Arts education stuck in neutral?

The U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress in Arts finds that arts and music education in the nation's schools is about where it was a decade ago. (The survey was conducted before the recent wave of recession-driven retrenchments in school budgets.)

The survey, whose results may be questionable because of the small number of students sampled, found that "in music and art, white and Asian students scored higher, on average, than African-American and Hispanic students, girls outscored boys, and private schools outperformed public ones," Sam Dillon reports in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/education/16scores.html?_r=1&ref=music