Last week, the National Endowment of the Arts released a new analysis showing a sharp decline in participation in arts education nationwide, with particularly bad news for African-Americans and Hispanics. Here's how Ed Week's excellent Curriculum Matters blog covered it:
Fewer American children are getting access to arts education, whether at school or elsewhere, according to a new analysis of federal data issued by the National Endowment for the Arts. What's especially alarming is that the overall decline is only part of the story: The drop is apparently most severe for African-Americans and Hispanics.The research, part of a broader look at arts participation by U.S. adults, finds that fewer 18-year-olds surveyed in 2008 reported receiving any arts education in childhood than did those surveyed in 1982, dropping from about 65 percent to 50 percent. The report also includes survey data in 1992 and 2002, and each successive time the overall figure was lower.
The analysis includes a slightly broader pool of adults surveyed in breaking down the results by race and ethnicity, including those ages 18 to 24. Here, the data are most stark. Just 26 percent of African-Americans surveyed in 2008 reported receiving any arts education in childhood, a huge drop from the 51 percent who reported as much in 1982.
"We've moved from a half to a quarter of all African-Americans," Sunil Iyengar, the director of research and analysis at the endowment, told me. "It's now 26 percent. ... You're talking about staggering rates of decline for African-Americans and for Hispanics, too."
For Hispanics ages 18 to 24, the figure for getting any arts education plummeted to 28 percent in 2008, down from 47 percent in 1982. For whites, meanwhile, the figure was down just slightly. I won't round these figures, but it dropped from 59.2 percent to 57.9 percent.
When the news first broke, I shot off a thoughtless tweet blaming the trend on teachers unions, as their unwillingness to compromise on salaries, benefits, or seniority rights forces districts to look for other cuts, like arts education, when times are tough. I regret that missive; of course union intransigence can't explain the decline in arts education from 1982 to 2008--a period of unparalleled prosperity for America's schools. (Per-pupil spending went up by about a third, in real dollars, during that quarter-century.) It's much more likely that a narrow-minded focus on raising achievement in math and reading is to blame.
But the current budget crisis is likely to make matters even worse, for the reasons I mention above. Arts education, unfortunately, is an easy target. Consider New York City, for example, which, according to the New York Post, had 135 fewer arts teachers than the year before. Proposed layoffs could drive out 356 more. (H/T Gotham Schools)
Kudos to Arne Duncan, who last week sent governors and state schools chiefs a paper with suggestions for how to deal with the New Normal by cutting smart.* He urges them to "first do no harm."
Avoid short-sighted cost-cutting. Efforts to increase productivity should not be mistaken for the short-sighted cost-cutting many states and districts have engaged in over the years to reduce education spending. Even in an era of tight budgets, cutting back in a manner that damages educational quality and hurts children is the wrong thing to do. Short-sighted cuts include: reducing the number of days in the school year, decreasing the amount of instructional time, eliminating instruction in the arts and foreign languages, eliminating high-quality early learning programs, abandoning promising reforms, and indiscriminately laying off talented teachers be they new, mid-career, or veteran.
Will decision makers at the state and local levels listen? Here's hoping.
-Mike Petrilli
*Yes, it bears a striking resemblance to our recent policy brief on the topic. I am happy to be plagiarized by high ranking government officials any day.
