Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art

Professor James S. Catterall of UCLA her presents his analyses of long-term outcomes for the students featured in Champions of Change a decade ago, 12,000 students now followed through age 26. The impacts of intensive involvement in the visual and performing arts during secondary school on young adults are shown to include doing better and going further in college (doing well) and greater involvement in community service and pro-social activities (doing good). The book presents assessments of arts-rich versus arts-poor schools, an intriguing comparison of passionate involvement in the arts versus athletics in school, and the fortunes of limited English speakers in arts-rich versus arts-poor schools. Nick Rabkin, formerly Senior Arts and Culture Program Officer at the MacArthur Foundation writes: ... Unlike other research on the effects of arts education, Catterall was able to show that low-income students benefited from arts learning even more than more privileged students. This new study picks up the same thread and shows that the positive effects of arts education last well into adulthood. And Professor Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University and Professor, Brown University writes: This book will show students how someone can make statistical analyses comprehensible for those who work in schools, and those who need to think much more theoretically and in terms of research findings... Several of the findings were quite surprising to me, for I had forgotten that the NELS data would provide data with such "long arms" beyond school and family. Such a gift the book will be for so many. (Los Angeles: I-Group Books, 172 pp. (2009).