When Oren Alperin was ready to apply to high school, they knew they wanted to study theater. Now a junior at the competitive Brooklyn High School of the Arts, their coursework has included acting, playwriting and world theater classes on top of more traditional academic subjects.

Alperin loves the school and says that the benefits extend from the personal to the scholastic. “I’ve gotten so much better at leaning on other people and having them lean on me,” Alperin told Truthout. “Nothing I do happens alone, even if I’m doing a monologue. I’ve learned to work with others, learned about other cultures and collaborated with other students to write a play called Midnight Reunion. The piece is about community and trauma, what it means to be a family and how to build relationships. We performed the play in April and the audience came from all over the world but regardless of where they started out, they felt something deep as they watched us on stage.”

Like Alperin, 16-year-old Zavannah Deas is effusive about the school’s theater program. “Being in theater has helped me develop into who I am,” she told Truthout. “It has also helped me understand other people. Knowing theater history and the ways people have performed in other eras and in other countries has been wonderful.”

It’s also uncommon.

According to Erica Rosenfeld Halverson, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the availability of arts or aesthetic education (which includes dance, music, the visual arts, theater and creative writing, and straddles the divide between Eurocentric materials and those that are culturally responsive to a diverse student body) is hugely uneven, varying by state and even by districts within states. What’s more, she told Truthout that funding for all types of public school arts education typically fluctuates from year to year, with massive cuts implemented during economic downturns. This trend, she explains, began during the fiscal crises of the 1970s and was later exacerbated by the push for improved standardized test scores, a move that sidelined the arts as expendable. The result was that by 2020, just 19 states included the arts as a key education area.

Then the pandemic came.

“Before COVID, we were at a fairly productive point of the pendulum swing, with the end of No Child Left Behind in 2015 and a more holistic understanding of young people’s lives,” Halverson said. “Legislators and policy people were showing an increasing understanding that the race to perform in content areas was not the best way to ensure adequate, equitable learning.”

COVID, she says, could have been an opportunity to rethink the way we educate young people. Unfortunately, “that was not the direction taken.”

Instead, she told Truthout, the focus has been on a return to basics — reading, writing, arithmetic and sanitized accounts of American history — a focus that ignores the role that arts education (especially if it is culturally responsive) can play in helping kids plug into academics and social and emotional well-being.

Lakeisha Steele, vice president of policy at the 30-year-old Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning agrees. “COVID has forced us to think about the value of public education as a public good.” All of the research, she told Truthout, points to the value of the arts. “The arts help us learn to be more than consumers. They teach........

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