Looking at the ashes being scattered across Wall Street, the extent to which we do not yet understand or can reasonably predict, made me think a bit about what it was like going into the public schools as a “teaching artist” during the early to late 1980’s.

Okay, I am not completely sure that the term teaching artist had quite taken hold as early as 1982. I was then a student at The Juilliard School and was recruited to be part of a program then called, if my memory serves me,  the Lincoln Center Student Program, that I believe had a connection the what was then a very young Lincoln Center Institute. I was part of a small musical ensemble that was sent into the schools to perform for auditoriums full of K-12 students. We received no training. In fact, there was practically no preparation whatsoever. Seriously. We were booked into the schools, and just went in and played for anywhere up to say 1000 kids. It was pretty freaking wild.

Jump forward a few years later, I was working with a chamber ensemble that was part of a number of organizations that also sent us into schools and in community settings, for auditorium programs (lecture-demonstrations) and residencies, including New York Young Audiences, New Jersey Young Audiences, Lincoln Center Meet The Artist, and Carnegie Hall Neighborhood Concert Program,

By the time we made it to the Young Audiences rosters, we had started to receive training from Kathleen Gaffney and Mitchell Korn. There was an extremely talented program director at New York Young Audiences, Tom Bellino, who helped us immensely.

What I remember most about these early days, was that a large number of the New York City public schools and many of the New Jersey urban schools had little to no arts education. Our 45 minute programs, which were part of a series of such offerings across different art forms that a school might purchase were just about all these kids got.

I remember just so well, kids hanging on to us after the gig, wanting to talk, to hear us play more, to ask more questions, to touch the instruments. We had to peel ourselves away. I remember too that we would get terribly depressed after the programs, knowing that these bright eyed children were being denied.

This wasn’t all that many years after the cataclysmic events of 1975-1976, where NYC almost went bankrupt and 15,000 teachers were fired. It ripped the heart out of a well-rounded education for urban school students in New York City, and we are still struggling today to make it right. By the time we had hit the schools as teaching artists, many programs had disappeared or declined. High schools that had managed to keep arts teachers saw the results of cuts to junior high schools: students unprepared for arts education at what had been the generally accepted level of high school instruction. This, of course, only led to cuts at those high schools. One big event, followed by years of continued decline, wreaked havoc on arts education in the largest school system in the United States.

Even today, there are estimated to be near 300 schools in the New York City public schools without even one arts teacher. And that’s after a school budget that increased from $12 billion to almost $20 billion.

So, it’s difficult to not to wonder about what shoes will be next to drop. What exactly will last year’s 1.7 percent cut to the school budget, combined with this year’s 2.5 percent cut, followed by next year’s 5 percent cut, and the reasonable likelihood of even deeper cuts to the school budget (and overall city spending), mean to arts in the schools (not to mention artists and arts organizations).

On one hand, while the mayor promised that no one subject would be singled out for cuts, they have also made it clear that reading and math were the real priorities. There have been promises that principals would be held accountable for providing the minimum New York State requirements, but such accountability was deferred, during much more quaint times last year when the budget was not a big issue.

So, I wonder, how will arts education fare? How far have we come, across the country, in building stronger support for the arts. Will we be seeing 1975-1976 all over again?