Are field trips worth the money, effort and lost instructional hours?

These organizations have a vested interest in promoting field trips as the trips represent a source of revenue during a time of lower attendance and slashed funding.

The arts are in jeopardy in Atlanta.

Georgia Shakespeare is shutting down after 29 years. The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra is fighting for its financial life. The Theater of the Stars closed last year, and Theatre in the Square shut down in 2012.

If you research school field trips, you will read the same story in every state: Schools have either eliminated them altogether or cut back sharply. An artist friend suggested the reduction in school field trips is playing a role in the demise of long-standing cultural institutions across the country.

Rural school leaders often tell me their kids are at a disadvantage because they lack access to art and history museums and theater productions.

But having chaperoned many a field trip, I wonder about the return on investment. My most recent chaperoning stint was at an art museum where my group of 12 students had an articulate and witty docent explaining the paintings to them.

By the end of the tour, the group had dwindled to me, another chaperone, three students and two strangers who tagged along because the docent was so entertaining. The teens had drifted off in pairs or trios, looking at their iPhones or talking among themselves.

A friend recently returned from a week-long trip to Washington, D.C., with her son's private high school class. She said the 10th graders were bored with the National Gallery of Art after about five minutes and only mildly more interested in the Smithsonian Institute Museums.

What they liked best, she said, was running on the National Mall and up and down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And, of course, they loved the restaurants, shops and food trucks.

It may be that the logistics of moving as a group takes some of the pleasure out of museum visits.

Inevitably, some student wanders off, and so there's always a pause in the action while the errant teen is tracked. On the Washington trip, the mom reported at least one misplaced iPhone a day so time was wasted retracing steps to find the devices.

Teachers and parents: From your viewpoint, are field trips worth the expense and effort? Are kids getting more out of them than we realize? Are the trips worth the loss of classroom instruction time?