Look at the boundary conditions. We've now lived in a "no child left behind" world for 12 years - if you were in kindergarten when it was passed into law, you're going to graduate high school soon. NCLB was an overt charge for quantitative learning at the expense of qualitative learning, and music, art and other "creative" endeavors had long since been under assault by standardization. It's not a "we hate creativity" in school problem, it's a "we can't pass standardized tests through creativity" problem. When you make the success of your entire school district dependent on math and verbal scores earned by the students under your care, Mozart, Einstein and Picasso could share a lunchroom table and it wouldn't fucking matter. A Shakespearean sonnet counts a lot less than A, B, C or D on a test about diagramed sentences.