Creative Arts in Schools Are Not Extra
*Opinions are mine, conclusions are yours. Take what resonates, leave what doesn't. Respectful disagreement always welcome unkindness never is.
Somewhere along the way, we collectively decided that art class, music, theater, and dance were the nice-to-haves…the electives. The fillers between the subjects that actually mattered. Budget season rolls around and the arts table gets quiet first because everybody already knows how that conversation ends. We have been treating creative education like dessert for so long that most people have forgotten it was always part of the meal. The data never agreed with that decision. We just stopped asking it.
What Actually Happens When Kids Make Art
When a child sits down to paint, write a scene, play an instrument, or learn choreography, something is happening in their brain and in their sense of self that a standardized test cannot measure and a reading worksheet cannot replicate. Arts integration has been shown to enhance creativity, critical thinking, and emotional engagement in ways that support academic, social, and emotional growth across the board. The first large-scale randomized controlled trial studying a city's collective effort to restore arts education found that substantially expanding arts programming produced remarkable impacts on students across all three of those areas. The city was Houston. The results were hard to argue with. Students in schools with expanded arts programming experienced fewer disciplinary infractions and were more likely to report that schoolwork was enjoyable, made them think in new ways, and that their school offered programs worth showing up for. You can read the full findings from the Brookings Institution here: New Evidence of the Benefits of Arts Education
Interest. Engagement. A reason to show up. Those things matter, and the arts were consistently delivering them.
The Skills We Keep Saying We Need
Every conversation about preparing kids for the future includes the same list. Critical thinking. Problem solving. Collaboration. Adaptability. Creativity. Employers say it. Universities say it. Policymakers say it in every strategic plan and then the same people making those lists sign off on cutting the very programs that build those skills.
Here is what that actually looks like in a real classroom. A student rehearsing for a school play is practicing:
Memorization and recall under pressure
Emotional regulation and vulnerability in front of peers
Collaboration toward a shared goal with people they did not choose
Public speaking and the kind of confidence that only comes from doing the scary thing
Receiving feedback and incorporating it without shutting down
A student in a visual arts class is practicing observation, decision-making, and revision. They are learning that something does not have to be perfect to have value, which is a lesson that transfers everywhere. A student in choir is learning to listen as much as they perform. None of that is extra, all of it transfers directly into the skills we claim to want kids to have.
Who Loses When the Arts Get Cut
This is the part that does not get said loudly enough. Arts cuts do not land equally. Schools with higher percentages of minority students and schools already flagged under federal accountability measures are consistently more likely to see reductions in arts programming. The schools with the most to gain from what the research documents are the first to lose access to it. That is not a coincidence, that is a pattern worth naming out loud. When a kid who has always struggled in a traditional classroom finally finds their thing in a drama class, and then that drama class disappears, we do not just lose a program. We lose the version of that kid who was starting to believe that school had something in it for them. That cost does not show up in a budget line, but it is real, and it accumulates.
We have spent decades measuring student success in ways that were always too narrow. Test scores tell us something, but they do not tell us everything. They do not capture the student who finally understood how to express something through color. They do not capture the band kid who showed up every single day because Tuesday was rehearsal day. They do not capture the girl who found her voice in a monologue before she found it anywhere else. The arts are not extra. They never were. They are where some kids finally discover what they are capable of, and that discovery does not always announce itself in ways we know how to grade.
What we call a frill is often someone's foundation. It is time we funded it that way.