Over the next several months, P.S. ARTS’ Chief Executive Officer John Lawler will share a series of long-form pieces that take stock of the current state of the field of arts education and bring attention to critical ongoing conversations. In this month’s piece, John argues that arts education is not a luxury ancillary to standardized education, but rather an essential component of educational equity that transforms learning, builds community, and belongs to every child. Follow along with us on our blog or on the P.S. ARTS LinkedIn account.
What if we stopped asking whether arts education is essential to a child’s education and started asking why so many children still don’t have access to it?
Somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted an uncomfortable truth about public education: Kids from lower-income communities often get less than their wealthier peers. Fewer resources. Fewer opportunities. Fewer choices. If we think of arts education as a nice-to-have extra, something to offer when there’s money left over in the budget, maybe that seems reasonable to us.
I don’t buy it.
In my years as a teacher and arts school principal, I saw firsthand how the arts can change a student’s relationship with learning. They build confidence, teach kids to work together and solve problems, encourage them to take risks, and give them the opportunity to find their voices. They also give young people a place to belong.
We understand that children need to be well-fed to learn. So why do we treat the arts as optional when they, too, play a vital role in how children learn, develop, and engage with the world? I saw this clearly as a founder and principal of ArTES Magnet School, an arts-focused high school serving a predominantly low-income, historically under-resourced community in Los Angeles. We put the arts at the heart of the school, not off to the side. Students studied theatre, dance, music, design, and visual arts, but they were learning much more than technique. They were learning how to express an idea, work through a challenge, trust their instincts, and contribute something of their own. The arts weren’t a break from academics. They were one of the ways we made learning matter.
When our students arrived performing poorly on standardized tests, we had additional funds to invest in math and reading interventions. Instead, we invested in arts teachers. They were the intervention.
When our daily attendance rose, so did our funding, and so we added more arts. It’s hard to imagine, but in a school of 500 students, we had five full-time arts teachers offering a four-year sequence of classes—all on a standard LA Unified budget.
Later, as principal of the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), I faced a different challenge. LACHSA offers an extraordinary arts education, but admission requires an audition, and its student population has been historically affluent—the kind of kids who have private arts lessons from their earliest years. We needed to eliminate the barriers while keeping high expectations.
Over three years, the percentage of students eligible for free lunch grew from roughly 4% to more than 30%.
Not everyone welcomed the change. Some parents worried that admitting students from less academically rigorous backgrounds would lower academic standards or change the school’s culture. I heard the concerns, but I knew from experience that when students have access to resources and rigor, they rise to the occasion.
The results spoke for themselves. College acceptances and scholarship awards increased, along with overall student outcomes. We expanded access without lowering expectations. We challenged assumptions about who belonged. And under our leadership, LACHSA became the nation’s top-ranked arts high school.
That experience reinforced something I’ve believed ever since: Equity doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means removing the barriers that keep talented students from reaching it. Unfortunately, those barriers remain deeply embedded in public education.
Across Los Angeles County, schools serving larger numbers of students of color, English learners, and children from low-income households often have fewer arts opportunities. When budgets get tight, administrators scramble to address math and reading scores. Arts programs are the first to lose funding, and the last to get it back. The students who could benefit most from opportunities to create, perform, explore, and express themselves are often the least likely to receive them.
The National Endowment for the Arts’ 2012 report, The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth, examined four longitudinal datasets and found that students from low socioeconomic backgrounds who had intensive arts experiences demonstrated stronger academic and social outcomes than their peers with less arts engagement. Among students in the lowest socioeconomic group, 71% of those with arts-rich experiences attended some form of college, compared with 48% of those with fewer arts experiences. So, what happens when we systematically deny some children the opportunities that we know help others thrive?
Los Angeles makes this question especially urgent. Nearly 9.7 million people call LA County home. Roughly 47% identify as Hispanic or Latino, 12% as Asian, and 8% as Black. This is a place shaped by extraordinary cultural diversity and creative talent. Yet too many of the children who make this region what it is have limited access to the arts that define our culture. Sometimes it feels as though we want talented, diverse people to come here, but we don’t care if they’re from here.
At P.S. ARTS, we’re working to change that. We partner with schools and communities to make arts education a meaningful, sustained part of public education. Not a privilege reserved for families who can afford private lessons. Not an elective that disappears when a school’s budget gets squeezed. But an essential opportunity for every child.
Not every student will become a professional artist. That’s not the goal, and it’s not the point. The point is that every child deserves the chance to discover what they can do. To think creatively. To communicate with confidence. To collaborate, experiment, fail, try again, and find their own way forward.
If we’re serious about educational equity, we have to invest in the whole child. That means rejecting the false choice between academic achievement and artistic development. It means funding arts programs, developing qualified teaching artists, and making sure access doesn’t depend on a family’s income or a school’s ZIP code.
Because arts education isn’t an extra. It’s an essential part of an equitable public education. And every child deserves that opportunity.
