Professor Pat Thomson, CLA’s Senior Evidence Associate, examines a study from the US which uses two key measures, grade point average (GPA) and dropout rates, to determine that Arts education benefits Black and Latinx (of Latin American descent) high school students more than it benefits White students.
Isaac, V., & Britton, M. (2025). Arts Education and Black and Latinx Student Achievement and Attainment: Evidence from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. Sociological Perspectives. https://doi.org/10.1177/07311214251352550
This US study asks whether Arts education benefits Black and Latinx high school students more than it benefits White students. It uses two key measures: grade point average (GPA) and dropout rates. Good news. The researchers did find that studying Arts subjects makes a positive difference.
The study used a nationally representative US dataset which tracks students who entered high school in 2009. The researchers measured how many Arts credits (completed and passed subjects) each student had. They connected this Arts data with GPA and data that showed whether the student had dropped out by 2013. They controlled for a range of factors including socioeconomic status, highest math and science courses taken, school type and region.
The study is at scale. The researchers looked at 15,875 students. The racial breakdown was roughly: 9,000 White students, 2,400 Latinx, 1,575 Black, 1,357 Asian American/Pacific Islander, and 1,485 in the “other” category (combining Native American and multiracial students). The dataset was nationally representative by design, but the trade-off was that national representativeness meant not a lot of school-level detail, which is where more detailed explanatory information sits.
The headline findings affirm what Arts educators regularly see. More Arts coursework was associated with higher GPAs for all students. But the association was significantly stronger for Black students than for White students. And completing five Arts credits (compared to none) was linked to a statistically significant drop in the probability of leaving school early for both Black and Latinx students. That is around a 6-percentage point reduction. And the same measure was not statistically significant for White students.
On the basis of this correlation, the authors argue that the Arts education ‘effect’ may work partly through the sense of active belonging in a shared cultural life, that is, in cultural citizenship. In schools that routinely centre White, middle-class language, curriculum content and norms of academic ability, Arts coursework affirm Black and Latinx students identities and ways of knowing. In other words, because the Arts use culturally relevant pedagogies and learning environments where students’ cultural identities are assets rather than deficits, Black and Latinx students are likely to stay in school and achieve more on standardised measures.
Of course, the study has limits. It could not establish causation, nor rule out the possibility that students attending better-resourced schools take more Arts classes but achieve better outcomes for unrelated reasons. As well, the data could not account for school racial composition, or which specific courses were available at each school.
Despite these limitations, there is a significant upside to the research. The results of this study suggest that Arts subjects may be doing equity work that is often invisible in accountability frameworks that centre maths and English test scores. And as the students who arguably gain most from sustained access to Arts education are also the students most likely to lose that access when budgets are cut, typically in higher-poverty, predominantly non-White schools, the research provides useful evidence. Arts educators have more concrete, quantitative data to draw on to present to school leaders and policymakers about why Arts programmes matter for the students who need them most.
