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…

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…

The 1994 National Standards for Arts Education were succeeded by a new generation of standards published in 2014 by the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS). This iteration of voluntary standards provided a new foundation for designing curriculum for visual arts education. The design of the standards utilized the curriculum model…

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution suggests that all speech is constitutionally protected. The right of free speech has been broadly defined by the court system, legislatures, and stakeholders in the field of education. Speech has been defined in many ways, but it is most commonly agreed on that speech, in its purest sense, is a basic…

This White Paper provides a selection of some general principles of assessment or overarching ideas that may guide educators in selecting, developing, and implementing assessments of students' learning at all instructional levels or educational settings in which they are used. These principles represent a framework for understanding the nature of…

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…