Dean's Perpective
Dear Friends:
Around the time that Barack Obama was being sworn in as our 44th president, music maverick Quincy Jones was lobbying the newly elected administration to create a cabinet-level national ministry of culture and the arts, similar to those already in existence in more than two dozen countries. This idea is not new — Jones has been talking about the need for at least a decade. With the Obama administration’s talk about reinvesting in arts education, including creating an artists corps that would work in low-income schools, Jones, no doubt, felt the time was right to make a move.
Today, although still pushing hard for his idea, Jones also acknowledges that with the current economic woes, this may take awhile longer. Every educator reading this magazine knows all too well that when budgets get tight, one of the first things to go is the arts. This, too, isn’t new. So the question becomes: is it going to be even harder for public schools across the country to fund their in-house music and painting classes, student literary magazines, and theater programs? What author Mary Tamer found was bleak, with urban and suburban schools facing the biggest budget cuts since the mid-1980s. As I read this issue’s cover story, what I found particularly distressing is that the fallback for many resource-poor schools — offsite arts organizations that bring their services to the classroom — was also in trouble: the Associated Press predicted that this year alone, about 10,000 arts organizations could fold.
Does this mean the end of arts in most public schools, or will many programs be shells of their former selves? Federal aid to education totals about $115 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama signed into law in February. Advocates hope that some of these funds will be designated for the arts. I am encouraged to see many of the talented students in our Arts in Education Program, as well as many of our alumni, already preparing for the challenges ahead. As Christine Jee, Ed.M.’09, says in the story, “We can have this crisis, and focus on everyone cutting the arts, or we can think creatively of new ways to incorporate them.”
Sincerely,
March 2009
