Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, examines a study from the US which investigates how school leaders’ views of Arts education changes once they actually have more of it in their school, finding that involvement in Arts interventions deepens understanding of its value.
Daniel H. Bowen & Brian Kisida (02 Mar 2026): Valuing the Arts: a randomized controlled trial with school leaders, Arts Education Policy Review, https://10.1080/10632913.2026.2633694
Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida study investigated how school principals’ views of Arts education changes once they actually get more of it. Their research is based in Houston’s Arts Access Initiative, a citywide scheme that pairs elementary and middle schools with cultural organisations for artist residencies, performances, workshops and field trips. HISD’s model gives principals discretion over how to spend Arts funding, working with a broad range of external Arts organisations rather than through a mandated curriculum.
Because 60 schools had applied for the scheme and only some places were available, the researchers had a ready-made randomised controlled trial: 21 schools were randomly assigned to receive the extra Arts provision, and 21 served as a control group with their participation in the programme deferred.
The authors first conducted a focus group and interviews with participating principals, asking open questions about why Arts education mattered to them and what they thought it was doing for their students. From these conversations they identified ten perceived benefits, including empathy, confidence, communication skills, creativity and school climate. They then built a survey around these themes and sent it to all 42 principals in the trial, asking how strongly each agreed that Arts participation affected each outcome.
Before any of the extra Arts provision, principals in the control group were already positive about the Arts, but unevenly so. Self-expression, school climate, engagement and creativity drew strong agreement from the majority. Test scores and empathy drew agreement from only half. This matches a pattern English Arts educators may recognise: leaders readily credit the Arts with shaping culture and confidence and are more cautious about claiming effects on the things that accountability systems measure.
However, the more striking result comes from the comparison between treatment and control schools after the intervention had finished. Principals whose schools had received the extra Arts resourcing were substantially more likely to agree that Arts learning has value in itself, independent of any other outcome it produces, and were more likely to credit it with improving student empathy. This result was statistically significant despite the small sample. Several other outcomes, including social-emotional learning, confidence and tolerance, showed sizeable gaps of fifteen to twenty percentage points that did not reach statistical significance, which the authors suggest may well come from the limited number of schools rather than an absence of effect.
The authors suggest that the RCT indicates that principals’ appreciation of the Arts deepens with direct experience, rather than being a fixed attitude formed in advance. A principal who has watched a shy or academically struggling student become, in the words of one respondent, “the star of a theatrical performance” comes away with a different account of what the Arts are for than one reasoning from general goodwill or policy documents.
It is important to note that Bowen and Kisida’s sample was small and self-selected: every participating principal, treatment or control, had already chosen to apply to a scheme designed to expand Arts access, so all had a baseline predisposition toward valuing the Arts. The authors are clear about this limitation but note that it is possible the study under-estimates the effect on principals who start out more sceptical. This is obviously something for further research.
The paper is not evidence that the Arts cause particular outcomes but is evidence of the impact of school leader buy-in. It suggests that once involved in an Arts intervention, predisposed principals deepen their understanding of the benefits of Arts education. The study also raises the possibility that the strongest argument for expanding Arts provision to sceptical school leaders may not be a stronger evidence base delivered in advance but may be the actual experience of having an Arts intervention programme in their school.
