Leading professor and Chair of the Faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, James Catterall speaks on his insightful book Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art: A 12-Year Longitudinal Study of Arts Education—Effects on the Achievements and Values of Young Adults (2009). Catterall’s study addresses the questions “Do the arts matter?” “Just how?” and “For whom?” Focusing on more than 12,000 students from diverse backgrounds, the study’s findings demonstrate that intensive involvement in the arts by students during middle and high school associates positively with higher levels of achievement in school and college attainment. You will not want to miss this deep dialogue about the state of education in our communities. Nick Rabkin, the senior research scientist at the National Opinion Research Center, describes James Catterall’s work this way: “Sometimes the solutions to complex problems are hiding in plain sight, but we still fail to see them. There’s been a public consensus that our schools are in crisis for over three decades. During that period, arts education has been consistently eroding in our schools, the victim of budget cuts and policy-makers who are consumed with raising scores on standardized tests. But the schools, especially those serving low-income students, are still in crisis. “A decade ago, James Catterall sliced and diced data on 25,000 students and found that those who were more engaged in the arts did much better in school and in many other ways as well. 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 privileged students. This new study picks up the same thread and shows that the positive effects of art education last well into adulthood. It points directly to a solution that has been hiding in plain sight: Our schools will improve if they deliver quality arts education to all students. The students deserve nothing less.” James S. Catterall is Professor and Chair of the Faculty at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. For the past two decades, his research has focused on measurement of children’s cognitive development and motivation in the context of learning in the arts. Professor Catterall has published leading studies on learning music and its effects on verbal and spatial intelligence; and learning in the visual arts and the development of creativity, originality and self-efficacy beliefs. He was a principal author on the Critical Links and Champions of Change projects as well as the AERA and U.S. Education Department’s New Opportunities for Research in Arts Education. He is now writing a book about the roles of creativity in basic cognitive processes, tentatively titled The Extraordinary Importance of Ordinary Creativity: A Theory of Creativity, Cognition and Behavior.