Why is there a picture of Leah Goldstein Moses with Tom DeCaigny? This picture, from Lisbon, Portugal, was taken during the World Conference on Arts Education. Leah and Tom presented the Improve Group's evaluation results of the Performing Arts Workshop's Artists-in-Schools program. Amazingly, we heard that around the world arts educators face similar challenges: making the case for the arts to policy makers; forced competition for resources with other disciplines such as math and language arts; and a general fear/anxiety around the arts for educators. We also heard extremely exciting ways that arts educators are meeting these challenges, like developing radio dramas in Cameroon and building video literacy in Australia.

We left the conference very excited about finding new ways the performing arts can be used to improve academic outcomes, enhance critical thinking, and support pro-social behavior in the classroom. The Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education has made over 60 awards in its Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination program; resources developed through this program promoting arts education can be found here.