Giving Compass' Take:

· Writing for Oklahoma Policy Institute, Rebecca Fine explains the importance of fine arts in providing a quality education for students and how shrinking budget contribute to education inequality in Oklahoma.

· How can donors help provide equal access to arts education in the state of Oklahoma? How does fine arts education help prepare students for their futures? 

· Here's more on why we should care about arts education. 

Oklahomans know every student needs access to quality public education.  Unfortunately, our state has struggled to uphold this commitment.  While all areas of public education have suffered from slashed education funding over the past decade, budget cuts have hit fine arts education especially hard.  In the 2017-2018 school year, Oklahoma had 1,110 fewer art and music classes than four years prior, leaving 28 percent of all Oklahoma public school studentswithout access to fine arts classes.  Statewide underfunding of arts education impacts all Oklahoma schoolchildren, but these cuts create deeper disparities in both access and quality for low-income and rural students.  The 2019 legislative session begins in February, but now is the time to gather concerns and share them with your representatives.  Our state must find new sources of recurring revenue for education funding, so we can uphold our promise to quality education.

Fine arts education, which primarily includes music and visual art, but also drama, dance, and debate, is integral to adequately prepare all students for college and careers.  Just as sports provide students a way of learning unavailable in other disciplines, the fine arts help develop students’ critical thinking skills, spatial-temporal reasoning and helps increase tolerance and cultural awareness.  Still further, socially and economically disadvantaged students who have high levels of arts instruction have shown more positive outcomes in areas such as grade point average, school engagement, and civic participation than their low-arts engaged peers.  Fine arts may also help reduce dropout rates for low-income and students of color who face greater risk of not graduating.  In light of these benefits, having access to fine arts education is both vital and necessary to a well-rounded education, and Oklahoma is not adequately meeting this standard.

Read the full article about fine arts education by Rebecca Fine at Oklahoma Policy Institute.