Arts Education is Not an “Extra” — It is Necessary to Great Schooling

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of watching students from SA’s High School of the Liberal Arts perform In the Heights, a musical by the legendary writer, composer, and actor Lin Manuel Miranda. Seeing the artistry and confidence in their performances, not to mention in the sets, costumes, and sound and lighting design they had created, was deeply moving. These scholars have attended SA for at least ten years, and the commitment we have made to educating “the whole child” — to ensuring our scholars have the opportunity to study and engage in the arts at a high level — was on full display.

At SA, we have always believed that arts education is core to schooling: It provides a vital outlet for creativity and self-expression, inspires engagement and a love of learning, and broadens children’s understanding of and interest in the world around them. It also provides kids with opportunities to collaborate and develop as leaders. Back in 2006, when I was planning the opening of our school, the fervor of this belief was such that I dreamed of having a double period of art twice a week, so our kids would have extended time to truly dig into projects.

Ultimately, our schedule didn’t allow for the double period — after all, we also had to fit in science every day, field trips, sports, chess, and blocks! — but to this day, all our elementary school students do have at least two periods of art each week (visual and/or performing) with extremely talented teachers. Starting in third grade, scholars are able to choose art as an elective which meets every day, and they receive additional exposure to the arts through project-based learning and twice-monthly field trips, which include visits to museums, galleries, and theaters, as well as in-school performances by visiting theatrical groups and musicians.

Our commitment to arts education has always been based on personal conviction, but a recent study provides hard data supporting its critical importance The study took place in Houston, where elementary and middle schools were offered the chance to participate in a selection of school-community arts partnerships, which took the form of on-campus performances, field trips, artists-in-residence, and other opportunities.

The partnerships didn’t have the capacity to serve all the schools that wanted to participate and thus schools were randomly assigned to the program. Researchers used this natural experiment to compare the outcomes of students in participating and non-participating schools. At the end of the year, they found that students in the arts-rich schools experienced significant benefits: they had higher achievement in writing, lower incidents of misbehavior, and a boost in compassion toward classmates.

Some may feel a study of this sort is redundant: of course arts education benefits kids. For students who attended well-funded private or public schools, their educational experience will have reflected this seemingly self-evident truth. Sadly however, this is not the case at many schools serving less affluent communities. Since the 1980s, arts education has declined disproportionately for certain groups. Black students, and students whose parents have less than a high school diploma, have experienced a 50% and 77% decline in school-based exposure to the arts, while white students and those with college-educated parents have experienced virtually no decrease.

This shameful discrepancy is yet another example of the educational injustice that pervades our system. All children deserve a well-rounded education that inspires and engages them and introduces them to the delights of theater, music, and visual arts. Yet too often, poor children attend schools where their educational experience is reduced to a colorless line up of low-level math and rudimentary literacy.

One reason for this is that low-income children often enter school behind in math and literacy skills. Educators want to ensure their students can catch up, and thus dedicate more time to basic math and reading skills and less time for art and field trips. It is true that students who start school behind benefit from extended, high-quality instruction in math and literacy, but the flip side of this is also true: spending less time on other subjects can actually have a damaging effect on learning.

Too few educators understand that broad and robust background knowledge — built through a rich, comprehensive curriculum that includes study of and exposure to the arts, both in and out of school — is actually vital to helping children become great readers, writers, and thinkers. Furthermore, the engagement that stems from in-school opportunities to discover and pursue co-curricular passions and talents spills over to academic classes. The necessity of providing both — more time on math and literacy and field trips and subjects like art, theater, and dance — is one major reason why SA, like many charter schools across the country, has a longer school day and year.

The Houston study is important because it demonstrates that even without a longer school day, making room in the schedule for arts education is worth it both in terms of social emotional growth and academic outcomes. Let’s hope that this kind of rigorous research provides the incentive districts need to ensure that the arts have a protected place in the daily schedule of every public school student.