A week or so back, it was field trips.  Today, on the Washington Post's front page, it's the arts.

The Post's Katherine Shaver reports that a fourth-grade teacher put together a morning of art instruction as "a protest in public school arts education attirbutable to budget cuts and a focus on standardized test scores spuured by the federal law [NCLB]." 

(Hey, Ed Sector Interns! Rise to the defense of NCLB and get on this quickly! It's time to interpret the reported effects of NCLB as narrowly as possible and waste an hour or two on Lexis-Nexis.)

If you're an NCLB lover, there's no use trying to contact the reporter  She's too far gone.  She writes that the morning of art focused attention on "a national reality: that art is often squeezed out of the curriculum by the academic rigors of the No Child Left Behind law."

Where do these reporters get these crazy ideas about the effects of NCLB, standardized tests and inadequate funding?  Uh, maybe they talk to teachers once in a while. In a survey of AFT's teachers, 87 percent agreed with the statement that testing "has pushed other important subjects and activities out of the curriculum."

That was a couple years ago.  Anyone out there think things have changed much since then?

UPDATE: Kevin Carey of the Quick and the Ed does some fact-checking for the Post reporter, digging into a CEP report she cited.  Then Kevin asks me whether I think 16% of school districts reporting a drop in art instruction is a big deal.  Well, a little extrapolating and back-of-the-
envelope arithmetic suggests that 4 million students (16% of ~ 25 million public K-6 students) are missing more than 30 hours of art instruction per year.  So, yes, Kevin, I think that's a lot of lost art instruction. But the art of defending NCLB against all comers is alive and well at Education Sector.