For what purpose the arts? An analysis of the mission statements of urban arts high schools in Canada and the United States
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While general arts programs have declined in many schools across the United States and Canada, the number of specialized art programs in public secondary schools has swelled since the 1980s. While this increase is often celebrated by arts educators, questions about the justification of specialized arts programs are rarely raised, and their value is often taken for granted. In this article, we examine the mission statements of eighty-four specialized arts programs across two countries to examine the ideas, values, and commitments that are expressed in these public statements. In addition to a close thematic analysis, we describe how these mission statements reflect different conceptions of the role of the arts in education and consider the ways in which arguments that seek to broaden access to the arts are combined with the goal of serving a narrow subset of the student population. We argue that analyzing mission statements provides a clearer picture of the ideas that shape these programs, and that in order to foster an informed public conversation about the purpose and value of an education in the arts, educators committed to the arts must engage in this serious discussion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it