State Data Infrastructure Project for Arts Education

Since late 2017, the National Endowment for the Arts has collaborated with Education Commission of the States to promote more and better information on young people’s access to, and participation in, arts education. Their joint initiative, the State Data Infrastructure Project for Arts Education, has resulted in tools to help states extract, analyze and report on data about arts education. SDIP also provided states across the country technical assistance to improve their capacity to mount arts education data initiatives of their own.

States’ data systems are more robust than they have ever been, and inexpensive data visualization software has toppled barriers to analyzing and reporting on education data. Yet before SDIP, there were few tools to help arts stakeholders take advantage of these conditions. SDIP has resulted in powerful, free resources to help anyone who wants to review, analyze and report on arts education data their states already collect. These resources aim to demystify this work by offering concrete guidance on the condition of state data systems, what kinds of information most systems could produce and what it takes to pursue an arts education data initiative.