Sunday, September 22, 2019
The Effect of Budget Cuts
After learning about the Iron Triangle on Friday, specifically the F-35, it got me thinking about how the importance of investment in various things. According to the article, one significant budget cut to the F-35 project, even though it's not doing great at all, could cause it to "death spiral," meaning that it will do even more damage than not cutting the budget. This really got me thinking about arts programs at schools. At a lot of school, arts programs experience budget cuts that put them further and further in the dirt. This makes way for lower-paid staff, who would be less experienced than higher-paid staff, who would give less quality teaching. Since the program is starting to fail, more cuts would occur, leaving the progam at its bare bones. At that point, it is barely helping anyone, where the cost of the program outweighs the help it gives the students. This analogy helped me visualize the "death spiral" and just how bad a budget cuts affect things, and why we should focus on investing in the beginning. By investing in a good arts program that is beneficial to students, arts and the products would flourish at the school. Same goes for projects like the F-35. Why even start making it at all if all it's gonna be is a pile of metal. We have to carefully plan in the beginning, and focus on cutting-edge innovation that is more beneficial to us, and far more advanced.
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Very interesting article! I do agree with you that the arts program is receiving a lot of budget cuts atm, this problem will probably not go away for a long time as long as their aren't SIG's who support the arts department, same goes with the metal district which flourished based on how many private support groups there are to support it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you stated about how budget cuts for various programs at schools (like for the arts) can only send the quality of the arts education at schools into a downward spiral. One important aspect of how much budget arts classes get is how wealthy the school and the property around the school is. If parents of students are able to make large donations and if schools are able to gain much funding from high property taxes (Both apply to our school.), then the arts education does not fall to this downward spiral of lower and lower quality. However, in poorer schools, this is a very common occurrence. For example, in Oklahoma, 1,110 fine arts classes were cut, disproportionately affecting low-income schools within Oklahoma (seen here: https://stateimpact.npr.org/oklahoma/2019/01/17/decline-in-school-arts-programs-follows-funding-drop-but-cuts-arent-equally-felt/). Thus, there needs to be a policy created within Congress to change the funding of schools and perhaps fund schools inversely proportional to how affluent a school's district or neighborhood is so that even low-income schools can go without cutting funds for arts classes. However, this would have to be a very strong initiative in order to overcome a potential Iron Triangle (if there is one) related to funding for education.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on budget cuts leading to the downfall of such programs getting less funding. I believe art is getting less funding because of all the construction going on, It's sad really. Art isn't really expressed as a vital part of this school as much as it should. The same thing happened to the auto-shop class that was offered here at LAHS. The interest coming from students was there but the funding wasn't so it was completely cut out as a class. The school should really plan out a better budget plan for the future otherwise art classes might head down the same lane. I mean who wants to be in a class that can't provide the necessary materials...?
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