Research has proven that the arts create a success-oriented learning environment by "fostering teacher innovation, a positive professional culture, community engagement, increased student attendance and retention, effective instructional practice, and school identity" (AEP Highlights, p. 3). For low-income students, the arts provide "critical links to develop crucial thinking skills and motivations to achieve at higher levels" (Council of Chief State School Officers News, 5/16/02). In the report Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, researchers found that engagement in the arts nurtures the development of intellectual, social and personal competencies, and increases arts discipline specific skills. Arts programs were seen to increase academic achievement; to decrease youth delinquent behavior; to improve youths' attitudes about themselves, their peers, adults, and their future; and to promote a positive school culture, thereby encouraging students to stay and succeed in school.  Researchers have found that learning in and through the arts:     • contributes significantly to improved critical thinking, problem posing, problem solving, and decision making;     • involves the communication, manipulation, interpretation and understanding of a complex symbol system, as do verbal language and mathematics;     • fosters higher order and transferable thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation;     • develops positive peer and adult relations based on empathy and identification;     • engages multiple skills and abilities; and,     • develops increased capability in imagination and judgment.     U.S. Department of Education and National Endowment for the Arts, How the Arts Can Enhance After-School Programs, 2002 While the impact of arts programming on learning, and personal and social development has been well documented, the arts have not been meaningfully incorporated into school curricula. To change public education in America we must alter the curriculum to include learning in and through the arts so that the benefits of such programming can be available to all students. NALC supports programs and processes that make the arts an integral part of the curriculum for their own sake and for the many broader educational benefits they provide. History