In Wednesday’s (5/11) Los Angeles Times, Mike Boehm writes, “Hoping to reverse a decades-long decline in arts education in American elementary and secondary schools, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities has issued a report intended to help advocates press for more money, better teaching approaches and a fresh mind-set that doesn’t treat arts learning as a frill or an afterthought, readily cut when school budgets grow tight. While acknowledging that ‘the overall picture can appear bleak,’ the President’s Committee, co-chaired by film and television producer George Stevens Jr. and theater producer Margo Lion, argues in the report, ‘Reinvesting in Arts Education: Winning America’s Future Through Creative Schools,’ that ‘a critical mass’ of success stories now exists. The idea is to tell them to school boards, legislators and philanthropists in hopes of reversing drastic declines documented in a study the National Endowment for the Arts issued two months ago. The NEA found across-the-board drops in arts education, based on 18- to 24-year-olds’ responses to a 2008 U.S. Census Bureau survey. Among children of a college graduate, 27% said they had never taken even one arts class, compared with 12% in 1982. For children of high school graduates, the number who’d never had any arts study rose from 30% nearly 30 years ago to 66% in 2008.”
Posted May 11, 2011
