Every once in a while I like to use a somewhat elliptical title. Today is a prime example. Some of you got it immediately, others were thinking “huh?”
So, let me explain. 
Word is coming from all over the country about deep cuts to arts education. Some describe “blood on the floor.” A fair number of people have been talking about fighting to ensure that the arts are not cut on a basis disproportionate to other subjects. This has been explicitly stated as the approach of the NYCDOE (in theory at least, since the principals can do whatever they please), and I have seen it on press releases coming out of other regions. The strategy seeks to establish some sort of fairness doctrine.
The problem here is that some subjects, like the arts and physical education, in urban school districts in particular, have been so overwhelmed by other interests for so many years that the proportionate cuts strategy will leave our children with very, very little at the end of the day.
After years of disproportionate cuts, arts education negative policies inherent in most of the accountability movement, and a panoply of other examples that are too numerous to list today, I think that the position of accepting proportionate cuts is a mistake.
While no one wants to be viewed as being unrealistic, out of touch, or god forbid hostile, we should be fighting for less of a cut to arts education rather than reductions that are proportionate to those in in other subject areas, particularly ELA and math, the two subjects the entire education-industrial-complex is built upon.
Perhaps then, we will end up with something along the lines of a actual proportionate cut or perhaps do a bit better, rather than a actual disproportionate cut that guts the fraction of resources allocated to arts eduction. 