Arizona Attorney - December 2015

www.azbar.org/AZAttorney 24 ARIZONA ATTORNEY DECEMBER 2015
more arts classes, the higher the score. As
the study found, “Students who took four
years of arts coursework outperformed their
peers who had one half-year or less of arts
coursework by 58 points on the verbal por-
tion and 38 points on the math portion of
the SAT.”
The Rand Corporation’s 2005 study
titled Gifts of the Muse emphasized the
cognitive benefits of the arts. Among other
findings, researchers said, “When individuals
focus their attention on a work of art, they
are ‘invited’ to make sense of what is before
them. Because meanings are embedded in
the experience rather than explicitly stated,
the individual can gain an entirely new per-
spective on the world and how he or she per-
ceives it.”
Benefits such as these may be placed at
risk as budget decisions are made, nationally
and in the states, visible in a multiple ways:
• As schools across the country have faced
budget shortfalls in recent years, funding
for arts education is being slashed as the
STEM (science, technology, engineering
and math) subjects are prioritized. This
national trend was also reflected by the

2013 elimination of Arts in Education,
the Department of Educa-
tion program that awards
grants for art teacher train-
ing. It became part of an
umbrella program encompassing health
education, financial literacy, foreign lan-
guage, and physical education—a move
that opponents claim make the arts
even more vulnerable.

• An Arizona bill suggested substituting a career or technical credit instead of the arts credit currently demanded of high school graduates applying to the state’s three major universities.

This move was interpreted by arts advocates as a serious catalyst for some Arizona high schools to drop courses in the arts.

While the number of students not offered art courses—134,203 in 2009—has decreased since that time, according to a December 15, 2014, report by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, more than 115,000 students currently lack access to arts instruction provided by highly qualified art teachers.

Arts
Education
Cutbacks

The attorneys interviewed
for this article see threats to
childrens’ critical thinking
development embodied in
the cutbacks. That is
revealed in specific as
well as general ways by
the following remarks.
Award-winning
sculptor Marcy Janes
had this to say about
the subject:
Art is about ob-
servation, and learning starts with
observation. Seeing and otherwise
perceiving is crucial for developing
critical thinking skills, because the
child hones her own sense of what
exists, what works, what is true, and
can then compare that with other
people’s observations of the same
objects, events, ideas. I have always
believed children learn best using all
of their senses and large and small
motor skills, and art provides the
opportunity for such comprehensive
learning.

“The effects of cutbacks in art education
are brutally heavy on young people from
economically disadvantaged backgrounds,”
points out fiction writer Joel Sannes. “For-
tunately, there are a lot of volunteers who
are stepping in to give young people access
to the arts, but the volunteer efforts can’t
replace daily immersion in public schools.”
“My high school, where I first learned
to use a wood lathe, no longer has a wood
shop,” says sculptor Jon Saline. “We revere
as a society those who can create works of
beauty, yet we remove that possibility from
children by reducing art funding—even
while we are increasing funding for athletic
Gary Fry
Jon H.
Saline
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