This Whole Assessment thing...

My mentor teacher during my Field Placement III at NFA, along with all of the other teachers in the school and New York State for that matter are all trying to understand this new NYS assessment thing. It requires a formal assessment in the beginning of the year followed by another at the end of the year. The test results in the end, have to illustrate significant growth for each student otherwise the teacher is in hot water. Now, the issue that was raised by the teachers that I was working around was how exactly do you formally test students in a studio art room? Where do you even begin when the formal techniques are usually told and exemplified as opposed to written and taken in notes like other subjects. On top of it all, what do you even test them on so early in the year? Well from what I saw, teachers were approaching it in the most logical way they could. Since this is really an assessment of their teaching abilities, many of the teachers made tests that were purposely impossible for the students to do well on so that when the time came at the end of the year, the test that they give will be easier and indicate "growth" based on the students' scores. Besides that this is pretty blatantly cheating the system, my question lies not with their morality of the situation, but why would you put in place more formal assessment of students or teachers? Why does it seem that there is always more and more of a focus brought on pure academic subjects to undermine art classes in ways like this? The arts seem to always suffer because they are a different form of learning. Just because this form isn't measured in numbers and formulas, the higher ups deem them inferior. I don't know, it all just seems a bit messed up to me. But no matter what happens with systems like these, I know that people like me, my classmates, my colleagues and my mentors all alike, will work hard and persevere to see that the arts are kept as important as the other subjects in school.