Does Taking Arts Electives Predict Later Academic Outcomes and Suspensions for Previously Suspended Middle Schoolers?

• In Event: At-Risk, Justice-Involved, and Traumatized Youths: Outcomes of Engagement in the Arts

Abstract

School suspensions exclude students from their schools and are linked to later disengagement with school and involvement with the police, a problem known as the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color (Hwang, 2018; Kovera, 2019). It is important to understand buffering factors that might disrupt this negative downward spiral and promote positive outcomes for students who receive school suspensions early in their academic career. The arts have been associated with enhanced personal and academic outcomes in school (Winner et al., 2013) and external (outside of school) arts programs have been used successfully to help delinquent/suspended students (Chong & Yun, 2020; Dorr, 2007; Henley, 2015). To our knowledge, however, no study has examined whether middle school arts elective courses reduce the risk of later negative academic outcomes or repeated school suspensions.

Using a subset of students from our large-scale, prospective, longitudinal study of over 37,000 predominantly low-income, ethnically diverse children followed from age 4 through middle school, we selected the N = 760 students (61% Black, 36% Hispanic, 2% White/Asian/Other) who received at least one in-school or out-of-school suspension in 5th grade (end of elementary school), and examined 8th grade (end of middle school) academic outcomes (GPA, math and reading standardized test scores, and whether or not the student was suspended [again] in 8th grade). The key independent variable was student enrollment in arts elective courses (dance, drama, music, and visual arts) in middle school (6th-8th grade) obtained from school records/student transcripts. Arts enrollment was explored in 3 ways – overall any enrollment (yes/no), years of enrollment across all students (0-3 years), and years of enrollment within arts students (1-3 years). We ran multivariate regression analyses on the outcomes including demographic variables (race, gender, special education status, poverty status) and prior academic performance (5th grade GPA) as covariates. In addition to overall any arts, we also re-ran the models specifically focusing on music participation (band, chorus, guitar, keyboard, orchestra, general music, and music theory) since stronger effects on academic performance have been observed for music compared to other art forms (Alegrado et al., 2022).

As shown is Tables 1-2, within these conservative models that control for other major predictors of academic performance including 5th grade performance, we found that students who were suspended in 5th grade and took arts classes had stronger 8th grade GPAs and math scores compared to similarly suspended students who did not take the arts. In terms of dosage, more years of arts were associated with greater math scores, and for those who took at least one year of arts courses, each additional year of arts courses decreased the odds of the student being suspended (again) in 8th grade by 42%. Effects for GPA and math were even stronger for music compared to the any arts composite. These results suggest that arts engagement in schools, especially music, may serve as a small protective factor for later academic performance and repeat suspension for students who have been suspended from school.

Authors

• Adam Winsler, George Mason University
  Presenting Author

• Alenamie Alegrado, George Mason University

• Tevis Lee Tucker, George Mason University

• Joshua Stein, George Mason University