Arts Education for Minority Children Drops

Fewer children are getting access to arts education, whether at school or elsewhere, according to a new analysis of federal data issued by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Especially alarming is that the overall decline in recent decades is coupled with a big drop for African-American and Hispanic youths.

The research, part of a broader look at arts participation by U.S. adults, finds that fewer 18-year-olds surveyed in 2008 reported having received any arts education in childhood than did those surveyed in 1982, dropping from about 65 percent to 50 percent. The report also contains survey data in 1992 and 2002, and each successive time, the...