National Endowment for the Arts

Arts education in America: 

What the declines mean for 

arts participation

Nick Rabkin and E. C. Hedberg

NORC at the University of Chicago

National Endowment for the Arts

Arts education in America: 

What the declines mean for 

arts participation

Nick Rabkin and E. C. Hedberg

NORC at the University of Chicago

Based on the 2008 Survey of 

Public Participation in the Arts
Research Report #52 

February 2011

National Endowment for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20506-0001

Telephone: 202-682-5400

Prepared for the Office of Research & Analysis by Nick Rabkin and E. C. Hedberg, NORC at the University of Chicago 

Produced by the Office of Research & Analysis

Sunil Iyengar, Director

Sarah Sullivan, Senior Program Analyst

Patricia Moore Shaffer, Program Evaluation Officer

Other staff contributors: Tom Bradshaw, Ellen Grantham, Nona Milstead, Bonnie Nichols, and Kelli Rogowski

Designed by Roman/Thayer Design Inc. 

Front Cover Photo: Blondine Jean, a student at Design and Architecture Senior High in Miami, Florida, 

working in her fashion design class

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rabkin, Nick.

 Arts education in America : what the declines mean for arts participation / by Nick Rabkin and E.C. Hedberg.

 p. cm. -- (Research report ; #52)

 Includes bibliographical references and index.

 1. Arts--Study and teaching--United States--History--20th century. 2. Arts--Study and teaching--United States--

History--21st century. 3. Arts audiences--United States--Statistics. 4. Arts surveys--United States. 5. Arts--United 

States--Citizen participation--Statistics. I. Hedberg, E.C. (Eric Christopher), 1978- II. National Endowment for the Arts. 

III. Title.

 NX304.R33 2011

 700.71’073--dc22

 2011004095

Available after February 24, 2011, in the PDF version of the report at www.arts.gov.

202-682-5496 Voice/TTY

(a device for individuals who are deaf or hearing-impaired)

Individuals who do not use conventional print materials may contact the Arts Endowment’s Office for 

AccessAbility at 202-682-5532 to obtain this publication in an alternate format.

This publication is available free of charge at www.arts.gov, the website of the National Endowment for the Arts.
CHAIRMAN’S NOTE

“Art works.” Those two words — with their three 

meanings — are perhaps the simplest and clearest 

declaration of what we are about at the National 

Endowment for the Arts. They first refer to works of 

art themselves, to the creations of artists. They also 

remind us that art works on audiences, to comfort, 

challenge, and inspire us. And finally, they are a bold 

reminder of the artists and arts workers across this 

country who earn wages, pay taxes, and contribute 

toward our country’s economy.

Our 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the 

Arts seems to report that art is working for fewer 

Americans, a finding that is deeply disturbing 

to all of us who care about the arts in our country. 

It reports a 5 percentage point decline in arts 

participation by Americans. 

But as I have been traveling across this country, those 

findings did not ring true with what I was seeing: 

young people signing on to Pandora and plugged into 

all manner of mp3 players; people of all ages watching 

Dancing with the Stars and So You Think You Can 

Dance; the prevalence of etsy.com and the quarter 

of a million military families who visited one of our 

920 Blue Star Museums over 4 months this summer; 

the Kindles and Nooks in front of every airport 

passenger; Netflix and YouTube allowing all manner 

of film and media, past and present, to be consumed 

anywhere. And how about Glee?

I am witness to a voracious American appetite 

for the arts that does not seem to track with a decline 

in arts participation. Luckily, Sunil Iyengar, our 

director of research and analysis, had the foresight to 

commission a series of deeper looks at this data, 

and asked fellow researchers to interrogate this data 

about the roles that technology, arts education, 

age, and personal arts creation play in American 

arts participation. 

Each of these reports individually expands and 

shades our understanding of the arts participation 

numbers. Collectively they report that one 

factor, above all others, is the prime indicator of 

arts participation — a factor not surprising to 

any Glee-ks:

Arts education in childhood is the most significant 

predictor of both arts attendance and personal arts 

creation throughout the rest of a person’s life. 

All of us who care about the arts in this country 

have to care about arts education, about exposing 

young people, early and often, to the arts in rich, 

rigorous, and repeated ways. That is largely why, over 

the past year, we funded arts education projects in 

every Congressional district in America.

The reports on technology and personal creation 

greatly expand our institutional understanding of 

meaningful arts participation.

And the report on age shows that it’s not the 

audiences who are graying, it’s our country: the age 

distribution of audiences generally mirrors the 

adult population of the United States. Baby Boomers 

continue to dominate audiences, just as we did 

in the 1980s, when we were among the youngest 

audience members.

Taken together, the 2008 Survey of Public 

Participation in the Arts with its follow-up reports, 

present the most nuanced understanding of arts 

participation that the NEA has yet presented. I am 

pleased to share these reports with you, and proud 

of the way we are expanding our understanding 

of how art works in America.

Rocco Landesman

Chairman

National Endowment for the Arts

Photo by 

Michael Eastman
“In America, we do not reserve arts education for 

privileged students or the elite. Children from 

disadvantaged backgrounds, students who are English 

language learners, and students with disabilities often 

do not get the enrichment experiences of affluent 

students anywhere except at school. President Obama 

recalls that when he was a child ‘you always had an art 

teacher and a music teacher. Even in the poorest school 

districts everyone had access to music and other arts.’

Today, sadly, that is no longer the case.”

– U.S. Department of Education Secretary 

Arne Duncan, April 9, 2010
TABLE OF CONTENTS

9 PREFACE

13 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

19 INTRODUCTION

25 CHAPTER 1: ARTS EDUCATION AND ARTS PARTICIPATION

25 Context

26 Analytic Approach

28 Findings

41 CHAPTER 2: TRENDS IN ARTS EDUCATION

41 Context

43 Analytic Approach

44 Findings

51 CHAPTER 3: CONCLUSION

54 APPENDIX ON METHODOLOGY

56 AUTHORS
8 National Endowment for the Arts
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 9

PREFACE

The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey 

of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) is the 

nation’s largest periodic survey of adult involvement 

in arts and cultural activities. For more than a 

quarter-century, since the survey was first 

conducted, researchers at the Arts Endowment 

have issued summary reports and key findings to 

the public. In addition to reporting the survey 

results as a whole, the NEA has made the data files 

available to other arts and cultural researchers 

for their own analyses and publications.1

The 2008 SPPA provided a fascinating glimpse into 

changing patterns of arts participation. Since the 

prior survey period of 2001–2002, rapid advances in 

technology had enabled more access to arts events 

and arts creation through portable devices and the 

Internet. Also, in 2007–2008, many representatives 

of Gen Y (or the “Millennials”) — the second largest 

generation since the Baby Boomers — became 

eligible for taking the survey.

These factors alone would have made the 2008 

SPPA data an attractive prospect for researchers. But 

in still other ways the 2007–2008 survey year 

marked an aberration. For the first time since 1982, 

attendance rates declined for virtually all art forms 

captured by the survey; also for the first time, many 

of those declines occurred for adults 45 years or 

older — an age group that historically has accounted 

for the largest share of arts audiences.

Therefore, even before the 2008 SPPA results had 

been announced, the NEA posted the survey data 

online, to allow researchers to conduct their own 

analyses. The NEA also commissioned reports on 

five cross-cutting topics: media and technology, arts 

education, arts creation, age, and race and ethnicity.2

Results from the study of media, technology, and 

arts participation appeared in June 2010.3 For the 

remaining topics, the NEA was fortunate to obtain 

the services of four researchers or research teams 

already renowned for their work in characterizing 

trends in arts participation. Those researchers 

included Mark Stern, University of Pennsylvania, 

and separate teams at WolfBrown and the National 

Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University 

of Chicago.

Each of these researchers has added a vitally new 

dimension to the NEA’s official summary of the 

2008 data, as published in 2009.4 This report, one of 

three to become available in 2011, is a direct result 

of their efforts. 

In their analysis, NORC researchers Nick Rabkin 

and Eric Hedberg test and ultimately confirm the 

validity of an assumption made with prior SPPA 

data, that participation in arts lessons and classes is 

the most significant predictor of arts participation 

later in life, even after controlling for other 

variables. They also show that long-term declines 

in Americans’ reported rates of arts learning align 

with a period in which arts education has been 

widely acknowledged as devalued in the public 

school system. Nor are the declines distributed 

equally across all racial and ethnic groups.

Working along quite different lines, Mark Stern 

similarly concludes that arts education is the 

most important known factor in influencing arts 

participation trends. But he is much more skeptical 

about the impact of other variables, especially age. 

Practically since the SPPA began, in 1982, there has 

been much talk about the “graying” of arts audiences. 

And while it is certainly true that the audiences 
10 National Endowment for the Arts

for many art forms tracked by the SPPA are aging 

more rapidly than the U.S. population, Stern brings 

out the sobering fact that age and generational 

cohort differences account for less than 1 percent of 

the variance in the total number of arts events that 

Americans attended over the period of 1982–2008. 

Observing that arts attendance may be far less 

dependent on age than usually considered, he 

gives the lie to the notion of “demographic destiny” 

when it comes to arts engagement.

Based on their own analysis of the SPPA data, 

Jennifer Novak-Leonard and Alan Brown advance a 

“multi-modal” framework for understanding arts 

participation. Novak-Leonard and Brown challenge 

the orthodoxy of representing overall participation 

rates merely as a function of visual or performing 

arts attendance. They suggest that a more expansive 

benchmarking system — one accounting for 

participation across three modes (arts creation or 

performance; arts engagement through media; and 

attendance at a broader array of activities) — would 

produce more relevant results for arts funders, 

arts managers, and the general public. 

The NEA’s Office of Research & Analysis already has 

begun to incorporate the ideas of these report-writers 

into its deliberations about the future of the SPPA. 

The authors offer three distinctive takes on a federal 

data source which, since 1982, has shaped much of 

the conversation about how arts and cultural policies 

and programming can engage audiences more 

effectively. By supporting independent research of 

this type, we hope to broaden the scope of that 

conversation.

Sunil Iyengar

Director, Research & Analysis

National Endowment for the Arts
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 11

NOTES

1 For example, see the National Endowment for the Arts website, 

Supplementary Materials Related to the NEA’s 2008 Survey of 

Public Participation in the Arts, www.nea.gov/research/SPPA/

index.html.

2 The report on race/ethnicity and arts participation is still in 

progress. Authored by Vincent Welch, et al. of the National 

Opinion Research Center (NORC), it will be made available 

via the NEA website in 2011.

3 This report was published in multi-media and PDF versions as 

Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation, 

based on research by Sameer Bawa, Kevin Williams, and 

William Dong, BBC Research & Consulting. Audience 2.0, 

Research Report #50 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for 

the Arts, 2010), available online, www.nea.gov/research/

ResearchReports_chrono.html.

4 See 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 

Research Report #49 (Washington, DC: National Endowment 

for the Arts, 2009), available online, www.nea.gov/research/

2008-SPPA.pdf. The Executive Summary of that data appeared 

as Arts Participation 2008: Highlights from a National 

Survey (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 

2009), available online, www.nea.gov/research/NEA-SPPAbrochure.pdf.
12 National Endowment for the Arts

Arts education had a strong 

relationship with adult arts 

participation across all four waves 

of the SPPA. Having had any 

childhood or adult arts education 

was significantly correlated 

with attendance at “benchmark” 

arts events.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 13

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts 

(SPPAs), conducted for the National Endowment 

for the Arts, have shown a steady decline in 

the rates of adult attendance at most “benchmark” 

arts events — specifically, classical music and jazz 

concerts, musical and non-musical plays, opera, 

and ballet performances — as well as declines in 

other forms of adult arts participation, including 

personal creation or performance of art and 

adult arts education — since 1982. The reasons for 

these declines, and potential strategies to mitigate or 

reverse them, are of vital importance to American 

artists, cultural policymakers, arts organizations, 

and other stakeholders concerned about the future 

of American culture. 

An analysis of 1992 SPPA data found that “arts 

education was the strongest predictor of almost all 

types of arts participation (arts performance being 

the exception).”5 The present study analyzes data 

from four administrations of the SPPA — 1982, 1992, 

2002, and 2008 — to address several important 

questions prompted by that finding. 

Was the strong relationship between arts 

education and arts participation found in 1992 

consistent across all four administrations of 

the SPPA? 

Arts education had a strong relationship with 

adult arts participation across all four waves of the 

SPPA. Figure 1 (see page 14) demonstrates that 

having had any childhood or adult arts education 

was significantly correlated with attendance 

at benchmark arts events. More than 50 percent 

of adults who indicated that they had had any 

childhood arts education attended a benchmark 

event in the year before each survey, while fewer 

than 30 percent of those who had no childhood 

arts education attended a benchmark event. More 

striking results are apparent in the relationship 

between arts education as an adult and arts 

participation as an adult. Nearly 70 percent of those 

who had any arts education as an adult attended a 

benchmark event in the year preceding each survey, 

while 28 percent of Americans who had no arts 

education as an adult attended a benchmark event. 

Although adult classes or lessons appear to have a 

stronger association than childhood experiences 

with benchmark arts attendance, it is important 

to note that most Americans who had arts education 

as an adult also had had arts education as a child. 

Arts education also showed strong associations 

with personal creation or performance, as well as 

consumption of the arts through media. 
14 National Endowment for the Arts

Did participation in school-based arts education 

decline from 1982 to 2008, or did it increase?

There is a dearth of credible data about the rate at 

which American children have studied the arts over 

time. Yet trend data from the SPPA do suggest a 

decline in school-based arts education offerings, 

particularly since 2001–2002. Figure 2 (see page 15) 

tracks the rate of participation in childhood arts 

education, as reported by 18-year-olds in each 

SPPA year. It shows a long-term pattern of decline 

since 1985, a decline first documented with the 

1992 SPPA. Declines were greatest in music and 

visual arts, the two arts subjects taught most in 

schools, while theater and dance actually recorded 

small increases. Given the mandatory status of 

public education, there is good reason to believe that 

the general decline in arts education participation 

in childhood was in large measure the result of 

cuts in school-based arts instruction. 

What can we learn from SPPA data about the 

rate of childhood arts education before 1982? 

The decline of childhood arts education after 

1982 followed a steady increase in childhood arts 

education throughout most of the 20th century. 

Figure 3 (see page 15) shows the proportion of people 

who reported they had taken any classes or lessons 

in music, visual art, dance, theater, or creative 

writing before age 18 (for simplicity, we refer to this 

as “any childhood arts education”) across all 

SPPAs. In 1930, slightly over 20 percent had some 

arts education. By the early 1970s, more than half 

of American children had had some arts education. 

It is likely that this increase was the consequence 

of the 20th-century trend to stay longer in school, 

where many had access to classes and lessons in 

the arts, particularly in music and visual art. But by 

FIGURE 1

Benchmark arts attendance, by childhood and adult arts 

education and SPPA year

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity in the survey year, by whether

they received any arts education in adulthood

Percent of adults who attended at least one 

benchmark arts activity in the survey year, by whether 

they received any arts education in childhood

SPPA Year SPPA Year

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activityPercent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any adult arts education

None

1982 1992 2002 2008

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any childhood arts education

None

1982 1992 2002 2008

69.5 71.6

68.7 67.2

26.7 27.5 28.2 30.7

57.3 59.8 60.3

54.4

24.1

28.5 28.0 29.6

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 15

1985 a decline began, which continued through 

the last survey year (2007–2008). This pattern is not 

typical of social change, which is generally more 

gradual. It suggests there was likely a significant 

precipitating event or events. (It is important to note 

that the data points on the graph are assigned to 

the year in which respondents became 18 years old. 

Their childhood, of course, occurred over the 

17 years before that date. So, the data point for 1930 

actually represents childhood arts education 

between 1912 and 1929, the childhood years of an 

18-year-old in 1930. The downward “turning point” 

for arts education actually occurred sometime 

during the 17 years before 1985 — not in that year 

precisely, but between 1967 and 1984. If there were 

precipitating events that prompted the decline, 

they were likely to have occurred during or shortly 

before that period.)

How have changes in arts education been 

distributed across the population?

In 2008, all 18- to 24-year-olds, no matter what 

their socioeconomic status as children, were less 

likely to have had a childhood arts education 

than the 18- to 24-year-olds of 1982. As Figure 4 

(see page 16) illustrates, the decline of childhood 

arts education among white children is relatively 

insignificant, while the declines for African 

American and Hispanic children are quite 

substantial — 49 percent for African American 

and 40 percent for Hispanic children.6

FIGURE 2

Percent of 18-year-olds who received any arts 

education in childhood, by SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18-year-olds who reported receiving any 

arts education in childhood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

1982 1992 2002 2008

49.5

57.0

63.0 64.6

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

FIGURE 3

Percent of Americans who received any arts education 

in childhood over the past 77 years

Year respondent was 18 years old

Percent of adults who reported receiving any

arts education in childhood 0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

1930 1950 1970 1990 2010

Observed yearly cohorts

SPPA survey year

Trend line

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
16 National Endowment for the Arts

Can arts education contribute to arts 

participation, mitigating or reversing the trend 

of decline? 

Adult classes or lessons have a stronger statistical 

association with benchmark attendance than 

childhood classes or lessons, but very few adults who 

took advantage of arts learning opportunities as 

adults had had no childhood arts education. This 

pattern may suggest that childhood arts education is 

ultimately more important, and that adult arts 

education and benchmark arts attendance may both 

simply be expressions of adult interest in the arts, 

with neither factor causally related to the other. A 

reasonable case can be made for the vital importance 

of childhood arts education as a gateway to lifelong 

participation in the arts. Still, we are not prepared to 

claim that all arts education will have this effect. 

More fine-grained research is needed to identify 

the kinds of arts education experiences that are 

most likely to inspire students to pursue further or 

deeper engagements with the arts into adulthood. 

For that matter, moreover, childhood arts 

education has also been declining. Reversing this 

decline will be necessary if arts education is to 

play a significant role in stemming the erosion of 

adult arts participation. 

FIGURE 4

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who received any arts 

education in childhood, by race/ethnicity and SPPA year7

SPPA Year

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported receiving 

any arts education in childhood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Hispanic

African American

White

1982 1992 2002 2008

28.1 27.4

34.8

47.2

26.2

36.0

43.5

50.9

57.9

53.4

64.8

59.2

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 17

NOTES

5 L. Bergonzi and J. Smith, The Effects of Arts Education on 

Participation in the Arts, NEA Report #36 (Santa Ana, CA: 

Seven Locks Press, 1996), 5.

6 Demographic data, including race and ethnicity data used in 

SPPA analyses, are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 

main survey (e.g., Current Population Survey) to which the SPPA 

was a supplement. While the U.S. Census Bureau has fairly 

consistently collected data on three “racial” categories — white, 

African American, and other — as well as “ethnic” data, it is 

critical to note that the Census Bureau has revised race categories 

over time. Because of these changes, the calculation of the 

“Hispanic” category for SPPA analysis has changed over time. 

For instance, the “Hispanic” category was determined differently 

in 1982 than in subsequent SPPAs because, at the time, the 

Census Bureau did not separately ask if the respondent was of 

Hispanic origin. In 1982, the Census Bureau did ask separately 

about ethnicity for the household via a checklist of ethnic 

categories. Therefore, the “Hispanic” category for 1982 was 

derived by combining categories such as Mexican, Puerto Rican, 

etc. Beginning with the 1992 SPPA, respondents were asked 

whether they were of Hispanic ethnicity. The questions on race 

were reworded to indicate that individuals could select categories 

such as Asian and American Indian. Because of these changes in 

Census race/ethnicity categories over time, data on race/ethnicity 

across the SPPAs are not always directly comparable, and 

some caution should be exercised when interpreting trend data.

7 See note 6 above.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
18 National Endowment for the Arts

Arts participation requires 

capacities for understanding and 

appreciating the modes of 

expression, symbol systems, 

aesthetics, and the cultural context 

in which the arts are embedded. 

People who have not cultivated and 

developed these capacities are less 

likely to find arts experiences 

rewarding, and they are less likely 

to invest time and resources in the 

arts, according to a 2008 study.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 19

INTRODUCTION

Arts participation takes many forms. Americans 

attend performances and exhibitions of art in 

theaters, concert halls, festivals, and museums. 

Many engage with the arts through electronic media, 

which is rapidly changing in terms of technology, 

content, and affordability. Large numbers of 

Americans make art themselves, performing or 

creating work professionally or informally, alone or 

in groups, for their personal pleasure or for their 

friends or community. Pathways for arts education 

are also diverse: Americans participate through 

classes and lessons in schools, colleges, and 

conservatories, in a wide range of other community 

venues, and in private lessons throughout their lives. 

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has 

tracked adult arts participation through a series 

of Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPAs) 

since 1982.8

 The surveys have focused principally 

on adult attendance at jazz, classical music, opera, 

musical theater, non-musical theater, ballet and other 

dance performances, and visits to art museums 

and galleries. Collectively, these arts experiences 

are referred to as “benchmark” activities or events. 

But the SPPAs also have collected data about 

personally creating and performing art, consuming 

the arts through media, owning art, taking classes or 

lessons in the arts, reading literature, and visiting 

historical sites. 

The most recent SPPA (2008) found that a smaller 

proportion of Americans participated in benchmark 

activities in the year before they were questioned 

than in any prior survey. All but one benchmark 

activity showed substantial, double-digit declines 

in the proportion of Americans who attended 

between 1982 and 2008.9

 Only museum and gallery 

attendance increased between 1982 and 2008 — a 

modest three percent rise — but not at a statistically 

significant rate. Overall, the proportion of adult 

Americans who attended any benchmark arts event 

in 1982 was 39 percent. By 2008 it was 34.6 percent, 

a decline of 15 percent from the 1992 peak rate.10

Surely the economic recession that began in late 

2007 contributed to the decline, but the NEA’s 

report on 2008 SPPA data stressed that the trend 

was well underway by the time of the 2002 SPPA, 

when the economy was relatively stronger. It also 

reported that audiences for the performing arts 

were aging more quickly than the general population 

and that participation was declining even among 

the most educated adults — historically the most 

reliable segment of the arts audience.11

There are, no doubt, multiple reasons for the 

declines in adult benchmark arts participation. 

Arts education appears to be one of these reasons. 

A study of the 1992 SPPA explored the relationships 

between arts education and adult arts participation. 

It found that “arts education was the strongest 

predictor of almost all types of arts participation 

(arts performance being the exception). Those 

with the most arts education were also the highest 

consumers and creators of various forms of 

visual arts, music, drama, dance, or literature.” 

While socioeconomic status (SES) also had a strong 

relationship to adult arts participation, the study 

found “at least half of the effect of SES on all types 

of arts participation was attributable to differences 

in arts education.”12

By 2008, a report by the RAND Corporation, 

commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, 

advanced a theory of arts participation grounded 

in a fundamental understanding of the importance 

of arts education to arts participation: adults 

participate in the arts when they find personal 
20 National Endowment for the Arts

value in the experience. Arts participation requires 

capacities for understanding and appreciating 

the modes of expression, symbol systems, aesthetics, 

and the cultural context in which the arts are 

embedded. People who have not cultivated and 

developed these capacities are less likely to find 

arts experiences rewarding, and they are less 

likely to invest time and resources in the arts, 

according to the 2008 report. RAND proposed that 

arts education is the most promising pathway to the 

development of these capacities for many people, 

suggesting that arts education should be the 

cornerstone of a strategy to reverse the long-term 

decline in arts participation.13

The present report goes beyond the study of SPPA 

data from 1992. It examines data from four SPPAs 

(1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008) to determine if arts 

education is consistently associated with higher 

levels of arts participation. It adds to the depth of our 

understanding of the relationship between arts 

education and adult arts participation, and confirms 

the validity of the 1992 findings over time. 

Although our research did find a very strong 

correlation, it is premature to conclude that arts 

education of merely any kind or in any dose 

will precipitate higher levels of arts participation. 

The effects of arts education may depend on the 

kind, the quality, the intensity, and the longevity

of arts education experiences. For example, 

all American children are required to study 

mathematics in school, and most study the subject 

throughout their elementary and high school 

years. The time and attention devoted to math in 

American schools dwarfs the time and attention 

devoted to the arts in schools. We can say with 

some confidence that math study inspires some 

students to pursue further learning in math, and that 

some of those students go on to take a life-long or 

professional interest in math or related subjects. But 

studying math in childhood certainly does not have 

that effect on all children. Some math education 

experiences surely drive some students away from 

mathematical thinking and learning. 

The same is likely to be the case with arts education. 

There are different approaches to arts education, 

characterized by different pedagogical strategies, 

and with many distinct purposes and objectives, 

both in and out of schools. More fine-grained 

research than is possible with the SPPA data is 

required to determine what kinds of arts education 

experiences have the effect of inspiring students 

to pursue further or deeper engagements with 

the arts — engagements that are sustained into 

adulthood. 

Moreover, much has changed in American 

popular culture since 1982. New technologies, new 

media, and the Internet compete for scarcer leisure 

time. The arts themselves have changed, and the 

historical distinctions between art forms and the 

traditions of cultural hierarchy have eroded, partly 

as a result of the efforts of contemporary artists. 

Consequently, the SPPA’s concentration on 

attendance at benchmark events may be becoming 

too narrow to capture the range and complexity 

of adult arts participation. 

Nonetheless, SPPA data certainly shows that 

some arts education experiences have a relationship 

to adult benchmark attendance, and they also 

have strong relationships with other forms of arts 

participation. If those experiences can be identified 

and made widely available, then arts education has 

the potential to play a vital role in changing patterns 

of arts participation and in improving the prospects 

of the hundred-thousand-or-more not-for-profit 

and for-profit organizations offering benchmark 

arts events to the public. 

Making arts education experiences widely available 

represents an enormous challenge. As we will see 

when we examine the data itself, a childhood 

arts education is crucial. Although adult experiences 

have an even stronger association with benchmark 

activities, relatively few adults take arts classes 

or lessons unless they have had some childhood arts 

education. Private classes or lessons outside 

school are voluntary. Although there are some free 

programs and some scholarship programs for needy 

students, children generally require both a financial 

commitment from their parents and additional 

parental support to attend non-school programs. 

While non-school arts education programs are vital 

resources in communities all across the country, 

schools are the only institutions that have the 

potential to deliver arts education experiences to 

virtually all children. 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 21

Broadly scaling up arts education in schools would 

require substantial support from school leaders who 

have been, in recent decades, focused increasingly 

on improving student performance in reading 

and math as measured by state standardized tests. 

Despite formal designation as one of 10 “core 

subjects” by federal education legislation, there are 

some indications that the arts have been cut back in 

schools since the passing of the No Child Left 

Behind Act. A 2008 survey of school district officials 

found that, since 2002, 16 percent of the nation’s 

school districts that had decreased instructional 

time in subjects other than English-language arts 

and mathematics had reduced instructional time in 

art and music by an average of nearly an hour a 

week.14 Yet caution must be applied in interpreting 

these findings; a recent report by the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO) presented evidence 

from a U.S. Department of Education survey 

that 90 percent of elementary teachers reported 

that instruction time for arts education stayed 

the same between the 2004–2005 and 2006–2007 

school years.15

A small but growing body of research has shown 

that arts education is associated with the 

development of dispositions and inclinations that 

scaffold learning in general, reaching well beyond 

the arts to a broad range of positive cognitive, 

social, and emotional outcomes. Some studies have 

found that arts learning has a more significant effect 

on low-income student achievement than it does 

on the academic performance of more privileged 

students, and that arts education is an effective 

pathway to deeper engagement and success in school 

for students who are at the greatest risk of academic 

failure. Some research has shown that arts 

education can have significant influence on student 

achievement, even when measured by the narrow 

standard of improving test scores.16 For example, one 

study found that the effects of arts involvement on 

low-income youth, like the effects of early childhood 

education, are sustained well into young adulthood. 

Youth who have substantial engagements with the 

arts are more likely to go to college, get good grades 

in college, and get a degree. They are more likely to 

do volunteer work, register to vote, and hold a 

full-time job, and they are less likely to require public 

assistance or food stamps, according to the study.17

Research linking the arts to academic achievement 

is not without its skeptics, including some who are 

strong supporters of arts education. They assert that 

the correlations between arts education and positive 

outcomes do not conclusively demonstrate that 

arts education is the cause of the outcomes. They 

are concerned as well that arts learning will become 

the “handmaiden” of other subjects, and that the 

intrinsic value of the arts themselves will not be 

recognized.18

In the view of this study’s authors, however, 

education policy is likely to favor the arts only if the 

link to general academic achievement is further 

established and if the current narrow focus on 

reading and mathematics is broadened. Recently, 

the U.S. Department of Education has called for a 

more inclusive curriculum that explicitly includes 

the arts and new assessment strategies that will 

capture “higher-order skills [and] provide more 

accurate measures of student growth” and progress 

toward college readiness and the world of work.19

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, an 

organization formed through the efforts of the 

U.S. Department of Education and leaders of some 

of the nation’s leading high-tech corporations, 

has specified that those higher-order skills 

include creativity and innovation, critical thinking 

and problem-solving, communication, and 

collaboration.20 There may be less resistance to the 

notion that arts learning can contribute a great 

deal to an education that makes creativity and 

communication core objectives. 

This report, of course, has a limited purpose. It 

probes data from SPPA surveys completed in 1982, 

1992, 2002, and 2008, about arts education and 

its relationship to adult arts participation. Have 

patterns of arts education contributed to the reported 

declines in benchmark arts activities? Or has arts 

education mitigated what otherwise may have been a 

more precipitous decline? If arts education has a role 

in arts participation generally, does a decline in 

arts education, particularly a decline for young 

people, signal a continuing cycle of decline in 

arts participation? These are not trivial questions. 

In all its forms, the arts and participation in the 

arts are vital pathways to profound pleasure for 

millions of individuals; to finding meaning in 

INTRODUCTION
22 National Endowment for the Arts

life and to understanding our place in the world; 

to exploring and developing our national character; 

and to representing ourselves to others in all our 

complexity. Arts education is a portal to all of this. 

While this report is not intended to construct a 

case for the arts’ place in American education, it is 

within our educational system that most Americans 

enter, or do not enter, that gateway. So it is necessary 

that our understanding of the data be grounded in 

an understanding of this larger context. 

Arts education is not only a pathway to further 

participation in the arts; it is by itself a vital mode of 

arts participation. And beyond its role in a strategy 

for revitalizing participation in the benchmark 

activities, arts education itself may be at risk. It has 

been little more than a marginal concern in debates 

about education and school reform over the last few 

decades, and, as stated earlier, some evidence 

suggests that its role in schools is declining. So, in 

addition to understanding the relationship between 

arts education and arts participation, this report 

explores what can be gleaned from SPPA data about 

trends in arts education itself — as a mode of arts 

participation and as a contributing factor to other 

forms of arts participation. Has it declined or 

risen among children? Among adults? Does SPPA 

data suggest reasons for observable trends? Are 

the trends affecting some sectors of the population 

more than others? 

We have tried, within the limits of a short discussion, 

to find meaning in SPPA data in two contexts: the 

challenge of sustaining arts organizations that 

depend on adult arts participation to support their 

operations, and the challenge of providing arts 

education to children, particularly in schools and 

school systems that are themselves facing profound 

challenges. Chapter 1 is a deeper exploration of the 

complex but powerful relationship between arts 

education and adult arts participation. The second 

chapter is a discussion of trends in arts education 

over the last eight decades that helps illuminate the 

challenges and opportunities presented by arts 

education as a strategy to increase arts participation. 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 23

NOTES

8 The SPPA was used to collect arts participation data from 

American adults in 1982, 1985, 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2008. Due to 

the considerable differences in survey methodologies, the 1997 

SPPA telephone survey produced results that are not comparable 

to other SPPA surveys. Data from the 1997 survey is not used in 

research that examines change over time.

9 Jazz attendance was down from 9.6 percent to 7.8 percent of 

adults, a decline of 19 percent from the 1982 rate; classical music 

attendance was down from 13.0 percent to 9.3 percent, a decline 

of 29 percent; opera attendance was down from 3.0 percent to 

2.1 percent, a decline of 30 percent; musical theater attendance 

was down from 18.6 percent to 16.7 percent, a decline of 10 

percent; non-musical theater attendance was down from 11.9 

percent to 9.4 percent, a decline of 21 percent; ballet attendance 

was down from 4.2 percent to 2.9 percent, a decline of 31 percent. 

Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, Research Report 

#49, National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, DC: National 

Endowment for the Arts, 2009).

10 Ibid., 1.

11 Ibid., iii.

12 Bergonzi and Smith, Effects of Arts Education on Participation, 

5; and R. Orend, Socialization and Participation in the Arts, 

Research Report #21 (Washington, DC: National Endowment for 

the Arts, 1989).

13 L. Zakaris and J. F. Lowell, Cultivating Demand for the Arts: 

Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy (Santa 

Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008).

14 Center on Educational Policy, Instructional Time in 

Elementary Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific 

Subjects (Washington, DC: Center on Educational Policy, 

2008), 2.

15 Government Accountability Office, Access to Arts Education: 

Inclusion of Additional Questions in Education’s Planned 

Research Would Help Explain Why Instruction Time 

Has Decreased for Some Students (Washington, DC: 

Government Accountability Office, 2009).

16 An analysis of longitudinal data on 25,000 students showed 

that those with higher levels of involvement with the arts did 

better across a wide range of outcome variables than those 

with lower arts involvement, and that low-income students 

benefited from their involvement in the arts more significantly 

than did higher-income students. “Involvement in the Arts and 

Human Development,” J. Catterall, R. Chapleau, and J. Iwanaga, 

in Champions of Change: The Impact of the Arts on Learning, 

ed. E. B. Fiske, 1–18 (Washington, D.C.: Arts Education 

Partnership, 1999).

Minneapolis’ Arts for Academic Achievement program 

apparently boosted student achievement, and had substantial 

effects on the performance of low-income students in public 

schools. “Arts for Academic Achievement: Summative 

Evaluation Report,” D. Ingram, and K. R. Seashore (unpublished 

manuscript, Center for Applied Research and Educational 

Improvement, University of Minnesota, 2003).

Schools working with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education 

raised test scores significantly faster than comparable schools 

between 1993 and 1998. “Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education: 

Summary Evaluation,” J. Catterall and L. Waldorf, in Fiske, 

Champions of Change, 47–62.

Affiliates of the A+ Schools, a network of arts-centered schools in 

North Carolina, improved student performance on standardized 

tests, and higher levels of success were associated with higher 

levels of commitment to an arts-centered school identity. Creating 

and Sustaining Arts-Based School Reform: The A+ Schools 

Program, G. Noblit, H. D. Corbett, B. Wilson, and M. McKinney 

(New York: Routledge, 2009).

17 J. Catterall, Doing Well and Doing Good by Doing Art

(Los Angeles: Imagination Group/I-Group Books, 2009).

18 E. Eisner, Does Experience in the Arts Boost Academic 

Achievement? (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University, 1997); and 

E. Winner and M. Cooper, “Mute Those Claims: No Evidence 

(Yet) for a Causal Link between Arts Study and Academic 

Achievement,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 34 (2000): 

3–4, 11–76.

19 U.S. Department of Education, “A Blueprint for Reform: 

The Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary 

Education Act,” 2010, accessed online March 14, 2010, 

www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/index.html.

20 Partnership for 21st Century Skills, “Framework for 21st 

Century Learning,” 2009, accessed online March 14, 2010, 

www.p21.org/documents/P21_Framework.pdf.

INTRODUCTION
24 National Endowment for the Arts

People who have had more general 

education have more opportunities 

to take art classes and often do. 

And socioeconomic status is strongly 

correlated to general education. 

Yet when each of these factors 

is analyzed, arts education emerges 

as the most powerful influence 

on arts participation.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 25

CHAPTER 1

ARTS EDUCATION AND ARTS PARTICIPATION

CONTEXT

The paying audience for the arts grew quickly 

after World War II and unleashed a wave of 

institutional development and growth, much of it 

in the not-for-profit sector, a pattern that continued 

for decades. This growth, in turn, made the arts 

accessible and available to Americans in many 

different places across the country, stimulating 

growth of arts audiences. 

By the 1960s, economists theorized that this 

virtuous cycle was limited because of what came to 

be called Baumol’s cost disease or the Baumol 

effect. Economist William Baumol first observed 

that labor-saving productivity gains that kept prices 

low in some economic sectors were unavailable 

in the performing arts: a Shakespeare script that 

required a dozen actors in the 16th century still 

requires a dozen actors in the 21st. Since artistic 

labor is the biggest expense in the performing arts, 

prices must rise more quickly than in sectors that 

benefit from improved labor productivity so that 

pay levels remain competitive. By this argument, 

the price of the performing arts inevitably rises 

more quickly, ultimately moving admission beyond 

the means of more and more people.21

A report released by the American Symphony 

Orchestra League (now the League of American 

Orchestras), which analyzed the finances of 

orchestras in the 1980s, found substantial 

evidence of the Baumol effect. The report authors 

predicted that classical music was likely to 

become overwhelmed by growing deficits, an aging 

audience, and increasing irrelevance as more 

Americans rejected it as an elite and prohibitive 

cultural tradition unless it underwent a “paradigm 

shift”.22 Similar trends and dark predictions were 

noted in other disciplines. A 1991 report on the 

performing arts found a high proportion of arts 

organizations operating “30 to 50 percent above the 

floor of available human and financial resources” 

and predicted that the “human and financial deficit” 

would continue to grow.23 Related concerns were 

expressed in a report of the American Association 

of Museums in the same year. It called attention 

to an expanding gap between the nation’s growing 

demographic diversity and its audiences for 

museums.24 Theaters have historically higher levels 

of earned revenue than symphonies, but the Theatre 

Communications Group’s annual survey of theaters 

reported in 2000 that for one group of theatres under 

long-term study, total expenses grew by 21.9 percent 

from 1997 to 2000, outpacing the growth in earned 

income for that period by 2.5 percent.25

Arts organizations have adapted to the Baumol 

effect by becoming more agile marketers and more 

resourceful fundraisers, so there has been no 

catastrophic collapse in our nonprofit arts system. 

But the economic logic of the Baumol effect 

is sound, and the rising cost of benchmark arts 

activities is one possible reason for the recent 

declines in arts audiences. There is evidence now 

that these declines are taking a toll. From 1998 to 

2008, one out of three nonprofit arts organizations 

failed to achieve a balanced budget, even during 

the strongest economic years of this decade.26

The 2008 SPPA documented the trends in adult 

participation that underlie these developments. 

Audiences for the arts are declining as a proportion 

of the American population. For many art forms, 

Americans are performing and creating art at lower 

rates as well.27 Those who attend arts events, 

like the population as a whole, are growing older.28
26 National Endowment for the Arts

Further, despite much effort by some arts 

organizations, there is evidence that audiences 

are not diversifying racially and ethnically 

to nearly the degree of the general population. 

The stark predictions discussed earlier about the 

future of the arts may have been exaggerated or 

premature in the 1990s, but they had some merit. 

Unless these trends are reversed, they surely 

will lead to greater financial issues in the nation’s 

arts organizations and are likely to reverse 

the growth that characterized the arts nonprofit 

sector throughout much of the 20th century. 

Based on evidence from numerous arts audience 

surveys,29 SPPA survey report-writers assumed 

a likely relationship between individuals’ 

experiences with arts education and their adult 

behavior with regard to arts participation. They 

have assumed relationships between adult arts 

participation and other variables such as general 

education, socioeconomic status, race, gender, 

family background, and geographical location. 

Their assumptions proved correct. An analysis 

of data from the 1992 SPPA showed that arts 

education had a stronger association with adult 

arts participation than any other variable.30 The 

first goal of this review, therefore, is to determine 

if that relationship was consistent across all the 

survey years. A secondary goal is to determine if it 

has intensified or become weaker over time, and 

to consider the meaning of changes in the strength 

of the relationship. 

Analysis of SPPA data does show that arts education 

— lessons or classes in school, at other community 

venues, or in the home — has more influence on arts 

participation than any other factor captured by all 

administrations of the entire survey. Arts education 

has more influence on adult arts participation than 

overall educational attainment, socioeconomic 

status, race, parent education, or gender. For 

example, childhood lessons or classes in three art 

forms had a stronger influence than a college 

education on benchmark attendance. Adult lessons 

or classes in two art forms had an even greater 

influence. 

The findings take into account that arts education 

is closely related to these other factors. Individuals 

who have had more general education have more 

opportunities to take arts classes and often do. And 

socioeconomic status is strongly correlated to 

general education. In other words, arts education is 

co-dependent with those factors. Yet when each of 

these factors is analyzed, while holding the others 

statistically constant, arts education emerges as the 

most powerful influence on arts participation. 

ANALYTIC APPROACH

The principal focus of the SPPAs has been on a set 

of core questions about attendance at benchmark 

performing arts events — jazz, classical music, opera, 

musical theater, non-musical theater, and dance 

performances — and visits to art museums and 

galleries in the last 12 months. Our first query was 

about the relationship of those benchmark activities 

to arts education. The first and simplest way to 

determine if there is a significant relationship 

between benchmark activities and arts education 

is to compare participation in benchmark arts 

activities by those who had no arts education to 

those who had some arts education. The relationship 

can also be explored by considering the differences 

in benchmark rates among those with more 

arts education and those with less, those with 

arts education in adulthood, and those with arts 

education in childhood. 

This analytic approach yielded clear and significant 

results. Still, it is important to understand limitations 

with the SPPA data. Each SPPA asked respondents to 

report on their arts education experiences. They 

were asked if they had taken lessons or classes in 

visual arts, art appreciation or history, music, music 

appreciation, theater/acting, dance, and creative 

writing while they were children (i.e., before the age 

of 18). They were also asked if they had lessons or 

classes in those art forms as adults. They were not 

asked about the depth, intensity, or longevity of their 

study in the arts, nor were they asked about their 

subjective experiences — how much they enjoyed or 

cared about learning in and about the arts. Private 

weekly piano lessons for 10 years and recorder 

lessons in a class of 30 second-graders for a few 

months are equivalent in SPPA data and recorded 

as childhood music education, provided that 

those experiences are remembered and reported. 

However, the data do indicate how many art forms a 

respondent studied. Depth of study and subjective 

experience may have more or less power than the 

number of art forms studied; but for the purpose of 

this report, we are able to determine only whether 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 27

studying more art forms has a stronger association 

with adult arts participation than studying fewer. 

Our results may be distorted by the absence of data 

about these other dimensions of arts education. 

In our analysis, for simplicity’s sake, we merged 

music and music appreciation classes into a single 

category of music. Likewise, rather than counting 

visual art, art appreciation, and art history classes as 

distinct categories, we merged them into a single 

category: visual art. 

The benchmark activities in the four SPPAs have 

varied slightly from survey to survey. In the most 

recent SPPA, for example, a new musical category —

Latin, Spanish, or salsa music — was added. Early 

SPPAs asked about just one dance form, ballet. Later 

iterations added modern dance, and the most recent 

surveys asked about ballet and “other” dance forms 

including modern, folk, tap, or Broadway style. 

To permit cross-wave comparisons of surveys with 

slightly different questions and to simplify our 

analysis, we collapsed several benchmark activities 

into just four categories that correspond broadly to 

the four arts disciplines. Classical music, opera, and 

jazz were collapsed into a single category — music. 

(Since Latin music was not included in three of four 

SPPAs, it could not be included in the collapsed 

music category or in our count of music attendance 

in the 2008 SPPA.) Musical theater and non-musical 

theater were also collapsed into a single category —

theater. And ballet and other dance were collapsed 

into one category — dance. Art museums and gallery 

visits constitute the fourth art form — visual art.

For our purposes, the most significant changes were 

in the questions about arts education. As new 

questions were added to successive surveys, some 

old ones were cut to keep the survey from becoming 

too long. Questions about arts education were among 

those changed or eliminated. In early surveys, 

respondents were asked if they had taken arts classes 

or lessons before they were 12, when they were 

between 12 and 17 years old, when they were adults, 

and in the past 12 months. Later iterations collapsed 

“under 12” and “12 to 17” into a single category: 

“under 18”. To permit comparisons across all SPPA 

administrations, we aggregated data about classes 

and lessons for children “under 12” and from 

“12 to 17” into a single variable, comparable to later 

surveys’ questions about classes and lessons taken 

by people “under 18.” 

The SPPAs in 1992 and 2002 asked if childhood 

classes or lessons were taken in school, outside 

school, or both. But in the surveys of 1982 and 2008, 

the distinction between school-based classes and 

non-school lessons was not included. Therefore, the 

data from those years does not yield a measure 

over time of school-based childhood arts education. 

Nonetheless, it does yield measures of overall 

childhood arts education (from birth to age 17), and 

we can make informed deductive judgments about 

the proportion of school-based and non-school 

arts education from the early SPPAs and from our 

understanding of the status of the different art 

forms in school curricula. 

Multi-variant logistic regression analysis was 

used to compare the influence of arts education to 

other factors that also have relationships to adult 

arts participation. This statistical methodology 

holds all factors constant while testing the 

power of the relationship of any single factor to a 

particular outcome. It is an essential method 

when, as with adult arts participation, there are 

multiple influential factors, each of which is also 

likely to have an influence on the others. In the 

case of arts education, for example, educational 

attainment is strongly correlated with arts 

education, as is socioeconomic status, gender, race, 

and age. Multi-variant analysis makes it possible 

to untangle this web of influences and measure 

and compare the effect of each individually. 

In doing so, we created a hypothetical “baseline 

person” (BP) — in this case, an 18- to 24-year-old, 

married, white male who has had no arts 

education in childhood or since, who graduated 

from high school but has not attended any college. 

His mother and father also had high school 

educations. BP worked, and was in the lowest 

quartile of socioeconomic status. He lived in a city 

under one million in population. We then examined 

the statistical effects for each covariant — arts 

education, general education, gender, race, 

socioeconomic status, age — while holding constant 

the others to test the relative power of each. A 

detailed discussion of logistic regression is presented 

in the appendix on the study’s methodology.

CHAPTER 1
28 National Endowment for the Arts

FINDINGS

1. Arts education has a powerful positive effect 

on adult benchmark arts attendance.

Arts education in childhood has a strong 

relationship to adult attendance at benchmark arts 

performances and exhibitions. Four SPPAs 

spanning 26 years all show that more than half of 

those who reported any arts education in childhood 

attended at least one benchmark event in the last 

year, far more than those who had none, as shown 

on the left side of Figure 5, below. From 1982 to 2008, 

those who had had no childhood arts classes or 

lessons were consistently and considerably less 

likely to attend a benchmark event. And the strength 

of the relationship between childhood arts education 

and benchmark attendance increased slightly 

over time. Those who had had any arts education 

as children were slightly more likely to attend a 

benchmark event in 2008 than in 1982, while those 

who had had no childhood arts education were 

slightly less likely to do so in 2008. Those who 

reported having some childhood arts education 

in 1982 were 1.8 times more likely to attend a 

benchmark event than those who had none. Those 

who reported having some childhood arts education 

in 2008 were 2.4 times more likely to attend a 

benchmark event than those who had none. This 

finding suggests that childhood arts education has 

mitigated factors that contributed to the decline in 

adult benchmark arts participation.

The right side of Figure 5 shows that people who 

have taken any adult arts classes or lessons are also 

more likely to attend a benchmark arts event than 

adults who do not take arts classes or lessons. Over 

all four SPPAs, more than two of three respondents 

who had any adult arts education attended a 

benchmark event. Like childhood arts education, 

the association between adult arts education and 

benchmark attendance has intensified. Those who 

had any adult arts education in 1982 were 2.2 times 

more likely than those who had none to attend a 

benchmark event. In 2008 they were 2.6 times more 

likely to attend. 

FIGURE 5

Benchmark arts attendance, by childhood and adult 

arts education and SPPA year

SPPA Year SPPA Year

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activityPercent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity in the survey year, by whether

they received any arts education in childhood

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity in the survey year, by whether

they received any arts education in adulthood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any adult arts education

None

1982 1992 2002 2008

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any childhood arts education

None

1982 1992 2002 2008

69.5 71.6

68.7

26.7 27.5 28.2 30.7

57.3 59.8 60.3

54.4

24.1

28.5 28.0 29.6

67.2

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 29

2. More arts education predicts more arts 

attendance.

Figure 6 (see page 30) shows that benchmark 

arts attendance is positively associated with arts 

education in a greater number of art forms in 

childhood, adulthood, and in the past year. Overall, 

those who took any lessons in a single art form 

during childhood and adulthood were twice as likely 

to attend a benchmark arts event as those who had 

no art education. Those who took any lessons in two 

art forms were almost three times as likely as those 

who had no arts education to attend a benchmark 

event. Adult lessons are associated with higher levels 

of attendance than childhood lessons, and may be a 

proximal cause of benchmark attendance. However, 

it is just as likely that people who take adult classes 

and attend benchmark arts events simply enjoy the 

arts. Taking adult classes may not be a cause of adult 

attendance, but simply another expression of interest 

in the arts. 

3. Arts education has similar effects on other 

forms of arts participation: personal art-making, 

participation in the arts through media, and 

additional arts education. 

Creation and performance

Figure 7 (see page 31) shows the number of art forms 

in which people took classes or lessons (as children, 

as adults, in the past year, and over their lifetimes) 

and the percent that performed or created art of their 

own in the last year. It confirms that arts education 

is clearly and strongly associated with higher levels 

of personal creation of visual art and performance 

of music, theater, or dance, and that lessons in 

more art forms are associated with higher levels of 

personal creation and performance. Those who had 

any childhood lessons were more than twice as 

likely as those who had none to create or perform art 

themselves; further, the likelihood of creating or 

performing art increased if they studied additional 

art forms as children. The pattern is even stronger for 

lessons or classes in the arts as adults and in the 

past year, both of which are strongly associated with 

higher levels of personal creation and performance 

by adults. 

Arts participation through media

Participation in the arts through the media, which 

includes recorded or broadcast music, dance or 

theater, as well as use of the Internet to access art 

or arts information or to post one’s own creations, 

is also positively associated with arts education. 

Figure 8 (see page 32) shows that those who had 

any lessons or classes in the arts in childhood 

or in adulthood were more likely to participate in 

the arts through media across all four SPPAs. 

(2008 SPPA data are excluded from this figure 

because substantial changes in the questions about 

media participation make the comparison to other 

years unreliable. However, the strong association of 

arts education and media-based arts participation 

was consistent in the 2008 data as well.) 

Figure 9 (see page 33) shows that those who had 

childhood or adult lessons or classes in one art form 

are roughly twice as likely to consume art through 

the media than those who had no childhood arts 

education. Further, the greater the number of art 

forms studied by survey respondents, the more likely 

the adults were to participate in the arts through 

media. The exceptions to this pattern for adults are 

those who had lessons in all five art forms, and 

those who took lessons in more than three art forms 

in the past year. Perhaps some of those who take 

many classes or lessons feel that education is their 

preferred form of arts participation, leaving little 

time for other modes of participation.31

Adult arts education

People who had arts classes or lessons in childhood 

are far more likely to take classes or lessons as adults. 

Those who took no arts lessons or classes as children 

were highly unlikely to take lessons or classes as 

adults. Figure 10 (see page 34) shows that only about 

one of 10 who took no childhood lessons or classes 

took adult arts lessons or classes. Nearly half of those 

who took lessons or classes in one art form as 

children took lessons or classes as adults, and more 

than half who took lessons or classes in two art forms 

as children took lessons or classes as adults. 

CHAPTER 1
30 National Endowment for the Arts

FIGURE 6

Benchmark arts attendance, by number of art forms 

studied

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity, by the number of art forms

studied in childhood and adulthood

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity, by the number of art forms

studied in the past year

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity, by the number of art forms 

studied in childhood

Percent of adults who attended at least one

benchmark arts activity, by the number of art forms

studied in adulthood

Percent of adults who reported attending any benchmark arts activity 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

83.8

80.8

75.0

64.2

47.0

22.8

100.0

88.2

73.4

81.2

71.7

37.5

81.2

76.4

73.5

63.5

51.5

27.3

88.1 88.8

81.8

75.6

61.1

27.9

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 31

FIGURE 7

Percent of adults personally creating or performing, 

by number of art forms studied

Number of art forms studied Number of art forms studied

Number of art forms studied Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who personally created or

performed, by the number of art forms studied 

in childhood

Percent of adults who personally created or

performed, by the number of art forms studied 

in adulthood

Percent of adults who reported creating or performingPercent of adults who reported creating or performing

Percent of adults who reported creating or performing

Percent of adults who personally created or

performed, by the number of art forms studied 

in childhood and adulthood

Percent of adults who personally created or

performed, by the number of art forms studied 

in the past year

Percent of adults who reported creating or performing 0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

60.1

56.6

47.1

38.3

26.0

9.5

83.1

57.2 58.1

63.3

55.7

19.2

54.8 53.5

48.5

40.1

28.9

12.4

69.5

61.7

51.0

45.6

36.7

13.2

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

CHAPTER 1
32 National Endowment for the Arts

4. Arts education has a more powerful effect on 

arts attendance than any other measurable factor.

For the purpose of determining the significance 

of arts education relative to other factors that affect 

adult benchmark arts attendance, we created a 

hypothetical “baseline person”, whom we call BP. 

As discussed earlier, we deliberately assigned a set of 

characteristics to BP that made him less likely than 

the average adult to participate in the arts. BP is not 

designed to be a “typical” American but a useful 

statistical baseline. In the real world, as it turns out, 

there are very few individuals who share all of the 

characteristics we assigned to BP. BP is a white male, 

between 18 and 24 years old, who has had no arts 

education as a child or as an adult. He had a high 

school education, as did his parents. He is married 

and works, is in the lowest socioeconomic quartile, 

and lives in a city with fewer than one million 

people. As shown in Figure 11 (see page 34) , BP was 

not very likely to attend a benchmark arts event in 

the year before the 1982 survey — the chance that he 

did was 12.5 percent. By 2008, the chance that BP 

(still 18 to 24 years old, etc.) attended a benchmark 

arts event in the past year had dropped to just 8.8 

percent. That decline, 3.7 percent in absolute terms, 

represents a 30 percent decline in the likelihood 

of attendance at a benchmark event from 1982 

to 2008. BP may not be a “typical” American, but he 

clearly reflects the general decline in benchmark 

adult arts participation found in the SPPA data 

between 1982 and 2008. 

Some of the demographic factors we assigned to 

BP have a small relationship to adult “benchmark” 

arts attendance. BP would be slightly more likely to 

attend a benchmark event if he had never married. 

He would be somewhat more likely to attend a 

benchmark event if he were a woman, or lived in a 

city with over one million people, for example. 

But some demographic and social factors would 

have a significant influence on the likelihood of BP’s 

attendance at benchmark arts events. Age appears to 

have some effect on benchmark arts attendance. 

If BP were between 25 and 45 (rather than 18 to 24) in 

2008, he would be more likely to attend a benchmark 

event; if he were 45 to 54, he would be still more 

likely to attend; and he would be most likely to attend 

a benchmark event if he were 55 or older, as shown 

FIGURE 8 in Figure 12 (see page 35).

Percent of adults participating in the arts through 

media, by arts education and SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

SPPA Year

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media, 

by whether they received any arts education in childhood

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media, 

by whether they received any arts education in adulthood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any adult arts education

None

1982 1992 2002

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Any childhood arts education

None

1982 1992 2002

76.1

72.2

33.6 31.2 33.4

11.2

67.6

63.1

28.3 29.8

34.1

8.8

Source: 1982, 1992, and 2002 waves of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 33

FIGURE 9

Percent of adults participating in the arts through 

media, by number of art forms studied

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

Number of art forms studied

Percent of adults who reported participating in the arts through media

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media,

by the number of art forms studied in childhood and adulthood

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media,

by the number of art forms studied in the past year

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media,

by the number of art forms studied in childhood

Percent of adults who participated in the arts through media,

by the number of art forms studied in adulthood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

70.9 71.7

64.8

54.9

39.6

18.7

51.8

70.7

74.1

70.8

62.2

31.5

79.7

74.8 73.1

64.2

51.8

26.8

75.7

78.8

70.4

63.5

50.6

23.6

Source: 1982, 1992, and 2002 administrations of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

CHAPTER 1
34 National Endowment for the Arts

Adult arts participation is strongly influenced by 

educational attainment and somewhat influenced 

by the educational attainment of one’s parents. 

In Figure 13 (see page 35), we see that if BP had not 

graduated from high school, he would be less likely 

to attend a benchmark event. However, if he had 

more than a high school education, he would be 

more likely to attend a benchmark event. The figure 

also shows that if either parent had more than a 

high school degree, BP would be more likely to 

attend a benchmark event. 

Changes in socioeconomic status, as indicated 

by income level in the SPPA data, show very 

substantial effects on adult arts participation. 

Figure 14 (see page 35) shows that if BP moved up a 

single socioeconomic quartile in 2008, from 

the lowest to the second lowest, there would be a 

significant positive effect. It would raise the 

likelihood of benchmark arts event attendance by 

17 percent, from 8.8 to 10.3 percent. If he were 

to move from the lowest quartile to the highest, he 

would be twice as likely to attend a benchmark event. 

In Figure 12, benchmark arts attendance is positively 

associated with age. As benchmark attendance has 

declined over the years, the audience for the arts has 

also aged, and the likelihood of young people 

attending benchmark events has declined. Figure 12 

is a dramatic illustration of how these effects have 

worked. The likelihood that BP (still 18 to 24 years 

old, of course) would attend a benchmark event in 

1982 was 12.5 percent. Figure 15 (see page 35) shows 

that by 2002 only those 25 or older were likely to 

attend, and the likelihood of attendance by those 

under 25 had declined to 9.8 percent. By 2008, only 

those older than 45 were as likely to attend as BP 

was back in 1982, when he was under 25, and 

the likelihood of attendance among those under 

25 had declined to just 8.8 percent.32

FIGURE 10

Percent of adults who received arts education as an 

adult, by the number of art forms they studied as a child

Number of art forms studied as a child

Percent of adults who reported receiving arts education as an adult

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

81.0

72.0 69.4

59.4

44.3

12.2

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

FIGURE 11

Relationship between benchmark arts attendance rates 

and SPPA year for BP (a hypothetical “Baseline Person”) 

SPPA Year

Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

0%

5%

10%

15%

1982 1992 2002*** 2008***

(reference)

8.8%

9.8%

12.0%

12.5%

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts. ***p < 0.00.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 35

FIGURE 12

Relationship between age and benchmark arts 

attendance for BP (a hypothetical “Baseline Person”): 

2008

Age

Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

0%

5%

10%

15%

Ages 18-24 Ages 25-44*** Ages 45-54*** Aged 55 and over***

(reference)

13.7%

13.2%

11.2%

8.8%

Source: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Note: Predicted values 

assume the 2008 baseline chance. ***p < 0.00.

FIGURE 13

Relationship between education and benchmark 

arts attendance for BP (a hypothetical “Baseline 

Person”): 2008

Education

Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

4-year degree or more

Some college

High school (reference)

Less than high school

Respondent*** Mother*** Father**

12.2%

11.0%

18.3%

10.2%

11.0%

12.7%

8.8% 8.8% 8.6%8.8%

7.9%

6.2%

Source: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Note: Predicted values 

assume the 2008 baseline chance. ** p < 0.01, ***p < 0.00.

FIGURE 14

Relationship between socioeconomic status and 

benchmark arts attendance for BP (a hypothetical 

“Baseline Person”): 2008

Income quartile

Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

Lowest 2nd** 3rd*** Highest***

(reference)

18.3%

13.9%

10.3%

8.8%

Source: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Note: Predicted values 

assume the 2008 baseline chance. ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.00.

FIGURE 15

Relationship between age and benchmark arts 

attendance for BP, by SPPA year

Age

Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

2008

2002

1992

1982

Ages 18-24 Ages 25-44 Ages 45-54 Ages 55 and over

13.7% 13.2%

11.2%

8.8%

15.3%

14.7%

12.6%

9.8%

18.3%

17.6%

15.2%

12.0%

19.0%

18.3%

15.8%

12.5%

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

CHAPTER 1
36 National Endowment for the Arts

The most substantial influence on BP’s attendance 

at benchmark events is arts education. Figure 16, 

below, shows the ascending likelihood that BP would 

attend a benchmark event if he had lessons or classes 

in one or more art forms as a child or as an adult. If he 

were to take a childhood class in one art form, and no 

other significant variables were to change, he would 

be 42 percent more likely to attend a benchmark 

event as an adult. To have an equivalent influence, 

BP would need to attend at least some college or rise 

from the lowest to the third socioeconomic quartile. 

If BP had childhood lessons in three art forms, it 

would have more influence than if he were in the 

highest socioeconomic quartile. Adult arts education 

in one art form nearly doubles the likelihood of 

attendance (an increase of 90 percent). Adult arts 

education in two art forms has more influence 

on the likelihood of benchmark attendance than if 

BP had attained a college degree or more. Adult 

lessons in three art forms triple the likelihood of 

BP’s attendance at a benchmark event. No other 

measurable variable has a larger estimated impact 

on adult benchmark attendance than taking at least 

three lessons in childhood or two in adulthood.

FIGURE 16

Relationship between arts education and benchmark 

arts attendance for BP, by number of art forms studied 

in childhood and adulthood: 2008 Benchmark arts attendance rates predicted for BP

Number of art forms studied

0%

5%

10%

15%

20%

25%

30%

35%

4

3

2

1

0 (reference)

Art forms studied as a child* Art forms studied as an adult*

31.8

23.7

26.2

19.9

22.0

15.6

16.7

12.5

8.8 8.8

Source: 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts. Note: Predicted values 

assume the 2008 baseline chance. *p < 0.00.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 37

5. Children of parents who had arts education or 

who attend benchmark arts events are more 

likely to take private arts classes or lessons and 

more likely to attend arts events themselves. 

The SPPA is a survey of adult arts participation. 

It has collected data about childhood arts education 

to flesh out the background and preconditions of 

adults’ behavior. But in 2008 the survey added three 

new questions for parents of school-aged children 

that establish some limited baseline information 

about their children’s participation in the arts: rates 

of attendance at live music, theater or dance events, 

and rates at which children take private lessons or 

classes in the arts. In a certain sense, these questions 

are also about adult behavior, as children’s private 

lessons and attendance at benchmark events often 

require parental support of some kind. The results 

are not surprising, showing strong intergenerational 

transmission of arts participation habits. 

The children of parents who attend benchmark 

events are more likely to take private arts classes 

or lessons. They are also more likely to attend 

benchmark events themselves. The likelihood 

increases as parents attend events in more art forms, 

as shown in Figure 17, below.

Children of a parent who had arts education were 

more likely to take private lessons and to attend 

benchmark events than were children of parents 

who did not have an arts education. The more 

art forms that the parents studied, the more likely 

the children were to take private lessons and attend 

benchmark arts events, as shown in Figure 18 

(see page 38). 

FIGURE 17

Private arts education in childhood and benchmark 

arts attendance in childhood, by benchmark arts 

activities attended by parent: 2008

Number of benchmark arts activities attended by parent

Percent of children reported taking private arts lessons

Number of benchmark arts activities attended by parent

Percent of children reported attending benchmark arts activities

Percent of children who took private lessons, 

by the number of benchmark arts activities 

attended by parent

Percent of children who attended 

at least one benchmark arts activity, by the number 

of benchmark arts activities attended by parent

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4

49.2

36.9

30.3

15.8

6.3

89.0

79.7

66.9

47.0

16.7

Source: 2008 wave of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.

CHAPTER 1
38 National Endowment for the Arts

FIGURE 18

Private arts education in childhood and benchmark 

arts attendance in childhood, by number of art forms the 

parent studied in childhood: 2008

Number of art forms parent studied in childhood

Percent of children reported taking private arts lessons

Number of art forms parent studied in childhood

Percent of children reported attending benchmark arts activities

Percent of children who took private lessons,

by the number of art forms 

the parent studied in childhood

Percent of children who attended at least 

one benchmark arts activity, by the number of art forms

the parent studied in childhood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

0 1 2 3 4 5

63.7

26.7 24.4

16.7

20.9

7.9

82.5

73.3

69.3

47.4 48.5

20.2

Source: 2008 wave of the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 39

NOTES

21 The Baumol effect, or Baumol’s Cost Disease, was first articulated 

in Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, W. J. Baumol and 

W. G. Bowen (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1966). For a 

recent and briefer discussion see J. Surowiecki, “What Ails Us,” 

New Yorker, July 7, 2003.

22 The Wolf Organization, The Financial Condition of Symphony 

Orchestras (Washington, DC: American Symphony Orchestra 

League, 1992).

23 G. Thorn and N. McDaniel, The Quiet Crisis in the Arts

(New York: FEDAPT, 1991).

24 Ellen Cochran Hirzy, ed., Excellence and Equity: Education 

and the Public Dimension of Museums (Washington, DC: 

American Association of Museums, 1992).

25 Zannie Giraud Voss and Glenn B. Voss, with Christopher Shuff 

and Dan Melia, Theatre Facts 2000 (New York: Theatre 

Communications Group, 2000), accessed online September 24, 

2010, www.tcg.org/pdfs/tools/TheatreFacts_2000.pdf.

26 R. Kushner and R. Cohen, National Arts Index 2009: An 

Annual Measure of the Vitality of Arts and Culture in the 

United States (Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts, 2010).

27 National Endowment for the Arts, 2008 Survey of Public 

Participation in the Arts, Research Report #49 (Washington, DC: 

National Endowment for the Arts, 2009).

28 National Endowment for the Arts, Art-Goers in Their 

Communities: Patterns of Civic and Social Engagement, 

Research Note #98 (Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for 

the Arts, 2009).

29 P. DiMaggio, M. Useem, and P. Brown, Audience Studies of the 

Performing Arts and Museums: A Critical Review (Washington, 

DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1978).

30 Bergonzi and Smith, Effects of Arts Education on Participation, 

5.

31 L. Mizell, Arts Education in the U.S.: 1982–2002 (Washington, 

DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004).

32 For a fuller treatment of the relationship between age and arts 

participation, see Age and Arts Participation: A Case against 

Demographic Destiny, M. J. Stern (Washington, DC: National 

Endowment for the Arts, 2011).

CHAPTER 1
40 National Endowment for the Arts

The proportion of 18-year-olds 

who had arts education as 

children has declined with each 

wave of the SPPA, reaching a low 

of less than half in the most 

recent survey (2008).
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 41

CHAPTER 2

TRENDS IN ARTS EDUCATION

CONTEXT

Americans participate in arts education in both 

school- and community-based settings. Arts 

education is taught across the full range of academic 

settings — public and private, elementary, middle, 

and high school, and post-secondary. The arts are 

also taught in a wide range of community settings at 

levels for beginners through virtuosos, in private 

individual lessons and in group classes, in homes, 

arts institutions, community centers, parks, and 

storefronts across the nation. Whether formal 

or informal, these settings play valuable roles — as 

gateway experiences and as introductory instruction 

to professional training at the highest levels. 

Arts education in primary and secondary schools is 

of particular importance. Millions of parents seek 

opportunities for their children to study the arts 

outside school, but millions more are not inclined 

to do so, cannot afford to, or lack convenient access 

to those opportunities. Schools serve virtually 

all American children, including those least 

likely to receive arts education in any other way. 

Again, analysis of 1992 SPPA data showed that 

“socioeconomic status is the strongest determinant 

of obtaining an arts education,” and that “members 

of all racial/ethnic groups attained comparable 

levels of school-based arts education.” But outside 

schools, the reverse was found, “with non-whites 

accruing significantly less education in the 

arts than whites. This suggests that school-based 

arts education is more accessible to a broader 

cross-section of Americans than is arts education 

in the private sector.”33 Policies that affect the 

availability of arts education in public schools, then, 

are likely to be decisive when it comes to making 

arts education available to young Americans on an 

equitable basis. Accordingly, trends in the provision 

of arts education in public schools are of great 

significance to future participation in the arts. 

As public education took root and blossomed in 

the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th 

century, Americans became a far better educated 

people, and more entered the middle class. Across 

the entire 20th century more Americans tended 

to stay in school longer, graduate from high school, 

go to college, and earn post-secondary degrees. 

We hypothesize that as Americans became better 

educated a growing proportion had access to and 

many more took school-based arts lessons or classes; 

childhood arts education grew as education grew 

in the 20th century. 

The arts, however, have never enjoyed a secure 

place in American public education. There have 

been earnest debates about the value of the arts in 

education throughout our history, and the rationale 

for their inclusion in the curriculum has rarely been 

based on the value of learning the arts themselves. 

Rather, it has focused on their value in achieving 

other broadly accepted goals of public education. 

These goals have changed with the times, but have 

often been linked to vocational training needs, moral 

development, or to strategies for acculturating and 

socializing the children of new immigrants. Music, 

for example, was accepted into the curriculum of the 

first public schools “to improve singing in the church 

service.”34 An influential report in 1836 urged the 

new schools to include music instruction to “promote 

his [the student’s] progress in other subjects.”35 By 

the 20th century, progressive educators, including 

John Dewey, the leading educational philosopher 

of the time, began asserting that learning in the 

arts was essential to a complete education. They 

proposed that students needed to learn about culture 

and how to express themselves. Dewey, in particular, 

theorized that learning happens as a consequence 

of experience, and that the arts, which are often 
42 National Endowment for the Arts

thought of as the artifacts of human culture, 

are “refined and intensified forms of experience” 

that make unique contributions to human learning 

and understanding.36

Over time, art and music teachers became more 

common in elementary schools, and art and music 

classes were offered as electives (and sometimes as 

requirements) in high schools. The National Center 

for Educational Statistics (NCES) reported that 

94 percent of American elementary schools offered 

music and 87 percent offered visual arts classes in 

the 1999–2000 school year; dance and theater 

were offered in far fewer elementary schools, just 

20 percent and 19 percent respectively. NCES also 

found that music and visual arts were offered in 

90 percent and 93 percent of American high schools, 

respectively, that same year. Theater was offered in 

48 percent of high schools (much, presumably, as 

literature in the context of the English curriculum), 

while dance instruction was offered in just 14 

percent of high schools.37 More recent, smaller-scale 

investigations show the same pattern. In Chicago, for 

example, 67 percent of elementary schools offered 

visual arts and 70 percent offered music, while 

just seven percent offered theater and four percent 

offered dance in 2001.38

Of course, the availability of classes in the arts 

in schools is not the same thing as delivering 

meaningful arts instruction to students. While 

many schools make arts education available, 

the evidence in the SPPAs suggests that they do not 

deliver it regularly to all their students. For example, 

the Chicago school district — the third largest in the 

country — budgets a half-time art or music teacher 

in elementary schools with up to 750 students. 

A single art or music teacher could be responsible 

for teaching up to 1,500 students in Chicago 

elementary schools.39 Given this staffing situation, 

some students may not receive regular instruction 

in either art form. 

Data are inconclusive about how access to arts 

education has fared since the passage of No Child 

Left Behind in 2001. As we mentioned earlier in 

this report, findings from a 2008 survey of school 

district officials conducted by the Center on 

Educational Policy40 suggest that arts education has 

been reduced nationally since the passing of this 

legislation. On the other hand, a recent GAO report 

on arts instructional time found that 90 percent of 

elementary teachers reported that instruction 

time for arts education remained the same between 

school years 2004–2005 and 2006–2007. 

While national data is inconclusive, there are 

findings at the metropolitan and state level that 

suggest declines in access to arts education.41

The average elementary school student in Chicago, 

for instance, received less than 45 minutes of art 

or music a week in 2001.42 A state-wide study in 

Washington showed that schools had reduced time 

for music instruction, which was most commonly 

provided, by 40 percent between 2005 and 2009. 

Time for the visual arts in Washington schools, the 

next most commonly provided art form, was reduced 

by 42 percent in the same period, even though a 

high proportion of Washington schools still provide 

visual art and music instruction.43

The early disinclination to consider the arts as 

serious academic subjects continues to this day. The 

arts are widely assumed to be expressive and 

affective, not cognitive or academic. Despite growing 

awareness among some educators and cognitive 

scientists that many of the fundamental processes of 

art-making are profoundly cognitive — reinforcing 

the building blocks of all thought44 — and despite 

the enormous discipline required to master arts 

skills and make high-quality art, the arts are often 

associated with play and luxury, not with the work 

ethic and discipline associated with school and 

academics. A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for 

Educational Reform, the highly influential 1983 

report that framed the wave of school reform that 

continues today, barely mentioned the arts. It argued 

that pervasive “mediocrity” in American education 

was the result of insufficient focus on the basics 

and a decline of standards in the classroom. Arts 

education was appropriate, according to the report, 

for high school electives, particularly for students 

who hope to pursue professional careers in an arts 

field.45 Given this subordinate role, the arts remain 

vulnerable to cuts whenever school budgets are tight.

That was the case in the late 1970s and throughout 

the 1980s, when school systems across the nation 

were confronted by fiscal crises precipitated by 

structural change in the economy, particularly in 

large urban areas, and resistance to taxes that fund 

public services such as education.46 School districts 

from coast to coast cut budgets, and arts education 

was one of the first places many of those districts 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 43

chose to cut. New York City cut arts education 

drastically in its schools in 1976. Chicago schools laid 

off all elementary art and music teachers in 1979. 

Similar cuts were made to districts large and small 

across California after Proposition 13, an amendment 

to the state constitution passed by the voters in 1978, 

imposed profound limits on property tax increases. 

Based on our understanding of these developments, 

we hypothesize that the growth of arts education 

in American schools slowed or even reversed by the 

late 1970s. 

Despite methodical collection of great volumes of 

data about American education and schools, there is 

no consistent record of how much arts education 

has been provided to American students in schools 

over the years. The National Center for Education 

Statistics (NCES) acknowledged that the arts were a 

core subject in its 1997 review of time spent teaching 

core subjects in elementary schools, but then did 

not report on time spent teaching the arts.47 While 

the U.S. Department of Education has supported 

comprehensive studies on arts education in public 

elementary and secondary schools, the studies 

are infrequent; the last report was issued in 2002,48

while the next report is not scheduled for release 

until the summer of 2011. It is worth stating that this 

Department of Education report, on survey data 

collected during the 2009–2010 school year, promises 

to yield results that could prove very useful for 

further research. 

The general dearth of high-quality, comparable data 

about arts education in public schools is itself an 

indication of the low status of the arts in American 

education. We cannot learn the depth of the cuts 

to arts education in the late 1970s and 1980s from the 

available educational statistics. Nor do we know 

the extent to which arts education may have been 

restored during the 1990s and the 2000s.49

We approached this study of data from the four 

SPPAs with the hope that it would offer insight into 

the extent to which Americans have received arts 

education as children, and, in particular, the extent 

to which they received arts education during their 

childhood school experiences. And we hoped to 

go beyond the years of the surveys themselves to 

find evidence of the expansion and contraction of 

arts education across the 20th century. We hoped, 

in short, to test our hypothesis: that childhood arts 

education, particularly arts education in schools, 

grew across most of the 20th century, but that in the 

late 1970s and 1980s it declined. And we hoped to 

learn whether it had been restored during the 1990s 

and the early years of the 21st century. 

ANALYTIC APPROACH

The SPPAs have collected data about Americans’ 

arts education experiences during their childhood 

years. Linking the age of respondents to childhood 

arts education makes it possible to use the SPPAs to 

draw a picture of the ebbs and flows of arts education 

over much of the 20th century. Absent longitudinal 

data from reliable primary or secondary sources 

about arts education budgets in school districts 

nationwide, or the number of art, music, and other 

arts teachers employed by schools, this SPPA data 

may be the best available way to track trends 

in public school arts education over the decades.

The most accurate data on childhood arts education 

in the SPPAs may be the responses of young 

adults to each survey. They are least likely to have 

forgotten their experiences in childhood. So we 

used data provided by 18-year-olds, the youngest 

respondents in each survey, to track childhood arts 

lessons or classes from 1982 to 2008. The data 

are not fine-grained. They do not give us insight 

into the intensity, duration, or subjective value of the 

educational experiences, as previously discussed, 

and they refer to experiences over Americans’ entire 

childhoods — from birth until their 18th birthday 

— a 17-year period before the survey date. 

To determine the level of childhood arts education 

for the years before those represented by 18-year-olds 

in 1982 (1964 to 1981), we relied on the reports of 

older survey-takers. Of course, older adults may have 

forgotten more about their childhood experiences 

than young adults; their responses, therefore, are 

somewhat less reliable. But their responses to the 

SPPAs are the best evidence available about young 

people’s arts education across much of the twentieth 

century. For analytic purposes, we grouped all 

respondents in each SPPA into cohorts by birth year 

and identified the proportion of each cohort 

that reported having arts education in childhood. 

We report on the years in which the samples were 

large enough to be statistically reliable, creating 

data points that go as far back as 1930. 

CHAPTER 2
44 National Endowment for the Arts

FINDINGS

1. Reported rates of childhood arts education 

declined significantly from 1982 to 2008.

Nearly two-thirds of 18-year-olds reported that 

they had lessons or classes in at least one art form 

as children in the 1982 SPPA. The proportion of 

18-year-olds who had arts education as children has 

declined in each succeeding SPPA, reaching a low 

of less than half in the most recent survey as shown 

in Figure 19, below — a drop of 23 percent. (It is 

important to remember that while these figures are 

associated with the dates of the four SPPAs on the 

chart, they represent the childhood of people who 

turned 18 that year — a period of 17 years before

the date of the survey. In other words, 65 percent 

of 18-year-olds had arts education between 1964 

and 1981, and that is represented on the graph 

by a data point in 1982, the year of the SPPA. 

Further, 49.5 percent of 18-year-olds in 2008 had 

arts education between 1990 and 2007, and that is 

represented on the chart by the data point in 2008.) 

2. Declines were substantial in childhood music, 

visual arts, and creative writing, while dance 

and theater increased slightly. 

Declines were most significant in visual arts, 

music, and creative writing classes and lessons, as 

shown in Figure 20, below. Music learning declined 

from 53 percent to 37 percent, a drop of 30 percent. 

Visual arts decreased from 36 percent to 26 percent, 

a decline of 28 percent. Creative writing dropped 

from 21 percent to 12 percent, a 42 percent decline. 

Theater increased from 12 percent to 13 percent. 

Dance increased from 9.6 percent to 10.1 percent. 

Theater and dance, of course, were far less pervasive 

than music and visual arts in 1982 and, despite their 

small increases, they remained far less pervasive 

than music and visual arts in 2008. (Note that the 

2002 and 2008 surveys were simplified, aggregating 

questions about classes and lessons taken when the 

respondent was “under 12” and/or “between 12 

and 17” into a single category: classes and lessons 

taken when the respondent was “under 18.” For the 

FIGURE 19

Percent of 18-year-olds who received any arts education 

in childhood, by SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18-year-olds who reported receiving 

any arts education in childhood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

1982 1992 2002 2008

49.5

57.0

63.0 64.6

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

FIGURE 20

Percent of 18-year-olds who received any arts education 

in childhood, by art form and SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18-year-olds who reported receiving

any arts education in childhood

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

Creative writing

Visual arts

Dance

Theater

Music 

1982 1992 2002 2008

12.2

20.1 18.9

21.1

25.7

30.7 32.2

36.1

10.1

17.0

17.5

9.6

12.8

10.3 14.5 11.6

36.9

42.9

46.0

53.0

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 45

purposes of creating comparison across all surveys, 

we aggregated the 1982, 1992, and 2002 SPPA data 

about classes and lessons taken when the respondent 

was “under 12” and/or between 12 and 17 into a single 

category: “childhood classes and lessons,” taken 

when the respondent was under 18. 

3. It is likely that the declines in music, visual 

arts, and creative writing represent, in large 

measure, reductions in in-school arts education. 

The 1992 and 2002 SPPAs include data indicating 

if childhood arts classes were taken in school, 

out of school, or both in and out of school. Those 

data show that of the children who took music 

and visual arts classes, more took those classes in 

school than out. Theater and creative writing 

classes followed the same pattern on a smaller scale. 

In contrast, most of those who had dance classes 

took them outside school.50 These patterns suggest 

that the declines shown in Figure 20 probably 

included substantial declines in classes taken in 

school in those subjects. Given the general decline in 

arts education in schools, the small increases in 

dance and theater suggest some growth in classes 

outside school in those art forms, but does not rule 

out the possibility of growth in schools. Absent 

data from the 2008 SPPA about school-based arts 

education, these are speculative, but reasonable, 

conclusions.51 It is also reasonable to assume that 

many children pursue lessons outside school 

after an introduction to an art form within school. 

As school-based introductions to the arts become 

less common, it is also reasonable to assume that 

some children — those whose parents do not actively 

intervene and support their children’s arts education 

— will be less likely to pursue non-school classes. 

4. Childhood arts education rose across most 

of the 20th century before declining in its final 

decades. 

Figure 21 (see page 46) represents the proportion 

of Americans who reported that they had any 

childhood arts education from 1930 to 2007. The 

data points are placed in the year of the respondents’ 

18th birthday, and represent data on childhood 

arts education from Americans of all ages in all of 

the SPPAs, including data from older Americans. A 

65-year-old respondent to the 1982 SPPA contributed 

data about experiences between 1917, her birth year, 

and 1934, when she turned 18. The average for each 

birth year is represented by the open circles on the 

graph. The solid line is what is known as a “best fit 

line,” and it represents the trend across the years by 

smoothing the irregularities of the data. (The black 

circles represent data from 18-year-olds in SPPA 

years.) The graph shows that arts education rose 

steadily from 1930 — the first year the data included 

a statistically reliable sample size (birth year 1912) 

— when over 20 percent of children had any arts 

education. By about 1972, half of American children 

were receiving some arts education, and the 

percentage continued to rise until 1985, when it 

began to decline sharply. It crossed the 50 percent 

threshold again in about 2000, this time moving 

downward. By 2007, it had retreated to roughly the 

level it was at in 1965. The sharp and dramatic 

“turning point” we see in this graph is not typical 

of patterns most often seen in social change, 

which are generally more gradual. It suggests the 

likelihood of a very significant event or events 

that precipitated the change. 

The data clearly indicate that a growing proportion 

of Americans received childhood arts education 

through most of the 20th century. The decline 

that began in the last decades of the century has 

continued into the new century. 

The dates in Figure 21 should not be interpreted 

literally. The points on the graph represent 

childhood experiences of those who turned 18 in 

that year, the 17 years before the date on the graph. 

So the real “turning point” for arts education 

did not occur in 1985, as it appears in the graph, but 

sometime during the childhood years of people 

who turned 18 in 1985 (1967 to 1984), and most 

likely during their years in school (1972 to 1984). 

Those dates align neatly with the policy and 

practical developments in education — deep cuts 

to school budgets and intensifying focus on 

“the basics” — that began at the end of the 1970s. 

This data and analysis support our hypothesis that 

childhood arts education in schools increased across 

much of the 20th century as Americans became 

better educated as a people, and that it has declined 

since the late 1970s, as school reform and fiscal 

constraints made arts education a lower priority in 

districts across the country.

CHAPTER 2
46 National Endowment for the Arts

5. Childhood arts education has not been equally 

distributed by SES or race. Its decline has been 

concentrated among low-income children and 

among African American and Hispanic children 

in particular. 

Figure 22, below, shows that girls have consistently 

had more arts education than boys, but there was 

not a statistically significant difference between the 

decline of childhood arts education for girls and 

boys from 1982 to 2008.52

Educational attainment is a consistently robust 

predictor of income,53 and the SPPAs included 

questions about parental education, so we chose 

parental education as the best available proxy 

for childhood socioeconomic status. Figure 23 

(see page 47) shows that unlike gender, children’s 

socioeconomic status mattered a great deal as 

childhood arts education declined. It shows the 

proportion of those 18 to 24 years of age who reported 

that they had lessons or classes in any art form in 

childhood by parents’ educational attainment and 

survey year. Those whose parents had less than a 

high school education (lowest socioeconomic status) 

were the least likely to have had any arts education 

in their childhood across all four surveys. Those 

whose parents had a college degree or more (highest 

socioeconomic status) were consistently most likely 

to have had childhood arts education. All 18- to 

24-year-olds were less likely to have had childhood 

arts education in 2008 than in 1982, no matter what 

their parents’ educational attainment, reflecting 

the general decline in arts education. In 2008, 

adults whose parents had the highest educational 

attainment (highest socioeconomic status) were 

17 percent less likely to have had a childhood arts 

education than the adults of 1982. Those whose 

parents had the lowest educational attainment 

(lowest socioeconomic status) were nearly 77 percent 

less likely to have had childhood arts education. 

FIGURE 21

Percent of Americans who received any arts education in 

childhood over the past 77 years

Year respondent was 18 years old

Percent of adults who reported receiving any

arts education in childhood 0%

25%

50%

75%

100%

1930 1950 1970 1990 2010

Observed yearly cohorts

SPPA survey year

Trend line

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

FIGURE 22

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who received any arts 

education in childhood, by gender and SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported receiving

any arts education in childhood

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Female

Male

1982 1992 2002 2008

49.2

52.5

65.7

58.9

45.4 41.6

53.6

54.5

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 47

Figure 24, below, shows that white children 

enjoyed considerably more arts education than did 

African American or Hispanic children in all four 

SPPAs. What is more, the decline in the rate of 

childhood arts education among white children is 

relatively insignificant from 1982 to 2008, just five 

percent, while the declines in the rate among 

African American and Hispanic children are quite 

substantial — 49 percent for African American and 

40 percent for Hispanic children.54 These statistics 

support the conclusion that almost the entire 

decline in childhood arts education between the 

1982 and 2008 SPPAs was absorbed by African 

American and Hispanic children.55 The findings 

also lend further credibility to the hypothesis 

that the declines for those children resulted from 

declines in arts education in the schools, where 

African American and Hispanic children were the 

most likely to have received any arts instruction.56

The powerful association of arts education and 

adult benchmark attendance is confirmed again in 

Figure 25 (see page 48), which shows that adult 

benchmark attendance among young whites 

(18 to 24) was down just slightly from 1982 to 2008, 

but that benchmark attendance among young 

African American and Hispanic adults was 

substantially down, tracking the large decline in 

childhood arts education in those groups. 

6. Arts education rates among young adults 

were extremely volatile during this same period. 

In Figure 26 (see page 46), we see that in the 2002 

SPPA about 28 percent of young adults between 

18 and 24 reported that they had taken arts classes or 

lessons in the past year. That rate declined to 22.4 

percent in the 2008 SPPA, consistent with the decline 

in arts education during the childhood of those who 

turned 18 between 2002 and 2007. The remarkable 

increase in adult arts education among young adults 

from 1982 to 1992 is not consistent, however, and 

seems anomalous. We cannot explain the rise with 

the data available. 

FIGURE 23

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who received any 

arts education in childhood, by parental education and 

SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported receiving

any arts education in childhood

0%

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

4-year degree or more

Some college

High school

LT high school

1982 1992 2002 2008

73.2

65.7

79.5

88.7

51.8 54.4

72.3

86.8

33.8

40.5

54.1

70.0

12.5 15.1

32.4

54.0

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

CHAPTER 2

FIGURE 24

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who received any 

arts education in childhood, by race/ethnicity and 

SPPA year 57

SPPA Year

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported receiving

any arts education in childhood

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

Hispanic

African American

White

1982 1992 2002 2008

28.1 27.4

34.8

47.2

26.2

36.0

43.5

50.9

57.9

53.4

64.8

59.2

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
48 National Endowment for the Arts

FIGURE 25

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who attended 

any benchmark arts activities, by race/ethnicity and 

SPPA year

SPPA Year

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported attending

any benchmark arts activities

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Non-white

White

1982 1992 2002 2008

24.9 25.3

34.3

37.8

41.7 42.8

46.5

43.7

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

FIGURE 26

Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who received any arts 

education as an adult, by SPPA year Percent of 18- to 24-year-olds who reported receiving any arts education in adulthood

SPPA Year

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

1982 1992 2002 2008

22.4

27.8

53.0

23.8

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 49

NOTES

33 Bergonzi and Smith, Effects of Arts Education on Participation, 

48.

34 E. B. Birge, History of Public School Music in the United States 

(Philadelphia, PA: Oliver Ditson Company, 1928), 2.

35 Calvin Stowe, quoted in Birge, History of Public School 

Music, 64.

36 J. Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), 2.

37 N. Carey, B. Kleiner, R. Porch, E. Farris, and S. Burns, Arts 

Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools: 

1999–2000 (Washington, DC: National Center for Educational 

Statistics, 2002). This publication is based on NCES’ Fast 

Response Survey System (FRSS) for 1999–2000. A FRSS survey 

of public schools-based arts education occurred in 2009–2010, 

but the results were unavailable at the time of this report’s 

publication.

38 L. Donaldson and E. Pearsall, Arts Education in Chicago Public 

Schools (Chicago: Chicago Community Trust, 2002).

39 Some elementary schools do supplement the formula with 

funding from other sources to employ more arts teachers, but 

other elementary schools have no arts faculty despite the budget 

formula in Chicago. 

40 Center on Educational Policy, Instructional Time in Elementary 

Schools: A Closer Look at Changes for Specific Subjects

(Washington, DC: Center on Educational Policy, 2008).

41 Government Accountability Office, Access to Arts Education: 

Inclusion of Additional Questions in Education’s Planned 

Research Would Help Explain Why Instruction Time has 

Decreased for Some Students (Washington, DC: Government 

Accountability Office, 2009).

42 Donaldson and Pearsall, Arts Education in Chicago.

43 G. Spilka, and S. Watts, Arts Education Resources Initiative: 

The State of Arts Education in the State (Olympia, WA: 

Washington State Arts Commission, 2005).

44 See, for example: G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live 

By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); R. Root-Bernstein 

and M. Root-Bernstein, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen 

Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People (New 

York: Mariner Books, 2001); H. Gardner, Frames of Mind: The 

Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983); 

G. Faconnier and M. Turner, Conceptual Blending and the 

Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2003); J. 

Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (New York: Mariner Books, 

2008); D. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music (New York: 

Dutton, 2006); and M. Gazzaniga, Learning, Arts, and the Brain: 

The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition (New 

York: Dana Press, 2008).

45 National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at 

Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (Washington, DC: 

U.S. Department of Education, 1983).

46 M. Gottdeiner, and R. Hutchison, The New Urban Sociology

(Boulder: Westview Press, 2006), 223–25.

47 National Center of Education Statistics, Time Spent Teaching 

Core Academic Subjects in Elementary Schools, NCES 97-293 

(Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, 1997).

48 National Center for Educational Statistics, Arts Education in 

Public Elementary and Secondary Schools: 1999–2000, NCES 

2002-131 (Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education, 2002).

49 A potentially important source of longitudinal data on art and 

music teachers is the NCES Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). 

This survey collects extensive data on American public and 

private elementary and secondary schools, including data on 

characteristics and qualifications of teachers and principals, 

teacher hiring practices, professional development, class size, and 

other conditions in schools. The SASS has been administered 

multiple times between 1987 and 2009.

50 L. Mizell, Arts Education in the U.S.

51 The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) arts 

assessment of 2008 found that there had been no “statistically 

significant changes since 1997 in the percentages of students [in 

eighth grade] attending schools offering instruction in music or 

visual arts with varying frequency.” This finding might appear 

contrary to our conclusion that visual arts and music education in 

schools declined during this period. However, the NAEP did not 

determine how many students actually took the available classes, 

nor does it provide data on arts classes in other grades. The 

Nation’s Report Card: Arts 2008 Music and Visual Art, NCES 

2009-488, S. Keiper, B. A. Sandene, H. R. Persky, and M. Kuang 

(Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Sciences, U.S. 

Department of Education, 2009).

52 We statistically tested the downward trend for boys and girls with 

a logistic regression model that employed an interaction effect 

between gender and time. The interaction effect was non-significant, indicating the null hypothesis that the effect of time was the 

same for boys and girls.

53 P. Wachtel, “The Effect on Earnings of School and College 

Investment Expenditures,” Review of Economics and Statistics

58 (1976): 326–31.

54 See note 6 above.

55 Findings from other national studies are inconclusive about 

the relationship between race and access to arts education. 

Data self-reported by teachers in the U.S. Department of 

Education’s National Longitudinal Study of No Child Left 

Behind (NLSNCLB), as reported in 2009 by the Government 

Accountability Office (GAO), suggests a correlation between 

race and access to arts education. The GAO identified 

statistically significant differences across school characteristics 

in the percentage of teachers reporting that the time spent 

on arts education had decreased. Teachers at schools identified 

as needing improvement and those with higher percentages 

of minority students were more likely to report a reduction in 

time spent on the arts. On the other hand, the U.S. Department 

of Education, in its Nation’s Report Card: Arts 2008

presenting the results of the 2008 National Assessment of 

Educational Progress (NAEP) in the arts, reported that there 

were no statistically significant differences found between the 

percentages of students in different racial/ethnic or gender 

groups attending middle schools with varying opportunities 

for instruction in either music or visual arts in 2008. Keiper, 

Sandene, Persky, and Kuang, Nation’s Report Card: 

Arts 2008; and Government Accountability Office, Access to 

Arts Education: Inclusion of Additional Questions.

56 Bergonzi and Smith, Effects of Arts Education on Participation.

57 See note 6 above.

CHAPTER 2
50 National Endowment for the Arts

The future of the arts may 

not lie in the restoration of higher 

levels of “benchmark” attendance 

at traditional performances and 

exhibitions. Rather, it could lie in 

new kinds of arts experiences 

and participation which, for some 

people, hold more personal value 

than sitting in an audience. 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 51

CHAPTER 3

CONCLUSION

We have tried to make clear in this report that 

arts education is an essential part of the shifting 

landscape of American culture. It is itself an 

important mode of participation in the arts for 

children and for many adults, and evidence from the 

SPPAs shows that it is also an engine that drives 

development and change in that landscape. Perhaps 

it is more appropriate to think of arts education as 

a particularly important dimension of the nation’s 

cultural “ecosystem”, rather than a landscape. 

Over much of the 20th century, a rising rate of arts 

education for American children helped create the 

necessary conditions for robust development and 

growth. Progressively greater access to childhood 

arts education probably helped build a large 

national audience for the arts. Private philanthropy, 

public subsidy, and private investment were also 

essential to building the ecosystem, but, without a 

growing audience, the development of a cultural 

infrastructure of producing institutions and venues 

in cities and towns coast to coast — a dazzling 

and diverse collection of theaters, orchestras, opera 

and dance companies, concert halls, festivals, 

community schools of the arts, and museums of 

many kinds and sizes — would have been impossible. 

Those institutions, in turn, provided employment 

opportunities for a growing number of artists, 

who, in turn, were educated and trained in the arts, 

and who produced the works that audiences 

consumed and appreciated. 

Needless to say, the cultural ecosystem is not 

nearly as simple, neat, and clean as the schematic 

outlined above. It has been filled with complexity, 

contradictions, and daunting challenges 

throughout its developmental history. But there 

is no doubt that it was robust throughout most of 

the 20th century. Now, SPPAs from 1982 through 

2008 show an undeniable trend: participation in the 

arts — at least in certain “benchmark” arts events 

(live theater, classical music and jazz concerts, 

opera, dance performance, and exhibitions at 

art museums and galleries) — is declining. Many 

arts leaders recognized this trend long before the 

SPPAs documented it, and they have pursued many 

efforts to reverse it by improving their marketing, 

management, planning, and fundraising. Despite 

such efforts, audiences for benchmark arts events 

have continued to decline, in good economies and 

now in bad. And now it also appears likely that 

childhood arts education, which we believe has 

played such a vital role in energizing the system by 

developing the potential audience (as well as by 

putting some young Americans on the pathway to 

professional arts careers), also has declined over the 

last quarter-century. If these trends continue, the 

health of the arts ecosystem will be in jeopardy. 
52 National Endowment for the Arts

Childhood arts education provides important 

gateway and formative experiences in the arts. Any 

serious strategy for mitigating or reversing the 

decline of arts participation must consider the role 

that childhood arts education can play in rebuilding 

and restructuring audiences. School-based arts 

education is of particular importance because 

schools are the only institutions that reach vast 

numbers of children, particularly low-income 

children, who are unlikely to receive arts education 

any other way. But the dominant trends in education 

policy have worked against the arts in schools 

for some time. While there are some suggestions 

that those trends might be changing, fundamental 

misunderstandings and underestimates of the 

cognitive value of the arts continue to keep the arts 

on the margins of public education, particularly in 

schools and systems serving low-income children. 

Those attitudes will need to change, priorities will 

have to shift, and new resources will need to be 

developed before we can expect to see significant 

new investments in arts education in our public 

schools. These reforms will occur only because a 

body of solid research and innovative practice 

continues to grow and show that arts education 

has serious benefits to students as students, and 

that arts learning is strongly associated with 

higher levels of achievement, positive social and 

emotional development, and successful transitions 

into adulthood. 

This research and practice should look far more 

closely than is possible with the SPPA surveys into 

the nature of arts education. We need to know more 

about what kinds of arts education matter most —

about different pedagogical strategies, teaching 

methods, curricular content, purposes, and goals. 

We also need to know more about the “dose” of arts 

education that is necessary to generate the positive 

outcomes all good educators seek, and more about 

the subjective responses to arts education that 

lead individuals toward lifelong participation in 

and engagement with the arts. 

The SPPA can and should play a small and 

continuing role in this pursuit of knowledge. This 

survey of a large and representative sample of 

adult Americans continues to be the best way to 

follow broad trends in arts education and calculate 

their effects on adult arts participation. The 

SPPA could add real value by restoring questions 

about childhood arts education. The study authors 

recommend, at the very least, that questions be 

added to establish if childhood arts classes 

or lessons were taken in school, elsewhere in the 

community, or both. Even more value could be 

added by establishing the intensity or duration of 

arts classes and lessons — in schools and out —

through the SPPA. 

It is vital to advocates for the arts and for arts 

education that data are regularly collected 

that indicate the penetration of the arts in schools. 

It would be wise to supplement the SPPA with 

data that measure partnerships between arts 

organizations and schools to bring the arts and 

artists into classrooms. 

The arts themselves have changed in many 

significant ways since the first SPPA in 1982. Some 

of those changes have been driven by artists who, 

as artists often do, have rebelled against many of the 

conventions of the art world. The traditional art 

forms have been transformed, deconstructed, and 

integrated. Enormous passion and interest is now 

directed at media and forms that hardly existed 

at the time of the first SPPA. Our assumptions about 

cultural hierarchy — terms like “high” or “fine” art, 

“pop” and “folk” art — have lost their traditional 

meanings, or lost their meaning altogether. And new 

expectations about how we participate in culture 

have developed in the wake of the computer age, 

the Internet, the do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, 

the rock concert, and hip hop. The future of the arts 

may not lie in the restoration of higher levels of 

“benchmark” attendance at traditional performances 

and exhibitions, desirable as those ends may be. 

Rather, it could lie in new kinds of arts experiences 

and participation that are more active, that blur 

the line between performer and audience, that 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 53

make the beholder a part of the creative process 

and artists the animators of community life —

experiences which, for some people, hold more 

personal value than sitting in an audience. Those 

kinds of experiences are being developed by artists 

and arts organizations, often in their education 

programs, in communities and schools across the 

country, and we need to know more about them. 

The SPPA has a responsibility to collect data that 

show us broad trends over time, so it must respect its 

own history and the history of arts participation in 

America. It also has a responsibility to keep up with 

the times by identifying and recognizing emerging 

forms of arts participation that reflect deep changes 

in the arts and in the American people themselves. 

What appears today to be an arts ecosystem in 

jeopardy may turn out to be an arts ecosystem that 

is restructuring and transforming as a result of 

the changing practices of artists and the changing 

interests and dispositions of the American people. 

The SPPA needs a broad enough perspective 

and sufficient flexibility to help us recognize the 

difference and to give us guidance in keeping the 

arts healthy in America. 

CHAPTER 3
54 National Endowment for the Arts

APPENDIX ON METHODOLOGY

Much of the analysis in this study was done using 

a statistical method called logistic regression. It uses 

a method called “maximum likelihood” to estimate 

the effects of independent variables on the chance 

of the dependent variable having a positive value 

versus a value of 0. The coefficients of a logistic 

model are best represented by odds ratios, which are 

the exponents of the coefficients. Odds ratios give 

the relative odds of the outcome, comparing those in 

the coefficient’s category to those in the reference 

group. For example, having one lesson in the arts 

as a child is associated with an odds ratio of 1.48, 

meaning that people who had classes or lessons in 

one art form as a child have nearly a 50 percent 

greater chance of attending a benchmark event than 

someone with zero lessons. Conversely, having 

less than a high school education has an odds ratio 

of 0.68, meaning that those with less than a high 

school education have a 32 percent lower chance of 

attending a benchmark event than someone with a 

high school education. The following table of logistic 

regression coefficients predicts attendance at 

benchmark events. It served as the basis for many of 

the graphs presented in figures in this report. 
Arts education in America: What the declines mean for arts participation 55

TABLE 

Logistic regression coefficients predicting attendance at 

benchmark activities

Variable Odds-ratio Coefficient Standard Error t-test p-value

Year 1992 0.95 -0.05 0.06 0.83 0.405

2002 0.76 -0.27 0.06 4.50 0.000

2008 0.68 -0.39 0.07 5.57 0.000

Age 25–44 1.31 0.27 0.07 3.86 0.000

45–54 1.57 0.45 0.08 5.63 0.000

55+ 1.65 0.50 0.08 6.25 0.000

Childhood lessons 1 1.48 0.39 0.04 9.75 0.000

2 1.92 0.65 0.06 10.83 0.000

3 2.59 0.95 0.09 10.56 0.000

4 3.22 1.17 0.14 8.36 0.000

Adult lessons 1 2.08 0.73 0.05 14.60 0.000

2 2.92 1.07 0.07 15.29 0.000

3 3.67 1.30 0.10 13.00 0.000

4 4.85 1.58 0.16 9.88 0.000

Respondent’s education Less than high school 0.68 -0.38 0.07 5.43 0.000

Some college 1.51 0.41 0.05 8.20 0.000

4-year degree or more 2.32 0.84 0.05 16.80 0.000

Respondent’s mother’s 

education

Less than high school 0.89 -0.12 0.05 2.40 0.016

Some college 1.28 0.25 0.06 4.17 0.000

4-year degree or more 1.28 0.25 0.07 3.57 0.000

Respondent’s father’s 

education

Less than high school 0.97 -0.03 0.05 0.60 0.549

Some college 1.17 0.16 0.07 2.29 0.022

4-year degree or more 1.45 0.37 0.06 6.17 0.000

Marital status Widowed 1.06 0.06 0.08 0.75 0.453

Divorced 1.01 0.01 0.05 0.20 0.841

Never married 1.15 0.14 0.05 2.80 0.005

Income quartile 2 1.20 0.18 0.06 3.00 0.003

3 1.68 0.52 0.06 8.67 0.000

4 2.32 0.84 0.06 14.00 0.000

Race Black 0.89 -0.12 0.07 1.71 0.086

Hispanic 1.20 0.18 0.07 2.57 0.010

Other 0.88 -0.13 0.09 1.44 0.149

Other demographics City’s population > 1 million 1.25 0.22 0.04 5.50 0.000

Female 1.27 0.24 0.04 6.00 0.000

Respondent does not work 0.88 -0.13 0.04 3.25 0.001

Intercept -1.95 0.10 19.50 0.000

R2 0.21

Model degrees of freedom 35

Chi-square 3519.77

Observations 23749

Source: 1982, 1992, 2002, and 2008 waves of the Survey of Public Participation 

in the Arts.

APPENDIX ON METHODOLOGY
56 National Endowment for the Arts

AUTHORS

Nick Rabkin is a senior research scientist at 

NORC at the University of Chicago (www.norc.org), 

where he is the principal investigator of the 

Teaching Artist Research Project, the first national 

study of artist educators, on track for completion 

in 2011. He was the executive director of the Center 

for Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago until 

2008, where he co-authored and edited Putting the 

Arts in the Picture: Reframing Education in the 

21st Century (2005), an effort to build a new kind of 

case for the arts’ role in educating children. He has 

also been the deputy commissioner of cultural 

affairs for Chicago and the senior program officer for 

the arts at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur 

Foundation, where he was instrumental in the 

publication of Champions of Change: The Impact 

of the Arts on Learning, a collection of research 

reports that helped change the terms of the national 

conversation about arts education. His arts 

background is in theater, and he was the executive 

director of the Organic Theater in Chicago from 

1981 to 1984.

E. C. Hedberg, PhD, is a research scientist at NORC 

at the University of Chicago. He has co-authored 

papers on experimental design and presented at 

several professional conferences. His work centers 

on education policy and methodology. 

National Endowment for the Arts

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Washington, DC 20506-0001

(202) 682-5400

www.arts.gov

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Available for free at www.arts.gov