The Arts: Forever on the Chopping Block

We’ve all seen the headlines—“Local Elementary School’s Music Program Cut After School Board’s Tough Call,” “Middle School’s Choral Director Let Go Due to Budget Cuts,” and “High School Marching Band Program on the Chopping Block.”

Countless stories in local, regional, and national news appear daily, telling of the cuts that spell out disaster for arts education in the United States.

Photo courtesy of Roland Herrera

Music and arts education programs disappear constantly.  Due to the difficult state of the economy, budgets in public schools are tight and funding for all departments is limited.  However it seems as though, more often than not, music and arts programs are the first areas to take the hit.  Many times, school districts would rather cut a whole department than redistribute funds—the solution is easier, less taxing to deliberate, and is the widely-accepted way of navigating a tight budget.

How did the fine arts become so expendable?

To begin, these programs require a large sum of money to run and to be successful.  To administrators, the cost of instruments, music scores, uniforms, music stands, choir risers, storage space, and all the other expenses required to keep a music program running, are impractical and superfluous, since many music programs do not have an obvious payout.  Many concerts that schools perform are available to the public for little to no cost.  The revenue made by high school orchestras or choirs in no way compares to the revenue made by high school football or basketball teams, which may bring in thousands of spectators paying $5 admission each. 

This issue is most apparent at the elementary and middle school levels, where musical groups are not quite at a high performance level, get very little publicity, and bring in no profit for the school.  Draining funding for the arts at the lower levels, however, squashes any chance of any school district producing high achieving high school ensembles that would be capable of bringing in publicity and profit to their school. 

Research presented by Southern California Public Radio demonstrates that in Southern California School Districts, funding for the arts is not consistent across all twelve grade levels of public school.  This trend is consistent across the United States.

Because a majority of school districts never do get to witness the effects of truly strong music or arts education, they tend to place value in other programs.  School districts tend to value the programs, like sports and STEM, that receive steady funding for all twelve years of a students’ education in the public schools system and consistently generate tangible, positive, obvious results.

Because the benefits of music and arts education are less tangible than a sum of money, the programs are consistently overlooked in budget considerations by school boards across the nation.

In addition to monetary concerns, schools tend to place the most value in the curriculum that translates directly into careers and degree programs where students are considered to be the most successful.  STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math education has been picking us steam.  

According to the California STEM Learning Network, "STEM is an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education.  We focus on these areas together not only because the skills and knowledge in each discipline are essential for student success, but also because these fields are deeply intertwined in the real world and in students learn most effectively.  STEM is an interdisciplinary and applied approach that is coupled with hands-on, problem-based learning."

School districts can clearly discern and demonstrate to a concerned parent board how a STEM-based curriculum can translate into a student’s success in the “real world.”  Yet, administrators have less success convincing their constituents how an education in music and the arts can translate to high achievement in today’s extremely competitive job market.

Photo courtesy of Horia Varlan

Many parents and administrators are extremely concerned with students’ standardized test scores, which are vital to acceptance in any university and additionally measure a school district’s achievement—a vital statistic for many schools when states are distributing funding.  Since the standardized tests have no “music” or “arts” section, many adults do not see the use in studying these “extra” topics in school that take time away from classes in math or science.

Yet hopefully, through the next four blog posts, I will be able to shed some light on the controversy revolving around funding for the arts in schools and present compelling arguments and concrete data to convince others to advocate for this vital aspect of public education.