Today’s students are tomorrow’s decision-makers.
The students in our arts classrooms today, in music rooms, visual art studios, dance studios, and theater programs, are more culturally, linguistically, and experientially diverse than any generation before. They also have more options than the generations before them. New technologies and AI are increasingly putting creative tools directly in their hands allowing them to produce music, design art, and engage in creative expression without ever needing to set foot in their school’s arts courses.
So the question isn’t whether or not the arts matter. The real question is whether our arts programs are designed for the students we actually have today. Or the students we used to have.
In thirty years, the student sitting in your arts classroom today will be the district superintendent, the school board member, and the budget decision-maker determining whether arts programs survive in our schools. And if that student’s experience was that the arts weren’t for them, they never get to experience what a high-quality, relevant, responsive arts education can do. They won’t defend the arts and they won’t fight for it because they won’t remember the arts as something worth protecting. They’ll see it as a line item on a budget and make the practical choice.
Arts programs that fail to reflect and respond to the wide variety of students in their communities today are not just losing students. They’re losing their future advocates.
This isn’t a future problem. It’s a right now problem with future consequences.
And for arts programs that believe they’re doing this work already, not being able to clearly articulate how equity and culturally responsive practice are showing up is it’s own problem. Because if we can’t explain it, we can’t defend it.
We need to reimagine what arts education is for, who it’s for, and how it operates. Not by abandoning what makes the arts powerful, but by building programs that are intentionally relevant, responsive, and designed for the students we actually have, not the students we used to have.
The Two-Sided Problem
The problem in arts education is two-sided.
On one side, we see brilliant and committed arts teachers building programs where students are thriving. The kind of programs where students re-enroll year after year, excited to participate, and form lasting connections to the arts and to each other. These are fantastic programs led by amazing arts educators. But when you look closely, the culture of the program is built around a narrow interpretation of what engaging in the arts looks like. And intentional or not, that narrow interpretation sends a clear message about who belongs and who doesn’t.
Students who see themselves reflected in that interpretation join and thrive. But students who don’t see themselves get a different message altogether.
I saw this play out firsthand while conducting a climate and culture audit for a school district’s music program. In interviews with students enrolled in the program, the responses were remarkably consistent: their music classes were where they felt like they belonged, where they made their best friends, and where they were doing something exciting, challenging, and worthwhile.
I also interviewed students who weren’t enrolled in music courses and the responses were just as consistent, and almost entirely the opposite. Time and time again students said “it’s not for kids like me.”
Same community, same program. Two completely different student experiences. Not because the teachers weren’t passionate or dedicated (they were! I saw such amazing pedagogy during my observations and wished I wasn’t working so I could’ve joined in!), but because the program had been built, over time and without much examination, around a very specific kind of student.
One student in particular still stands out to me. She was the only Black student in her orchestra class and described a quiet but persistent pressure she felt from her peers about being in orchestra. She even shared her brother had been in orchestra too but quit because of the peer pressure he felt.
That’s the cost of a program that only speaks one aesthetic language in a school full of many.
I’ll be honest: I was part of this very problem early in my career. I was classically trained and taught from that tradition without critically examining who I was leaving out. I talk about this more in my first book, Music As a Vehicle: A Practical Guide to Culturally Responsive Teaching in Today’s Music Classrooms, but what I learned was that I had to do my own unlearning and examination of myself before I could do this work and make my actions align with what I said I believed.
When we aren’t intentional about designing our arts programs and courses to reflect the full range of our community’s learners and their backgrounds and ways of engaging in the arts, we don’t just end up with a narrow program. We actively repel the very students who we say we want to serve – the ones who could benefit most from what the arts have to offer.
The costs we don’t see
The cost of holding on to how we’ve always done it is higher than we may realize.
We’re familiar with the immediate costs: declining enrollment, shrinking budgets, the constant uphill battle of advocating for arts programs that feel perpetually underfunded and undervalued. These are real costs, but the cost that really scares me is the one we won’t feel for another thirty years.
In my work, the leaders I work with who don’t just support the arts but actively defend them, are almost always people who experienced the transformative power of a high-quality arts education themselves. The kind of arts learning where they didn’t just perform, but they created, they learned about the world beyond just their own perspective, they thought critically, learned to persevere, navigating through disagreements, and experienced the joy of collaborating with others to create something bigger than themselves. These are the leaders who push back when staff members try to pull students out of rehearsal for a test, who protect arts funding even when budgets get tight. They understand in their bones why the arts matter.
These leaders don’t need to be convinced. They already know.
But the leader who sat in an arts class that felt irrelevant? The one who never even enrolled because it didn’t look like the arts were “for them”? These leaders didn’t see themselves reflected in the program and got the quiet message that the arts weren’t for them. And these are the leaders who look at a budget shortfall and make the practical choice. And the arts almost always lose.
When budget cuts come, leaders default to the programming with the clearest evidence of impact: state test scores, measurable outcomes, data they can defend in a school board meeting. The arts lose this argument every time we can’t clearly point to our own evidence. And we’re building that problem right now, one student at a time.
Because every student who leaves our arts courses without experiencing what a high-quality arts education actually does for their thinking, their identity, and their sense of belonging, is a future decision maker we’ve already lost. And a future advocate the arts can’t afford to lose.
Moving from Intention to Practice
Let’s be clear about something first: culturally responsive arts teaching is much more than “diversifying” repertoire or adding a few artists of color to your curriculum. That’s a start, but it’s not the work.
Culturally responsive arts education is about how we bridge the gap between what students already know, understand, and care about and new learning. It’s about partnering with learners to not just teach arts content, but to use the arts as a vehicle for powerful lessons that matter outside the four walls of the studio: lessons that will serve them in their careers and in life. It’s about building arts programs where every student can access the arts as a powerful vehicle for success.
But too often culturally responsive arts practice lives only in our intentions and our minds. In our values and missions statements. We hope others will get it, but hope is not a strategy.
For culturally responsive arts education to actually change outcomes for students and to build the pipeline of future advocates that the arts desperately need, we need to move our intentions into being visible, measurable, pointable, and sustainable:
- Visible: Students can see and feel it. Arts educators can clearly name and describe it. Visibility isn’t just about representation, it’s about students experiencing a program that was designed with them in mind, from the mindset of the teacher, to the learning environment, the curriculum, and the instruction itself.
- Measurable: What matters gets measured. Before we can prove our programs are equitable, we have to decide what we’re tracking so that our data reflects our values and what we say we believe, not just our convenience.
- Pointable: Data tells you what, but story tells you why. Culturally responsive arts practice must be documented and traceable in real time so that any staff member, leader, parent, or stakeholder can see not just what the data shows, but the full story behind it.
- Sustainable: Culturally responsive practice that depends on one passionate teacher or one grant cycle isn’t a system, it’s an event. It must be embedded in the structures, curriculum, and culture of the program itself so it outlasts any individual and survives any budget conversation.
Over the next four weeks, I’ll be going deeper into each of these and talking about what it looks like to build arts programs where culturally responsive, equity-centered practice is visible, measurable, pointable, and sustainable. But it starts here, with understanding why this work can no longer wait.
Reimagining Arts Education for Today and Tomorrow
The arts have always been powerful, transformative, and essential. What needs reimagining now is how we deliver them to ensure that students today and tomorrow will have access.
Because the arts aren’t extras. They’re a vehicle for learning, for identity development, for building the critical thinking, perseverance, collaboration, and creative problem-solving skills that students need to succeed in school, career, and in life. But that vehicle only works if every student can actually access it. They need to see themselves in it, it needs to speak to their cultural frames of reference, and it must clearly demonstrate its relevance to their lives.
When we build narrow programs, we aren’t just losing students from our rosters. We’re deciding, whether intentionally or not, which students get access to that vehicle. Which students get to experience the transformative power of the arts, and which ones don’t.
That’s not just an equity problem. It’s a survival problem for the arts field itself.
Reimagining arts education doesn’t mean we abandon all we’ve done before. It means we ensure that our arts programs are intentionally designed for the learners we have, so that thirty years from now the decision-makers remember what the arts did for them. And fight to protect it.
This is the first in a five-part series on building arts programs where culturally responsive practice is visible, measurable, pointable, and sustainable. If this resonated with you, I’d love to have you join the conversation! Subscribe to my weekly newsletter for deeper dives, behind-the-scenes thinking, and the insider conversation I’m having — the kind of stuff that doesn’t make it into the blog.