Griffin TryggArts Funding and Student Achievement in NYC
My senior thesis. Does arts funding move ELA and Math scores in New York City, and does it depend on the borough?
The question
Arts education is usually the first thing cut, and yet the research keeps tying music participation to academic gains. I wanted to know whether more arts funding actually showed up in test scores in New York City, and whether it showed up the same way in every borough.
What I did
- Filtered 650,000+ school allocation records down to ~28,000 arts allocations and rolled them up by borough and fiscal year (2018–2024).
- Merged with mean ELA and Math scale scores for grades 3–8, using number tested instead of enrollment.
- Built a 'real allocation' measure: arts funding relative to borough median household income.
- Ran full-sample and borough-by-borough fixed-effects models.
What I found
Across all boroughs, each $1,000 of arts funding came with +0.009 ELA points (p<0.01) and +0.003 Math points (p<0.05), with R² of 0.73 and 0.61.
Measured as real allocation, the effect grew to +0.469 ELA and +0.216 Math per $1,000, which suggests raw dollars understate it.
It varied a lot by borough. Strongest for ELA in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. Not significant in the Bronx or Queens.
What I'd do with it
What I'd recommend
Add arts funding as a weighted factor in NYC's Fair Student Funding formula, and send support where the effect is weakest instead of spreading it evenly.
What the data can't say
Borough-level data hides school-level variation, test scores miss the social and emotional side, and I didn't model lagged effects.