"An arts education helps build academic skills and increase academic performance, while also providing alternative opportunities to reward the skills of children who learn differently"
About this Quote
Newsom frames arts education as both a test-score machine and a justice project, a dual pitch tailored to a country that treats school primarily as workforce training. The first clause - “build academic skills and increase academic performance” - is strategic throat-clearing. It reassures skeptics (and budget committees) that the arts aren’t a decorative add-on. He’s borrowing the language of measurable outcomes, the only dialect many education debates allow.
Then the sentence swivels to its real target: “alternative opportunities to reward the skills of children who learn differently.” “Alternative” is doing heavy political work. It signals a critique of a school system that rewards a narrow band of competencies - speed, compliance, linguistic fluency, standardized testing stamina - while quietly punishing everyone else. Newsom avoids saying “standardized tests are failing kids,” but the implication is unmistakable: if the only rewards are tied to one kind of learning, we’re not measuring intelligence; we’re enforcing a hierarchy.
The subtext is coalition-building. Arts advocates want dignity and access; accountability hawks want proof; disability rights and neurodiversity communities want recognition; parents want their child seen as capable. Newsom offers all of them a single sentence that sounds pragmatic rather than ideological.
Context matters: a governor speaking from California’s brand of progressive managerialism. The arts become policy infrastructure - a way to talk about equity without triggering the culture-war tripwires around race, class, and special education. It’s a case for funding, but also a quiet indictment of what we currently fund and what we’re willing to call “achievement.”
Then the sentence swivels to its real target: “alternative opportunities to reward the skills of children who learn differently.” “Alternative” is doing heavy political work. It signals a critique of a school system that rewards a narrow band of competencies - speed, compliance, linguistic fluency, standardized testing stamina - while quietly punishing everyone else. Newsom avoids saying “standardized tests are failing kids,” but the implication is unmistakable: if the only rewards are tied to one kind of learning, we’re not measuring intelligence; we’re enforcing a hierarchy.
The subtext is coalition-building. Arts advocates want dignity and access; accountability hawks want proof; disability rights and neurodiversity communities want recognition; parents want their child seen as capable. Newsom offers all of them a single sentence that sounds pragmatic rather than ideological.
Context matters: a governor speaking from California’s brand of progressive managerialism. The arts become policy infrastructure - a way to talk about equity without triggering the culture-war tripwires around race, class, and special education. It’s a case for funding, but also a quiet indictment of what we currently fund and what we’re willing to call “achievement.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
|---|
More Quotes by Gavin
Add to List
