Creative Schools Certification

To find a CPS school’s artlook® profile, go to artlook® and type in the school of interest into the search bar. On school profiles for school years starting 2021-22, there will be a Creative Schools Certification data dashboard. The latest data uploaded is from the 2022-23 school year. While this information was collected starting with the 2019-20 school year, in accordance with the CPS School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP), Ingenuity and the CPS Department of Arts Education will not publish school Creative Schools Certification scores publicly during the COVID-19 pandemic for the 2019-20 and the 2020-21 school year. 

For schools that submitted data, there will be a section that lists “$X Arts Expenditures Per Student”. 

The budget data is being collected on the Creative Schools Survey, which is an annual survey that collects information about each CPS school’s arts programming and offerings. The Arts Liaison, on-site arts leaders and champions, submits the survey on behalf of their school each year. Since 2016-17, over 90% of CPS schools submit their arts data every year. 

The figure on school profiles, “$X Arts Expenditures Per Student” measures school spending on a per-student basis. On the Creative Schools Survey, Arts Liaisons are asked to report to the nearest dollar the following: 

“How much funding did a school dedicate to the arts? This is the amount of funding the school used for arts education supplies, materials, and programs. Include funding from all sources, but do not include teacher salaries or capital expenses.”

Using the total funding a school dedicates to the arts supplies, materials, and programs (see prior question), this figure is then divided by the official school enrollment in that school year. The figure on artlook® school profiles and used in the Creative Schools Certification is on a per-student basis

For the budget metric, schools that dedicate $7.00 or more per student are awarded the full 8 points. The Creative Schools Certification scores every school out of 100 points. The rating scale for the budget metric is shown below. 

The full Creative Schools Certification rubric can be found here.

This data is self-reported by the Arts Liaison on the Creative Schools Survey. Ingenuity runs a rigorous Data Audit on all schools’ responses to the Creative Schools Survey, and flags budget figures that seem relatively high and asks for confirmation from the Arts Liaison. The Data Audit is conducted prior to this information being uploaded onto school artlook profiles. 

In addition to the Data Audit, Creative Schools Roadmaps are sent to all Arts Liaisons and principals of schools that submitted their Creative Schools Survey. These Roadmaps are customized PDF reports sent to every school that outline how their individual school scored on all components of the Creative Schools Certification, including the budget question. If a principal or Arts Liaison notices discrepancies in the data that was reported, they are able to appeal and have their Creative Schools Certification data and rating corrected. An updated Roadmap is re-sent to the school. The Roadmaps are sent out prior to this information being uploaded onto school artlook® profiles. Click here to find a Sample CPS Elementary School Roadmap and a Sample CPS High School Roadmap.

Please reach out to Ingenuity’s data team at artlook@ingenuity-inc.org or the CPS Department of Arts Education at cpsarts@cps.edu, and we can make any corrections as needed.

In the annual State of the Arts report, Ingenuity publishes the distribution of budgets. While the 2022-23 State of the Arts report is currently being drafted, the following shows the initial findings as of January 2024 regarding distribution of per-student budgets. The 2022-23 State of the Arts Report is planned to be published in April 2024. To see prior reports, please see Ingenuity’s website. 

In the 2022-23 school year, 61% of elementary schools and 71% of high schools reported a budget of $7.00 or more per student.

Even while accounting for enrollment, high schools were more likely than elementary schools to report budgeting $7.00 or more per student on arts expenditures. High schools were 10 percentage points more likely than elementary schools to report budgeting $7.00 or more per student on arts expenditures in 2022–23. However, the percentage difference between high schools and elementary schools that reported a budget of $7.00 or more per student on arts expenditures has decreased since 2021–22. The difference in 2021–22 was 18 percentage points, with high schools being more likely to report a budget of $7.00 or more per student on arts expenditures.

Seven percent of elementary schools and 5% of high schools reported no arts budget per student in 2022-23.

To look at the relationship between a school’s Creative Schools Certification score and their per-student arts expenditures, we show two different visualizations. 

First, we will look at the distribution of per-student arts expenditures for each category (Excelling, Strong, Developing, Emerging) of the Creative Schools Certification.

Eighty-seven percent  of Excelling schools reported an arts budget of $7.00 or more per student, with no Excelling schools reporting that they did not have an arts budget. It may be easy to assume that a Creative Schools Certification rating would predict a school’s budget per student, however, we see that the landscape of school arts budgets is far more nuanced. Nearly half of Emerging schools reported an arts budget of $7.00 or more per student, though 26% also reported no budget per student. As for schools rated as Developing, the categories with the highest percentages are split relatively evenly between those with $7.00 or more per student (39%) and $0.01-$3.99 per student (41%). 

A second visualization analyzing these data flips the variables around, and shows the distribution of 2022-23 Creative Schools Certification scores for each budget category on the rubric.

Within each column, the distribution of Creative Schools Certification scores are shown. For example, the 52% figure in the $7.00 or more column indicates that 52% of schools that reported $7.00 or more per student were rated as Excelling. 

For schools that reported $7.00 or more per student in arts expenditures, roughly half of them are Excelling schools. Eighteen percent of schools reporting $7.00 or more per student in arts expenditures were rated as Developing or Emerging. As for schools that reported no budget per student, 48% of these were rated as Emerging. It’s not necessarily the case that schools with large per-student arts expenditures are rated as Excelling or that schools with no arts budget are rated as Emerging, though we do see on these ends of the spectrum roughly half are rated as such.

 

The following visualization illustrates the distribution of per-student arts expenditures by the number of arts partnerships an elementary or high school had during the 2022-23 school year. Arts partnership profiles are categorized by whether a school had a small (0-1), medium (2-5), or large (6 or more) number of arts partnerships.

For high schools, having more partnerships does not necessarily indicate a higher per-student expenditure. Seventy-four percent of high schools with a small number (0-1) partnerships reported $7.00 or more per student. No high school with a large number of arts partnerships reported no budget per student. There is generally little correlation between the number of partnerships and per-student arts expenditures for high schools.

For elementary schools, 42% reported $7.00 or more per student. A slightly higher percentage of schools with a small or medium number partnerships reported no budget per student (11% and 8%, respectively) as compared to those with a large number of partnerships (2%).

With this visualization, each column shows the distribution of partnership profiles for a given budget bucket. For example, the 78% on the far upper right indicates that 78% of high schools with no budget per student had a medium (2-5) number of arts partnerships in 2022-23. 

The data here shows for schools with a small or medium number of partnerships, there is generally little correlation with the arts budget per student. A higher percentage of elementary schools reporting $7.00 or more per student had a large number of partnerships (29%) compared to elementary schools with no arts budget (6%).

For the data from 2022-23, the below charts illustrate the relationship between a  school’s student racial/ethnic demographics and the per-student arts budget1 . Each dot represents a single school, with the vertical position representing per-student arts expenditures, and the horizontal position representing the percentage of students in that school in the plot’s racial/ethnic category. The red trend lines in each plot highlight how the per-student arts expenditures relate to schools’ racial/ethnic makeup; there is little to no correlation between the two. Across all three charts, there is no clear pattern.  A school’s racial/ethnic makeup is not statistically significant in regards to its per-student arts expenditures. 

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1 For readability, only schools with budgets of $40.00 or less have been included. This represents 76% of schools. The large range and distribution of per-student budgets, especially those at the 90th or higher percentile, are not easily visualized. However, we have also conducted a test of statistical significance with all schools’ budget data and conclude that a school’s racial/ethnic makeup is not statistically significant in regards to a school’s per-student arts expenditures.