BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Michelangelo considered fine art the “shadow of divine perfection,” while 20th-century poet and satirist Dorothy Parker called it “a form of catharsis.”

These are just two reasons why Baltimore’s Young Audiences/Arts for Learning Executive Director Stacie Sanders strives to fuse student experiences with music, dance, painting and the plastic arts with learning standards imposed by the 2001 Elementary and Secondary Education Act — part of the rigorous No Child Left Behind Act.

“With No Child Left Behind, which holds schools accountable for adequate yearly progress on certain standards, some schools have narrowed their curriculums so that the arts are cut,” Sanders said. “So we decided to help [schools] understand that our programs not only entertain, inspire and broaden horizons, they also educate — and address standards for which schools are being held accountable.”

Sanders is achieving this standardization through artist-training partnerships that identify links between art content and required learning objectives and help participating artists translate them accordingly. The 57-year-old nonprofit maintains a roster of 45 artists and ensembles that provide more than 2,800 arts experiences to about 250,000 Maryland students a year.

One result is the Teaching Artist Institute, a collaboration that includes the Maryland State Arts Council and the Arts Education and Maryland Schools Alliance to train artists to design and deliver standards-based arts instruction.

The nine-employee, $1 million-a-year nonprofit — one of 32 fee- and donation-funded chapters in the United States — specializes in offering arts experiences to Maryland elementary, middle and high school students by sending working artists to provide performances and hands-on, interactive arts events of varying durations.

More than 400 Maryland elementary, middle and high schools availed themselves of the service in 2006, Sanders said — a 50 percent increase over 2005.

Longer partnerships include Baltimore’s Robert Poole Middle School’s Academy for College and Career Exploration, where Young Audiences’ artists-in-residence work with faculty to design and manage a yearlong “careers in the arts” program for ninth-graders.

“Young Audiences has been a partner of ACCE for three years, and each year it’s grown to provide meaningful, broad-based instruction for our students,” said John Zesiger, ACCE career coordinator.

“They’re a wonderful organization,” added Clare Grizzard, art teacher at Baltimore’s Roland Park Elementary/Middle School. “They do try to work with the goals of the teachers, which makes sense in terms of the school’s requirements.”