The Trump
administration’s proposed budget, as it has been ballyhooed to his masses of co-deplorables, eliminates the federal agencies that are the
bedrock of America’s cultural and artistic vision: the National Endowment for
the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Shutting down these
critical agencies is not a financial decision to balance the federal balance
sheet: Their budgets are relatively
small, and together with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting also,
unbelievably, on the chopping block, they constitute just under 0.02 percent of the annual federal budget.
For the math challenged, that's 1/5000th
of the whole budget. However, their impact is exponentially large and
has garnered bipartisan support across the country for their role in job
creation and attracting businesses into communities.
Fun fact, about 1/3 of the total federal budget is
comprised of programs which cost below 25 billion or less, which is roughly the
same as the amount allotted to both of the previously mentioned agencies.
Secondarily that's about how big a budget share
is spent on farm and agricultural subsidies, which are almost
universally agreed to be gratuitous corporate welfare.
What may well
be even more significant is that those
dollars, unlike farm subsidies which enrich those who are already well off,
serve as incentive money for local efforts.
State humanities councils leverage about $5 in additional private money
for every federal $1 dollar spent at the local level, providing seed money that attracts additional
foundation, corporate, state government and individual support. This
essentially makes the NEA and NEH the sole federal organizations which produce
more than they receive. Don't even get me started on PBS. Only a psychotic game
show host (oh, wait, he was, wasn't he?) would believe that PBS is unessential
to our collective cultural well being.
But why? Why
spend this money at all? As an educator, I can give an answer based on
experience, and that is that many of my best students were those who were
engaged in school sponsored arts
programs. Not talking about only super bright kids who dabbled, here, I'm
referring to across the board
performance for just about every kid who played an instrument including
voice, acted, drew, danced, molded clay, etc. My second language learners who
were in music programs even seemed to acquire English faster.
Yeah, I know,
that was your experience, but...? Well the but is that my experience turns out
to be just about the norm nationwide when comparing "arts kids" with
non arts-involved students. I also was
an SAT prep coach. Data shows that there is an essentially linear improvement
curve on SAT verbal performance relative to years of arts education. the results are similar for math SAT scores.
Comparing average "arts
involved" student and "non arts involved" student scores shows
that for those kids having 4 years of an arts curriculum or involvement, the Math score was 7% higher, while verbal
was a whopping 11.9% higher! These are "get in" or "don't
get in" percentages for many universities!
I reiterate,
Trump doesn't seem to know or care that the arts matter. He should since, in a
2005 Harris poll, 93% of those surveyed
agreed that "The arts are vital to providing a well rounded education for
children." 86% agreed that "an arts education encourages and
assists in the improvement of a child's attitudes toward school." 80% agreed that "incorporating the arts into
education is the first step in adding back what's missing from public education
today." So let's get this straight.
He isn't responding to the multitude of the American people.
Not having been a public school student, and
relegated to military school (I can understand why, now) Mr. Trump simply has no soul
where the arts are concerned. his apparent standard for art is to be found in
the number of expensive portraits of himself which he has commissioned and paid
for with what his contributors thought were charitable donations. Further proof
is apparent in his selection of a moronic pyramid scheme princess as SecEd, a post for which she is singularly
unqualified.
Write,
call, or e-mail your Congressperson, tell them to leave arts
funding alone. After all, it is one of the few remaining vestiges of civilization we still have.
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