Fine arts curriculum gets approval from state

After years in the making, the Voluntary State Curriculum (VSC) for Fine Arts gained acceptance from the Maryland State Board of Education, May 28.

VSCs, despite their name, are mandatory. “State regulations require arts instruction and the VSC now defines what that means for Pre K-8th grades,” says Mary Ann Mears, founder of the Art Education in Maryland Schools Alliance (AEMS).

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“It is vital to have arts education for every child and it is equally vital that it is high quality, Mears says. “The VSC provides teachers with substantive support by defining what that looks like. It is a valuable tool for them.”

Mears, who is also a professional artist and arts educator, says “the VSC manifests Maryland’s policy that the arts are essential and on a par with other core subject areas.”

She adds that “development of the VSC was a result of the requirement for rigorous content standards in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 and the 2002 Maryland report, Achievement Matters Most: The Final Report of the Visionary Panel for Better Schools, which recommended the creation of a statewide K-12 curriculum that details expectations for students according to grade and subject.

Four content areas

In 2003, the Maryland State Department of Education created committees of state arts educators for each of the four fine arts content areas – dance, music, theater and visual arts – to produce VSC documents for each of the four.

During an external evaluation of Maryland’s fine arts content standards for Pre K through grade 8, nine nationally recognized content experts reviewed the VSCs for “content rigor, developmental appropriateness, clarity of language, scope and sequence, and relation to national curricular expectations,” Mears says.

“Overall, reviewers found the fine arts VSC documents to be comprehensive and well-crafted,” she says.