Archives for category: Ignorance
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Timothy Egan: Blame Our Civic Stupidity on Failure to Teach Civics and Government

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2017 //
112

Timothy Egan writes a regular column in the New York Times. I usually find myself vigorously nodding in assent as I read whatever he writes. I went to a wonderful conference at Oberlin College this week, and he gave a talk that is reflected in this column.

He blames our current national stupidity on schools and teachers because they are not teaching civics, Government, and history. He acknowledges that these vital courses may have been casualties of the standardized testing hysteria.

But that can’t be the only reason so many Americans can’t tell the difference between fake news and facts, why so many Americans don’t bother to vote, why so many accept outright lies without question, why so many know so little about our government or our history.

Teachers, what do you think?

Read what Egan writes and speak up.

Categories Citizenship, Civics, Fake News, History, Ignorance, Lies

Facebook is Failing to Identify and Exclude Fake News, Conspiracy Theories

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2017 //
86

Jon Christian, writing in The Atlantic, reports that Facebook has not been successful in identifying and screening out fake news (Campbell Brown–a close friend of Betsy DeVos– was hired by Facebook to lead this effort earlier this year). No matter how outlandish the story or the headline, people will read it and believe it if it confirms their own views.

Facebook’s fact-checking efforts are on the rocks. Five months after the social-media giant debuted a third-party tool to stop the spread of dubious news stories on its platform, some of its fact-checker partners have begun expressing frustration that the company won’t share data on whether or not the program has been effective.

In the absence of that official data, a study by Yale researchers made waves last week by suggesting that flagging a post as “disputed” makes readers just a slim 3.7 percent less likely to believe its claim. Among Trump supporters and young people, the fact-checking program could even backfire: Those respondents were more likely to believe unflagged posts after they saw flags on others.* That concern was echoed earlier this year by the actor James Woods, who tweeted that a disputed tag on Facebook was the “best endorsement a story could have.”

The study—as well as ongoing revelations about how Russian troll farms might have used Facebook ads to meddle with the U.S. presidential election—has been stirring up the debate about whether and how social-media companies ought to police misinformation and propaganda on their platforms. Facebook claims that its efforts are working, and criticized the Yale researchers’ methodology, but a growing body of scholarship shows how difficult fact-checking has become online. With roots in old-fashioned cognitive biases that are amplified by social-media echo chambers, the problem is revealing itself to be extraordinarily difficult to fight at an institutional level.

Open the link to read the full article and the embedded links.

Facebook is no doubt the most powerful media platform in the world. If it spreads lies and conspiracy theories, this poses a huge problem for everyone. It is an especially big problem for a democracy, which relies on having an informed public. If the public is fed a steady diet of lies, the liars win.

The Founding Fathers believed that the great enemy of sound government was ignorance. They could not have imagined a world in which lies and propaganda are even worse than ignorance. And travel faster.

Categories Fraud, Ignorance, Lies, Media, Propaganda

Trump’s War on Science

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2017 //
42

We need science more than ever, as our world is rocked by natural and people-made disasters.

Yet two words are banned the Trump administration: climate change.

Read the editorial that appeared in today’s’ New York Times.

The government is controlled by men (mostly) who are contemptuous of science and knowledge. Maybe this explains their war on education. They have reached the top without brains, why pay to develop them in young children?

The Times’ editorial reads:

“The news was hard to digest until one realized it was part of a much larger and increasingly disturbing pattern in the Trump administration. On Aug. 18, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine received an order from the Interior Department that it stop work on what seemed a useful and overdue study of the health risks of mountaintop-removal coal mining.

“The $1 million study had been requested by two West Virginia health agencies following multiple studies suggesting increased rates of birth defects, cancer and other health problems among people living near big surface coal-mining operations in Appalachia. The order to shut it down came just hours before the scientists were scheduled to meet with affected residents of Kentucky.

“The Interior Department said the project was put on hold as a result of an agencywide budgetary review of grants and projects costing more than $100,000.

“This was not persuasive to anyone who had been paying attention. From Day 1, the White House and its lackeys in certain federal agencies have been waging what amounts to a war on science, appointing people with few scientific credentials to key positions, defunding programs that could lead to a cleaner and safer environment and a healthier population, and, most ominously, censoring scientific inquiry that could inform the public and government policy.

“Even allowing for justifiable budgetary reasons, in nearly every case the principal motive seemed the same: to serve commercial interests whose profitability could be affected by health and safety rules.

“The coal mining industry is a conspicuous example. The practice of blowing the tops off mountains to get at underlying coal seams has been attacked for years by public health and environmental interests and by many of the families whose livelihoods depend on coal. But Mr. Trump and his department heads have made a very big deal of saving jobs in a declining industry that is already under severe pressure from market forces, including competition from cheaper natural gas. An unfavorable health study would inject unwelcome reality into Mr. Trump’s rosy promises of a job boom fueled by “clean, beautiful coal.”

“This is a president who has never shown much fidelity to facts, unless they are his own alternative ones. Yet if there is any unifying theme beyond that to the administration’s war on science, apart from its devotion to big industry and its reflexively antiregulatory mind-set, it is horror of the words “climate change.”

“This starts with Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax and pulled the United States from the Paris agreement on climate change. Among his first presidential acts, he instructed Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, to deep-six President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, and ordered Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to roll back Obama-era rules reducing the venting from natural gas wells of methane, another powerful greenhouse gas.

“Mr. Trump has been properly sympathetic to the victims of hurricanes Harvey and Irma, but the fact that there is almost certainly a connection between a warming earth and increasingly destructive natural events seems not to have occurred to him or his fellow deniers. Mr. Pruitt and his colleagues have enthusiastically jumped to the task of rescinding regulations that might address the problem, meanwhile presiding over a no less ominous development: a governmentwide purge of people, particularly scientists, whose research and conclusions about the human contribution to climate change do not support the administration’s agenda.

“Mr. Pruitt, for instance, is replacing dozens of members on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory boards; in March, he dismissed at least five scientists from the agency’s 18-member Board of Scientific Counselors, to be replaced, according to a spokesman, with advisers “who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community.” Last month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissolved its 15-member climate science advisory committee, a panel set up to help translate the findings of the National Climate Assessment into concrete guidance for businesses, governments and the public.

“In June, Mr. Pruitt told a coal industry lobbying group that he was preparing to convene a “red team” of researchers to challenge the notion, broadly accepted among climate scientists, that carbon dioxide and other emissions from fossil fuels are the primary drivers of climate change.

“Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric science at Texas A&M University, called the red team plan a “dumb idea” that’s like “a red team-blue team exercise about whether gravity exists.” Rick Perry, the energy secretary, former Texas governor and climate skeptic, endorsed the idea as — get this — a way to “get the politicians out of the room.” Given his and Mr. Pruitt’s ideological and historical financial ties to the fossil fuel industry, it is hard to think of a more cynical use of public money.

“Even the official vocabulary of global warming has changed, as if the problem can be made to evaporate by describing it in more benign terms. At the Department of Agriculture, staff members are encouraged to use words like “weather extremes” in lieu of “climate change,” and “build soil organic matter, increase nutrient use efficiency” instead of “reduce greenhouse gases.” The Department of Energy has scrubbed the words “clean energy” and “new energy” from its websites, and has cut links to clean or renewable energy initiatives and programs, according to the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, which monitors federal websites.

“At the E.P.A., a former Trump campaign assistant named John Konkus aims to eliminate the “double C-word,” meaning “climate change,” from the agency’s research grant solicitations, and he views every application for research money through a similar lens. The E.P.A. is even considering editing out climate change-related exhibits in a museum depicting the agency’s history.

“The bias against science finds reinforcement in Mr. Trump’s budget and the people he has chosen for important scientific jobs. Mr. Trump’s 2018 federal budget proposal would cut nondefense research and development money across the government.

“The president has proposed cutting nearly $6 billion from the National Institutes of Health, the nation’s single largest funder of biomedical research. The National Science Foundation, a government agency that funds a variety of scientific and engineering research projects, would be trimmed by about 11 percent. Plant and animal-related science at the Agriculture Department, data analysis at the Census Bureau and earth science at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would all suffer.

“It is amazing but true, given the present circumstances, that the Trump budget would eliminate $250 million for NOAA’s coastal research programs that prepare communities for rising seas and worsening storms. The E.P.A.’s Global Change program would be likewise eliminated. This makes the budget director, Mick Mulvaney, delirious with joy. He complains of “crazy things” the Obama administration did to study climate, and boasts: “Do a lot of the E.P.A. reductions aim at reducing the focus on climate science? Yes.”

“As to key appointments, denial and mediocrity abound. Last week, Mr. Trump nominated David Zatezalo, a former coal company chief executive who has repeatedly clashed with federal mine safety regulators, as assistant secretary of labor for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. He nominated Jim Bridenstine, a Republican congressman from Oklahoma with no science or space background, as NASA administrator. Sam Clovis, Mr. Trump’s nomination to be the Agriculture Department’s chief scientist, is not a scientist: He’s a former talk-radio host and incendiary blogger who has labeled climate research “junk science.”

“From the beginning, Mr. Trump, Mr. Pruitt, Mr. Zinke and Mr. Perry — to name the Big Four on environmental and energy issues — have been promising a new day to just about anyone discomfited by a half-century of bipartisan environmental law, whether it be the developers and farmers who feel threatened by efforts to enforce the Clean Water Act, oil and gas drillers seeking leases they do not need on federal land, chemical companies seeking relaxation from rules governing dangerous pesticides, automakers asked to improve fuel efficiency or utilities required to make further investments in technology to reduce ground-level pollutants.

“The future ain’t what it used to be at the E.P.A.,” Mr. Pruitt is fond of saying of his agency. These words could also apply to just about every other cabinet department and regulatory body in this administration. What his words really mean is that the future isn’t going to be nearly as promising for ordinary Americans as it should be.”

Categories Ignorance, Science, Trump

Los Angeles: Nick Melvoin Has Lots of Big Ideas, Now That the Billionaires Put Him on the zschool Board

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2017 //
18

Nick Melvoin beat Steve Zimmer for the LAUSD school board in the most expensive school board race in history.

The LA Times says he has fresh ideas.

Here they are.

Most of what he says is intended to enable the normalization of charter schools. Or is trite.

But get this:

“About 40% of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on measurable academic growth, such as standardized test scores, Melvoin said.”

Melvoin obviously is in the dark about the total failure of VAM.

But what would you expect from a puppet of Eli Broad?

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reform, Ignorance, Los Angeles, VAM (value-added modeling)

Los Angeles Editorial: “Our Dishonest President,” Part 1

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2017 //
29

The Los Angeles Times is publishing a series of editorials about Donald Trump. This is the first. It was published yesterday.


It was no secret during the campaign that Donald Trump was a narcissist and a demagogue who used fear and dishonesty to appeal to the worst in American voters. The Times called him unprepared and unsuited for the job he was seeking, and said his election would be a “catastrophe.”

Still, nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.

In a matter of weeks, President Trump has taken dozens of real-life steps that, if they are not reversed, will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.

His attempt to de-insure millions of people who had finally received healthcare coverage and, along the way, enact a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich has been put on hold for the moment. But he is proceeding with his efforts to defang the government’s regulatory agencies and bloat the Pentagon’s budget even as he supposedly retreats from the global stage.

It is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation.

These are immensely dangerous developments which threaten to weaken this country’s moral standing in the world, imperil the planet and reverse years of slow but steady gains by marginalized or impoverished Americans. But, chilling as they are, these radically wrongheaded policy choices are not, in fact, the most frightening aspect of the Trump presidency.

What is most worrisome about Trump is Trump himself. He is a man so unpredictable, so reckless, so petulant, so full of blind self-regard, so untethered to reality that it is impossible to know where his presidency will lead or how much damage he will do to our nation. His obsession with his own fame, wealth and success, his determination to vanquish enemies real and imagined, his craving for adulation — these traits were, of course, at the very heart of his scorched-earth outsider campaign; indeed, some of them helped get him elected. But in a real presidency in which he wields unimaginable power, they are nothing short of disastrous.

Although his policies are, for the most part, variations on classic Republican positions (many of which would have been undertaken by a President Ted Cruz or a President Marco Rubio), they become far more dangerous in the hands of this imprudent and erratic man. Many Republicans, for instance, support tighter border security and a tougher response to illegal immigration, but Trump’s cockamamie border wall, his impracticable campaign promise to deport all 11 million people living in the country illegally and his blithe disregard for the effect of such proposals on the U.S. relationship with Mexico turn a very bad policy into an appalling one.

In the days ahead, The Times editorial board will look more closely at the new president, with a special attention to three troubling traits:

1. Trump’s shocking lack of respect for those fundamental rules and institutions on which our government is based. Since Jan. 20, he has repeatedly disparaged and challenged those entities that have threatened his agenda, stoking public distrust of essential institutions in a way that undermines faith in American democracy. He has questioned the qualifications of judges and the integrity of their decisions, rather than acknowledging that even the president must submit to the rule of law. He has clashed with his own intelligence agencies, demeaned government workers and questioned the credibility of the electoral system and the Federal Reserve. He has lashed out at journalists, declaring them “enemies of the people,” rather than defending the importance of a critical, independent free press. His contempt for the rule of law and the norms of government are palpable.

2. His utter lack of regard for truth. Whether it is the easily disprovable boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd or his unsubstantiated assertion that Barack Obama bugged Trump Tower, the new president regularly muddies the waters of fact and fiction. It’s difficult to know whether he actually can’t distinguish the real from the unreal — or whether he intentionally conflates the two to befuddle voters, deflect criticism and undermine the very idea of objective truth. Whatever the explanation, he is encouraging Americans to reject facts, to disrespect science, documents, nonpartisanship and the mainstream media — and instead to simply take positions on the basis of ideology and preconceived notions. This is a recipe for a divided country in which differences grow deeper and rational compromise becomes impossible.

3. His scary willingness to repeat alt-right conspiracy theories, racist memes and crackpot, out-of-the-mainstream ideas. Again, it is not clear whether he believes them or merely uses them. But to cling to disproven “alternative” facts; to retweet racists; to make unverifiable or false statements about rigged elections and fraudulent voters; to buy into discredited conspiracy theories first floated on fringe websites and in supermarket tabloids — these are all of a piece with the Barack Obama birther claptrap that Trump was peddling years ago and which brought him to political prominence. It is deeply alarming that a president would lend the credibility of his office to ideas that have been rightly rejected by politicians from both major political parties.

Where will this end? Will Trump moderate his crazier campaign positions as time passes? Or will he provoke confrontation with Iran, North Korea or China, or disobey a judge’s order or order a soldier to violate the Constitution? Or, alternately, will the system itself — the Constitution, the courts, the permanent bureaucracy, the Congress, the Democrats, the marchers in the streets — protect us from him as he alienates more and more allies at home and abroad, steps on his own message and creates chaos at the expense of his ability to accomplish his goals? Already, Trump’s job approval rating has been hovering in the mid-30s, according to Gallup, a shockingly low level of support for a new president. And that was before his former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, offered to cooperate last week with congressional investigators looking into the connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.

Those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard.

On Inauguration Day, we wrote on this page that it was not yet time to declare a state of “wholesale panic” or to call for blanket “non-cooperation” with the Trump administration. Despite plenty of dispiriting signals, that is still our view. The role of the rational opposition is to stand up for the rule of law, the electoral process, the peaceful transfer of power and the role of institutions; we should not underestimate the resiliency of a system in which laws are greater than individuals and voters are as powerful as presidents. This nation survived Andrew Jackson and Richard Nixon. It survived slavery. It survived devastating wars. Most likely, it will survive again.

But if it is to do so, those who oppose the new president’s reckless and heartless agenda must make their voices heard. Protesters must raise their banners. Voters must turn out for elections. Members of Congress — including and especially Republicans — must find the political courage to stand up to Trump. Courts must safeguard the Constitution. State legislators must pass laws to protect their citizens and their policies from federal meddling. All of us who are in the business of holding leaders accountable must redouble our efforts to defend the truth from his cynical assaults.

The United States is not a perfect country, and it has a great distance to go before it fully achieves its goals of liberty and equality. But preserving what works and defending the rules and values on which democracy depends are a shared responsibility. Everybody has a role to play in this drama.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Equity, Freedom, Freedom of the Press, Ignorance, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Arthur Camins: Isolation and Segregation Make Us Stupid

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2017 //
5

Arthur Camins, scientist and educator, describes how his schooling shaped his understanding of Justice and social responsibility. His article was originally published at the Huffington Post, but he also placed it in the Louisville Courier-Journal because of his professional experience in Louisville and the fact that the legislature is about to roll back Louisville’s successful desegregation program.

Camins writes:


Mr. Casey, my high school English teacher, was fond of proclaiming, “From suffering alone comes wisdom.” There seems to be plenty of suffering around, but wisdom seems insufficiently distributed to protect our nation from the alarming triple threats to our democracy from escalating authoritarianism, inequality and divisiveness. I wonder: What is it that turns the banality of suffering, into wisdom?

Why do some people turn against one another in tough times, while others toward one another? Moreover, what can be done to transform the wisdom of observers into mass engaged action?

As a teenager with a typical level of angst, I thought Mr. Casey was especially insightful. After all, maybe I too could be wise. He was one of my favorite teachers. His gift was to help to nudge natural self-centeredness toward empathy. With a little research, I discovered that his suffering quote was hardly original, but rather a tweak on a line from the writings of the ancient Greek playwright, Aeschylus. Mr. Casey helped me identify with novel’s characters and see myself their struggles. That helped me understand that I was not alone. But it was the movements of the 1960s that connected my self-absorbed worries with deeper struggles in the world around me and gave me a lifelong sense of belonging and purpose. I thought about him and the movements today as I wrestled with conflicting emotions of despair and commitment to act.

Personal suffering may sensitize people to the plight of others, but that is insufficient to move them to action. That requires empathy and a sense of belonging, shared experiences with common goals across typical divisions, and development of agency. These frame the requirements for a successful organized resistance.
I have little hope that elected officials will substantively address current threats to democracy and equity on their own. They never have. In the short-term, that responsibility rests on the shoulders of community activists. It always has. For the future, that obligation falls to educators. They have always been the hope.

Globalization, pervasive information technology, and escalating automation provide new contexts, but today’s threats are not unique. U.S. History is replete with examples of how the empowered have fostered divisiveness to protect their privileges: Poor whites against freed slaves and their descendants; Men against women; Old immigrants against recent arrivals; Previously persecuted religious sects against new religious minorities; Just-getting-by employed workers against the unemployed and underemployed; underpaid American workers against more exploited foreign workers in developing countries. The list is endless, as is its diversionary potential to protect the wealthy. Alternatively, the potential for unity across these groups to challenge power and insist on a more equitable future is monumental.

Historically, authoritarianism, lies, and repression have been the turn-to solutions when elites perceived a challenge. Today, empowerment of women, voter participation of non-whites and newer immigrants, and organized workers pose such threats. Even the potential for a widespread, unifying shift toward identification with the brighter values of collaboration, equity, and social responsibility challenge those who rely on traditional dark American myths of a dog-eat-dog competitive meritocracy and self-reliance to justify their position.

Trump and his Republican enablers depend on cynicism about the power of collective action, racial and socio-economic isolation, and a lack of empathy for others’ suffering.

Isolation breeds ignorance of the unknown other. Isolation makes us stupid. I use the term stupid purposefully. I do not mean intellectually limited. Rather, I mean committedly ignorant about matters of personal and social consequence. Such ignorance and stupidity are enabled when selfishness is exalted over empathy in the context of competition for structurally limited resources. Such ignorance and stupidity are promoted when the empowered encourage the disempowered to distrust each other and reject reason and evidence….

Shared experience across perceived differences combats the stupidity that isolation fosters. Community activists and educators can lead front-line push back, engaging citizens and students across traditionally divisive lines in explicitly designed shared experiences.

A disciplined resistance movement can provide an alternative sense of belonging by organizing around shared unifying concerns, such as health care, fair wages, equitable local, states and federal taxes, high-quality public education, protecting and expanding Medicare, Medicare and Social Security, climate change, protecting the environment, and sustainable development. Purposefully, doing so across neighborhood boundaries and workplaces enables empathy and identification with the suffering of others and structures for action.

Similarly, integrated schools that emphasize academic, as well as social and emotional learning can build trust and a common sense of belonging. Curricula that infuse personal and social meaning into daily instruction offers the possibility for young people to see past selfish concerns.

I imbibed the lessons of Mr. Casey’s English class in 1967. It was a moment framed by the civil rights and antiwar movements. Those were times of suffering but also an era of hope. The wisdom that carries forth and provides a guide to action is that isolation and segregation make us stupid. Belonging and integration make us smart. Common struggle makes a difference.

Categories Ignorance, Resistance, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Trump

Trump Administration Plans to Eliminate Government Support for Arts, Humanities, Public Television

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2017 //
45

The Trump administration proves what some of us long feared and suspected: the crackpot fringe of the right wants to dumb down the populace by eliminating funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

These Yahoos hate education. They want the public to be raised in ignorance of science, history, and art. They want to eliminate funding for programs that educate the public. As long as you have a Bible, what more do you need?

Arts organizations across the country are rallying to save the meager amounts of federal funds that is available to supports the arts, humanities, and culture.

“As the news spread that the White House budget office had included the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities on a list of programs it was considering trying to eliminate, arts leaders at large and small organizations around the nation reacted with alarm — and began making plans to fight for their survival.

“The federal government plays a very small role in funding the arts, especially compared with other affluent countries. Together, the three programs that may be targeted account for less than one-tenth of 1 percent of annual federal spending. But even if the arts get only crumbs, administrators said, they are crumbs worth fighting for: much-needed money that supports community projects, new works and making the arts accessible to people in different parts of the country and to those who are not wealthy.

“And after years of culture-war debates in which conservatives took aim at the programs, questioning the value of some of the art that was publicly funded, arts groups are pressing the case that the federal money they receive supports organizations — and jobs — in all 50 states, both red and blue.

“The N.E.A. has a big impact in the middle of country — even more so, I suspect, than in urban areas where funding is more diversified,” said Martin Miller, the executive director of TheatreSquared, a regional theater in Fayetteville, Ark., that bills itself as the northwest part of the state’s only year-round professional theater.

“Losing the N.E.A. would mean that many smaller, mid-American arts companies couldn’t weather a recession,” he said, noting that the endowment supports both state and regional arts councils. “Losing these companies would mean fewer jobs, a lower quality of life and less local spending in the small towns that need it most.”

“Many arts officials said they were gravely concerned that the programs were back on the chopping block.
“It’s another example of our democracy being threatened,” the actor Robert Redford, the president and founder of the Sundance Institute, which helps filmmakers, said in a telephone interview. “Arts are essential. They describe and critique our society.”

“President Trump is already facing pressure from some of his allies to preserve the programs. Daryl Roth, a prominent Broadway producer (“Kinky Boots,” “Indecent”) whose husband, Steven Roth, is a Trump adviser, said that she opposed eliminating the programs and that she had expressed her view to the Trump administration and would continue to do so.
“The concept of ending federal funding to the N.E.A. and to the many nonprofit arts organizations, artists, writers, cultural institutions, museums and all recipients that would be affected is of course of grave concern to me,” Ms. Roth wrote in an email. “Arts education in the schools, theater groups, music and dance programs help revitalize local communities, both spiritually and economically, across the country.”

“The fate of the three organizations is still far from clear: An internal memo that circulated within the Office of Management and Budget last week, which was obtained by The New York Times, noted that the list of programs targeted for elimination could still change. Officials at both of the endowments said they had not received any official word from the White House. But the programs have long been in the cross-hairs of conservatives.

“Romina Boccia, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said Congress should eliminate federal arts grants altogether. “The minuscule portion of art funding that comes from the federal government does not support the arts in any meaningful way; rather, it distorts the art market toward what is politically acceptable,” she said. She also questioned the need for the federal government to support public broadcasting.

“But arts administrators around the nation said in interviews that culture had enjoyed bipartisan support in recent years, and that they were hopeful their elected officials could be persuaded to keep the programs. They began making plans last month to make the case for the arts to their audiences, their well-connected board members and Congress.”

Categories Art, Ignorance, Real Education, Resistance, Trump
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