In education, the arts are important not just for students with artistic talent. Arts education is for all children.

Art is for everybody

The arts are more than just what children learn but also how children learn. Teachers know that knowledge sticks more easily when it is beautiful, or compelling, or funny. (Comedian Steven Wright quipped "Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song?" To an extent, the answer is yes, and the song is global.

Knowledge sticks more easily when it is beautiful, or compelling, or funny.

There is a strong relationship between arts education and the skills that students use to master core subjects like reading, writing, and mathematics. Art is inherently creative. Teachers find ways to use art as part of the learning process, integrating arts into learning lots of things, like US history, and science. The arts can help students understand math, and memorize the quadratic formula.

Arts education can improve students’ ability to communicate effectively. It can teach the importance of teamwork and develop self-confidence through experiences in music or other performance. Growing evidence suggests a connection between participation in art programs and academic results. Additional findings point to a connection between arts programs and social-emotional development.

Historically, California neglected arts education

For many years, California's commitment to arts education was among the weakest in America.

California voters demanded change in 2022

As this lesson will explain, California's voters demanded change in 2022, so the future for arts education is relatively bright. But it's important to understand the history of the issue.

California requires arts instruction in grades 1-6 and arts courses in grades 7-12. This isn't new, but for a very long time the requirements were widely ignored. Teachers are busy, the arts were widely misunderstood as a distraction, or a low-value use of academic time. What changed in 2022 is the specific commitment of funds to make it a reality.

California's main policy for how funds flow from the state to the classroom is the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF), which is explained in Ed100 Lesson 8.5. Under LCFF, school districts have a lot of power to set local priorities and make local choices about how to use funds. Until 2023, it was up to each individual school district to decide whether and how to spend funds on arts education. In practice, it was essentially optional.

Some districts chose to fund arts, music and athletics as part of their core budget. Some hired tenured teachers for these purposes. But many districts didn't. They reserved little or no core funding for the arts, instead looking to their school community to raise extra money, or simply ignoring the subject altogether. Some districts provided arts programs through third-party contracts that they could easily eliminate or downsize if funding for education decreased.

Over decades, the overall effect was easy to predice: California fell dramatically behind other states in providing arts education opportunities for students.

How do schools provide arts education?

The arts show up in classrooms in two ways: Integrated into lessons, and taught as distinct art disciplines: visual arts, music, dance, the theater arts, criticism, history, and aesthetics.

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), America's main education law, defines the arts as a part of a well-rounded education, but leaves the details to the states. In practice, test scores in reading, writing and math are generally regarded as the indispensible core evidence of success in education. Arts education is frequently an afterthought.

Students in California receive much less instruction in visual arts and music than students do in other states.

Advocates for the arts realized decades ago that it's hard to make a case for investing in the arts without data. The simplest quantifiable evidence was the declining amount of time that schools committed to arts education.

As schools focused on math and English, time spent on arts instruction measurably declined.

In California, participation in music classes dropped 46% from 1999 through 2004. During the recession that began in 2008, many schools nearly eliminated arts education from their curriculum, continuing a decades-long decline. A statewide study of arts education in California in 2007 indicated that 89% of K-12 schools did not offer even a single standards-based course of study in the visual arts, music, theater, and dance.

California could ill afford this decline. In 2007, a study of instructional hours per year for music and visual arts in elementary schools documented that California children were spending less time on the arts than children nationally back in 1999-2000.

Unfortunately, followup surveys showed little improvement, suggesting that once art programs disappear from a school they can be difficult to bring back.

Art program advocates warned that the declining emphasis on arts education was creating a generation of teachers and parents with a narrow view of the arts in education. A 2015 report, A Blueprint for Creative Schools, outlined strategies to reverse the trend, making the arts a core part of education for all students.

Educational standards for arts education

In 2017, California adopted educational standards for arts education (finalized in 2019) to clarify the kinds of instruction and experiences that should be available to students. As the standards were being developed, advocates for arts education gathered data to make the case for change. They found that only a small percentage of students were receiving any arts education at all, and that access to arts education was wildly inequitable.

Because the data system extends to the school level, it was easy to document the difference in the education experience of children: classes in the arts tended to be most available to students in more-affluent communities. The pre-pandemic 2019 study showed that over half of students in grades six and up weren't enrolled in any art study at all. Participation in arts followed a familiar pattern: schools where more families are poor were far less likely to provide students with access to education in the arts. The test patterns often called achievement gaps could be seen as art gaps, too.

The Arts Education Data Project collects data about arts in the curriculum of each school in California, and (suitably for an art-focused organization) presents its school-by-school findings visually. If you are making a case for arts education in your school or district, start by exploring the data already collected.

California voters demanded more funding for arts education

In 2022, California voters overwhelmingly passed the largest public school investment in arts education in the nation.

The measure (Proposition 28 - 2022) didn't raise taxes for arts education. Instead, it re-prioritized the funding system. Under this measure, California sets aside about $1 billion each year from the state general fund, directing it to school districts with the requirement that the money must be used for arts education. This funding supplements other money that the state is constitutionally required to provides to public schools. Most of the money is directed to pay for instructional time.

Additional funds for arts education, maybe

In the post-pandemic budget boom of 2022-23, the California legislature set aside a substantial amount of state money — $3.5 billion — in the Arts, Music, and Instructional Materials Discretionary Block Grant for use through 2025-26. The language of the grant is slippery, and permits a wide variety of uses besides the arts, such as retirement, health care costs and costs related to COVID 19.

How arts education promotes equity

Increasing arts in schools helps close achievement gaps because it tends to increase students' level of engagement in their education.

A study of graduation rates in New York City found that increasing access to arts instruction helped turn around struggling schools and keep students engaged.

A set of multi-year studies using data from the Department of Labor and the Department of Education corroborate the connection between arts education and academic achievement, showing a "relationship between arts engagement and positive academic and social outcomes in children and young adults of low socioeconomic status (SES)."

As with all education, arts education tends to work better in person. During the pandemic, teachers and parents scrambled for ways to sustain arts education at a distance, somehow. The internet exploded with ideas, partly to help cooped-up parents from detonating out of frustration. Some standout sites are here and here.

The science and pseudo-science of arts education

Creativity is sometimes misrepresented as right brain thinking. As science, this is junk, but for many years it was taught in education schools. The idea that it's a good idea to incorporate creativity into learning is sound.

The next lesson examines another part of the school experience that many students find enjoyable: physical education.

Updated July 2017
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