California’s first wave of permanent arts funding is a great start, but more is needed

Kindergartners in music class at Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, Calif., Wednesday, June 4, 2014.

Alison Yin/EdSource

During the 15 years I’ve worked with children in marginalized communities, the arts were a lifeline, not a luxury.

Yet, with the continuous defunding of arts programs, particularly in schools where children of color attend, the arts are sometimes nonexistent. While working as an arts educator in schools across Arizona and California, I observed that teachers and administrators treated art class as a student’s prize to be won, not a right to be had. Children who misbehaved, did not wear the uniform or forgot to do homework were punished by not being allowed to attend my art class. Yet, those were the children who most needed a moment of imagination, reflection and self-expression. During my time as an arts educator in inner-city schools, the arts were outside the curriculum and only allowed after school when students had completed an entire day of English, math and science. The irony is that art education has proven to help children do well in subjects like reading and math.

Part of the research I conducted to write my new book about how the children of immigrants use art to grapple with issues of citizenship and belonging happened at one of these schools. It was located in South Central Los Angeles, where, in the 1980s, the region experienced a demographic shift, with thousands of Mexican and Central American immigrants moving into the neighborhood.

At the school I met students like Jay – a real student whose name I’ve changed to protect his privacy. At 13 years old, he was already left to fend for himself as his mother was in the hospital with cancer and his dad worked all the time to try to make ends meet. This sort of juggling and the sense of being overwhelmed is common among students in underserved and underresourced communities, and art serves as a way for them to organize and imagine a life beyond these conditions.

At school, teachers called Jay things like “a terror, angry, trouble-maker, problem student,” but in theater class, I saw a kid having fun playing theater games. Near the end of the school year, I found out Jay had stopped coming to school and was not going to graduate from sixth grade.

To the surprise of teachers and administrators, while he was not going to school during the day, he would still show up during the afternoon just in time for theater practice.

He performed during the final showcase for everyone — parents, teachers and peers — though no one from his family was there to see him. He was not promoted to junior high, and a year later, I heard he was sent to a juvenile hall.

What happened to Jay is what happens to too many students.

Theater mattered enough to Jay to keep him coming to the school building. But one year of after-school theater was not enough to help him.

Like Jay, children currently growing up in places like South Central confront the same issues their predecessors faced in the ’60s and ’90s. Coupled with over-policing, violence and immigration issues, these stressors can have detrimental consequences for children’s development in and out of school. Although labeled an “arts-focused” public school, the school did not have art classes until a district grant (which ended just two years later) made theater and other art classes possible.

Arts education experts have been screaming into what feels like a void that all children need art. Yet communities everywhere have continued to slash funding for arts in schools. For example, in 2022, New York City Mayor Eric Adams cut school funding by over $200 million. And when resources are scarce, the arts are some of the first programs to disappear.

Art gives children’s stories visibility. Like holding up a mirror, we can see, hear and feel their perspective. Ultimately, it makes us accountable.

While families in affluent communities are able to enroll their children in a vast array of artistic development opportunities like dance, ceramics, music, including summer art camps and more, our public education system is deficient in providing creative artistic opportunities for children in communities that have been traditionally beset by a long history of redlining, segregation, low property values and underresourced schools.

But there’s reason to hope. In California, voters recently passed Proposition 28, which will permanently increase funding for arts in schools, and this is a much-needed win. Yet, it is uncertain if this bill will undo decades’ worth of defunding. One idea is to set aside some of the already earmarked 80% of funding for instruction on art practitioners that have trauma-informed mindfulness expertise. This is a resource that children in financially exploited communities like Jay’s desperately need.

Proposition 28 funding needs to be the floor, not the ceiling. It is the beginning of what is urgently necessary: our investment in ensuring all students have access to art in school.

Art has the opportunity to save and change lives. It is urgent that we see it as such.

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Silvia Rodriguez Vega is the author of “Drawing Deportation: Art and Resistance Among Immigrant Children” and an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barabra.

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