Politics & Power Quote by Thad Cochran

In a single breath, Cochran turns arts education into a jobs program with a scantron score. The intent is persuasive and legislative: justify funding for the arts by translating it into the currency that budget writers and skeptical voters recognize - measurable gains, higher education, employability. It is a survival strategy for the arts inside a political system that treats anything not immediately "useful" as indulgence.

The subtext is more telling. Cochran doesn’t defend arts education as a public good that deepens civic life or expands imagination; he defends it as an instrument for improving math and language. The arts become a delivery mechanism for STEM and standardized outcomes. That framing flatters an accountability culture built on metrics, while also conceding its terms: art is legitimate if it boosts test scores. It’s a clever pivot, but it quietly narrows what the arts are allowed to be.

Context matters. Cochran, a long-serving Republican senator from Mississippi, operated in an era when federal arts funding and school arts programs were routinely targeted as elitist or nonessential, especially under test-driven reforms like No Child Left Behind. By citing "scientific research", he borrows authority from empiricism to shield a historically vulnerable budget line. The sentence’s chain of cause and effect - arts to scores to college to jobs - mirrors the way politicians often have to sell education itself: not as enlightenment, but as workforce pipeline.

What works rhetorically is its pragmatism; what it reveals culturally is our discomfort with valuing art on its own terms.