Improving Educational and Social Opportunities with School-Community Partnerships: An Experimental and Mixed-Methods Evaluation of Houston's Arts Access Initiative Grant uri icon

abstract

  • The Arts Access Initiative is a district-wide effort to improve the state of arts education for students in the Houston Independent School District. The Young Audiences of Houston is facilitating partnerships between schools and community cultural institutions and artists to provide arts-based social and educational opportunities that would not otherwise exist. In addition to closing opportunity gaps, the goal of the Arts Access Initiative is to improve students’ school engagement, consumption of the arts, social and emotional learning, and academic achievement. Dr. Bowen and his colleagues are examining the effectiveness of this Initiative through a school-level experiment partnered with qualitative investigations via techniques such as focus groups and teacher-practitioner interviews. Moreover, our access to administrative, student-level longitudinal data is enabling us to track longer-term student outcomes such as high school graduation and college enrollment. With the findings from this study we hope to inform education policymakers, arts advocates, and school administrators on how to leverage opportunities available with school-community partnerships to increase students’ exposure to the arts in addition to assessing the role that the arts serve in improving educational outcomes.,

date/time interval

  • 2016