begins with an overview of the inequities revealed in our public education system by COVID-19. While many of these have been revealed and studied before, the pandemic brought them to the routine attention of the public in a way that earlier advocacy and research efforts have not. The article then addresses how these inequities have influenced the availability and quality of arts education offered during the pandemic, showcasing the continued "second class" status of arts education in public education planning and delivery. Finally, the article ends with some positive outcomes one year into the pandemic for arts education, suggesting possibilities for the future post pandemic, as well as implications and potential warning signs for the next 24 months to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how free speech and free expression through art are supported by the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of rights. The author argues that visual arts are fundamental means of communication, that students should be given guaranteed access to the highest quality art education, and how it serves students and all citizens in using their guaranteed right of freedom of speech in the pursuit of social justice.

Assessments have become commonplace in every art program in the country. They depend on guidelines we often call "criteria." Beattie (1997) described "criteria" as "characteristics of something by which its quality can be judged or a decision about it [the quality of the object] can be made" (p. 4). Art teachers routinely struggle to identify criteria that capture the essence of what they teach and what students' artwork attempts to accomplish. Do exemplary criteria exist? Can they truly capture what art products are about? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a report of an experimental study that focused on adjudicating the art portfolios of secondary art students assessed in both actual and digital forms in order to determine whether art teachers evaluate actual works of art in students' portfolios differently than digital copies of them. The study participants included 178 students of 29 secondary teachers from four school districts in Florida and Indiana. This report includes description of the rationale for the study, goals and objectives of the study, analysis of the data, and discussion of findings of the study. The results suggest that electronic portfolios can be used to reliably estimate student art performances and that scores produced from art teachers' evaluations of digital copies of actual works of art are consistent with scores produced from evaluations of these same works in the actual form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses several alternatives to standardized state-wide testing in order to assess the performance of schools and its students. Description of the politics existing within the state-wide tests; Effects of the top-down evaluation models used by the tests on the performance of students; Use of visual modeling in assessing the artistic performance of students.

Discusses the assessment used to evaluate works of art made in art classes. Criteria used by artists to evaluate their works and other artists' works; Comparison of the criteria used by art teachers, art students and artists; Views on assessing studio production in art education.

Presents an excerpt from the book "Assessing Expressive Learning: A Practical Guide for Teacher-Directed Authentic Assessment in K-12 Visual Art Education," by Charles M. Dorn, Stanley S. Madeja and F. Robert Sabol.

Congress established the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for the purpose of measuring student achievement in American schools. In 1974 and 1978 the visual arts were included in the assessment. This article reports regional findings from ongoing secondary analysis of responses on the 1997 NAEP in visual arts. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the relationships between variable sets identified in items on school and student questionnaires and mean creating and responding scores of eighth-grade students on the test. This article provides regional reports of statistically significant variable sets identified in the study. It concludes with a discussion of the meaning of these findings for art teachers, policymakers, and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the importance of studying art history. Factors to consider when organizing the content of art history; Contributions of multicultural education; Considerations for curriculum planning.

The article focuses on the analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report card in the visual arts. It is posed that in 1998 the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) released the NAEP 1997 Arts Report Card. The report card presents various aspects of the most recent nationwide study of arts learning. Moreover, the National Art Education Association, through general sessions at the National Conference in 1999 in Washington, D.C. and within the Task Force and Research Commission structure, financed travel for a team of arts researchers to attend a government-sponsored workshop for advance statistical analysis of NAEP data.