Why We Need to Change the Way We Talk About Arts Education
An exploration of the critical changes in conversation that need to be had surrounding creativity, in order to enable sustainable arts education budgets and programs.
By the time I was ten, I was basically a multi-threat: dancer, writer, guitarist, drummer, poet, potter, actress, and recorder extraordinaire. Okay, was I good at any of it? Nope. But did I have a heck of a time learning about and expressing myself? Absolutely.
Something I am consistently most grateful for from my childhood is the amount of exposure and access I had to all kinds of creative opportunities, thanks to the vast range of classes and workshops my school at the time offered. As I grew up and moved back to the U.S., shifting from a private international school to local public school, the gaps in this kind of prioritization of arts education here became clearer. Rather than the norm, it seemed to be synonymous with wealth; arts in schools was a privilege, not a presumption.
This notion feels essentially embedded into the foundation of educational systems here. It seems everyone agrees that it has value, but that it falls much further down the totem pole than other more ‘traditional’ subjects like the maths and sciences. So what can we do about it? There are funding campaigns and budget fights and crowds of campaigners pushing for its prioritization across the country, but as we’ve seen, the kind of changes these pushes often achieve are fleeting.
For illustrative purposes, we’ll choose to focus on how this has played out in the past within the Los Angeles Unified School District. The first decline of arts education in schools in recent history was the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 by nearly two-thirds of California’s voters (California Tax Data), which reduced and placed a statewide cap on property taxes, causing the money available to school budgets to dramatically decrease. Before the passage of the proposition, schools had around a $9 billion dollar budget but following the passage, lost one third ($3 billion) of that seemingly overnight. As these cuts in funding were being made, many districts decided that their art programs would be the first to go since they wouldn’t be explicitly measured on state assessment tests. Budget allotment for the arts went from around a couple thousand dollars per year per pupil (out of roughly seven thousand dollars per year per pupil), to virtually zero.
By the late nineties, groups of community advocates took note of this lack of adequate arts education and began campaigning for change; the future began to look a little brighter. Valerie Fields was elected to the L.A. Board of Education after campaigning on the priority of it and assembled a blue-ribbon committee focused on redefining learning standards and increasing budgets to restore the arts.
Yet, the funding devoted to arts education has only continued to mirror this type of fluctuation over the past couple of decades, hitting either ends of budgetary extremes. Starting from an all-time high under Schwarzenegger of $48 million, to once again facing cuts during the economic recession of ’09, to the school board unanimously approving a measure in October 2012 that declared arts a core subject and prohibited further cuts to the program, bringing us to the current arts instruction budget of around a comparatively low $18 million (Romo).
With arts ed often the first to go, but then the first to come back, school and city authorities seem to understand that there is a value to it — but yet fail in maintaining its status as essential alongside subjects like English, History, Math and Science.
So, before heading to the boardrooms or the budget books, maybe we need to take a step back and understand why this is happening in the first place; why it’s important, but only until it becomes infeasible or inconvenient.
Thought shapes action, and when looking at the way we think and talk about the subject, the current conversation regarding it fails to value it for anything beyond the way it helps other more traditional and pragmatic elements of education rather than recognizing its merit in of itself.
Perhaps the issue of them not valuing it enough as they should, lies in the fact that they are not valuing it in the right way in the first place. Nearly all studies focused on arts education indisputably argues that arts education holds merit and that students who receive a larger amount of it reap a multitude of benefits. However, a closer analysis of their findings shows a common thread: art programs simply hold value because of their positive effect on academic outcomes.
For instance, according to studies conducted by College Board and the Texas Music Educators Association, “Art programs have been found to result in higher standardized test scores, higher grade point averages, and improved scores in math, reading and science” which thereby benefits the school and the community as a whole, as well as each individual student. Similarly, a pivotal 2000’s study concluded that the more years of art classes a student engaged in, the higher their SAT score was, demonstrating how “arts education has a positive effect on academic outcomes” (USC Rossier).
Another notable example is a 2011 study conducted by the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities that found that the skills learned through playing an instrument in music class, could be applied and used to improve math skills (Reinvesting in Arts Education). An op-ed in the Daily Beast uses this value as his primary support for maintaining a solid arts education budget, saying “If there is a direct correlation between art and music education and higher educational performance, as the research points to, we owe it to our students to do all we can to expose them to the arts.”
It’s certainly a step in the right direction that these studies affirm that arts education is valuable and is something that should be invested in. However, when looking at their objective findings of the value of it (and again these just served as a few examples), they measure it as valuable only due to the benefits it provides to other more pragmatic domains. The majority of available research studies conducted focus on how an arts education boosts student achievement in other subjects in school like math and science or has a positive effect on SAT score outcomes.
These types of studies promoting the value of creativity serve to contradict themselves, by suggesting that creativity and arts are valuable enough to be implemented in schools — but then that they are only valuable because of how they contribute to bettering non-creative subjects. The consequence of this is diminishing what has been established as the baseline of good arts educations programs, and what I loved so much about my own experiences growing up: allowing students to express their intrinsic passions and creative self for the sake of just that.
We’ve dug ourselves a hole where we’re no longer able to value arts education as its own thing and the creativity, magic and wonder it provides, but rather as just another stepping stone to becoming satisfactory salary earners or test-taking machines.
In contrast to these commonly provided studies and narratives on the measures of the value of arts, at a panel event titled “Achieving a Brighter Future for Arts Education in Los Angeles” in Beverly Hills, CA, students from the public Hamilton High School in 2019 shared their different insights on the matter. They described how studying music “gives them a whole new perspective on life” and how “everything involves music…songs on the radio or in the elevator become more than just background music” and that it’s their “main source of happiness”.
A particularly powerful anecdote was about a young boy named Moses in speech therapy who had never spoke, but a few months into the year had one day raised his hand in a music class. He made his way to the front of the room, and sung two bars of a song all by himself. Everyone realized he had this beautiful deep voice they had never heard before, and his classmates all cheered him on throughout and following his performance. These stories speak to the powerful impact music and the arts can have on so much more than just one’s academic ability, but on their overall expression, connection to others, and soul.
Beyond the stories, in a study conducted in Norway on teachers and pupils, they surveyed the students to find out what they considered to be the biggest benefits of a brief arts education course they took. By far, the most recorded responses included: “Opening up”, “Happiness”, “Joy”, and “an achievement that boosts self-esteem”.
So often, these are the stories that stick with us — of how the arts actually gives students the power to be able to heal and express themselves. Yet, these narratives are not the ones that are told. And when they are, are kicked down a notch below the “arts power to improve logic” ones; as if we’re completely undermining biological functions and values of the right-brain and deeming the only purpose of working it is to strengthen the left.
Perhaps this phenomenon represents the larger issue at play that we need to work on — how society and specifically the education system collectively views money and traditional careers as more important than one’s pure creativity and wellbeing. In order to prevent the attention and budget devoted to the issue to keep from fluctuating, steps first need to be taken to get players on all levels of the pipeline to value arts for arts itself.
This change in discourse may be what precipitates actual lasting change to be made in allowing a steady course of arts education budgets and programs throughout LAUSD and schools across the globe, lending to future generations of happier, more empowered and creative individuals (or, you know, multi-threats).
