This article argues that the last three decades of school improvement policies have progressively limited the places and arguments created for arts education in public schools. The result has been a steady marginalization of the arts in the work of school improvement, an exacerbation of opportunity gaps related to access to arts education, and a small window of opportunity to push back against what has become a cycle of narrowing and layering demands on literacy and mathematics to the exclusion of all other areas. As the standards, accountability, and competition movements have led toward increasing privatization and turn toward private industry to solve the problems of public schooling, arts education continues to be marginalized by seeming to require outside intervention rather than intensive internal solutions. I conclude with a discussion of the policy strategies that might reposition arts education within current trends in education policy.