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.
Yeah. You're right. Screw it. NCLB germinated in Texas, and by the time I was in high school mine had built a giant "practice facility" for the football team (grant money of course) and we had to fight when they considered cutting the Latin program. Also in elementary school we often had to -- I swear to god -- share the little plastic recorders which we played, with our mouths, primarily in "music" class. (Those things didn't make music.) We were hit pretty hard by NCLB because there are so, so many poor schools in Texas. EDIT: earthquake!