AUSTIN — In her first two years as an art teacher at Nash Elementary, Hailey Rodden saw many of her students’ works highlighted at Chicago Public Schools’ All-City Visual Arts Exhibition.
Every year, she submits 18 students’ works of art to the CPS exhibit, and every work she submitted in her first two years was either shown in the gallery or received an honorable mention and was displayed in a virtual gallery.
In what is now her third year, however, only one of Rodden’s students was selected for the honor. So, in an effort to recognize all of her students, Rodden organized an art gallery at Legler Regional Library, 115 S. Pulaski Road, which currently displays her students’ artwork throughout the library.
Rodden isn’t the only art teacher from a disadvantaged area that believes their students were overlooked for the district-wide art exhibit. The issue highlights the disparity in arts opportunities for CPS kids based on geography and race, with students from more affluent areas having greater access to arts programs, according to teachers and school district data.
It is an issue CPS has acknowledged, and one it is working to amend with a new district-wide arts plan, district officials have said.
“These opportunities foster confidence, pride and love for the arts while also increasing family engagement — something that is critically needed in our [Austin] community,” Rodden said of the arts exhibit in an Instagram post. “Additionally, I noticed the work from other schools — particularly on the North Side — that did not meet the same level of quality as my students’ but was chosen for the in-person show.”
‘Systemic Inequities’
CPS has faced disparities in access to art education and opportunities among its students for years.
Only 39 percent of CPS’s 641 schools in the 2023-2024 school year met the goals outlined in the district’s 2012 arts education plan, according to an annual report by Ingenuity, an arts education nonprofit that partners with CPS to track student art data. Just 14 percent of schools met the criteria in the 2012-2013 school year and 30 percent met the criteria in 2019-2020, according to CPS.
Many of the schools that meet the arts criteria are on the North and Northwest Side, areas that are significantly more likely to have at least 60 percent of schools rated as meeting CPS’s arts standards, according to Ingenuity’s report.
The district collects data for the CPS Opportunity Index, a measure that summarizes access to opportunities for each school based on 12 factors including community, demographics and historical school funding. Another equity metric, Creative Schools Certification, rates a school’s access and quality of art education.
Last school year, 45 percent of all CPS students had access to high-quality art education, according to Ingeuity’s report. While 59 percent of white students were able to access high-quality art education in their CPS schools, only 36 percent of Black students had this access.
Schools that are rated as below CPS standards for art education are primarily concentrated on the South and West sides. A data expert at Ingenuity said this disparity is fueled by racial and geographical segregation and disinvestment within CPS and the city as a whole.
“There’s an intersection at play with student demographics, race and ethnicity, opportunity, geography,” said Angela Lin, director of data and research at Ingenuity. “With systemic inequities and historical disinvestment, we know Black students are less likely than white, Asian and Latino students to have access to high-quality arts education programming.”
A Gallery Of Their Own
For Rodden and her students, disinvestment in high-quality arts education includes a lack of funding for art supplies, field trips and diverse programming both in school and after school, she said.
CPS has long used a student-based budgeting system, where individual school funding is primarily based on student enrollment. Nash Elementary, 4837 W. Erie St., had an enrollment of 263 students for the 2022-2023 school year, according to CPS.
This year saw a marked difference in arts funding at Nash, Rodden said. Most of its afterschool programming was cut, she said. The beginning of the 2025 fiscal year marked CPS ditching student-based budgeting in favor of a school-based budgeting model where funding is based on need.
Beyond school funding, Rodden said that she has seen North Side schools receive more support from parents willing to pay for their children to have art education.
“We have no money and parent involvement is definitely one of our biggest challenges,” Rodden said. “In terms of our school versus some of the other fine and performing art schools, a lot of their money for field trips, their parents might be able to pay for … but ours don’t have the same access.”
Despite those challenges, Rodden is doing everything she can for her students’ artwork to be seen. “The Wonder of Flowers” runs through June 4 at Legler Regional Library, 115 S. Pulaski Road, with art centered on the spring themes of flowers and growth. Several of the works shown are pieces Rodden previously submitted to CPS’s All City Exhibition.
“We’re all really proud of them,” Rodden said on her students’ work. “They worked hard and so to have their work up in their own community — it’s really powerful.”
Rodden’s students are not the only ones who feel left out by CPS at this year’s district showcase.
Lara Spyer, an art teacher at Brighton Park Elementary, also submitted several of her students’ works to the showcase and, like Rodden, only had one selected.
“I was affronted for my kids,” Spyer said. “We don’t really have the advocacy on the South and West sides … we have a lot of kids that are from groups that are marginalized, so they don’t feel like they can advocate for themselves.”
Like Rodden, Spyer said she reached out to CPS regarding the decision and received “panned responses” until she too received an email stating that nearly half of her submissions would be added to the showcase.
Spyer said she is used to the bureaucracy of CPS but added that in this case, the students suffer.
“[CPS] should account for where they live in the city, demographic-wise, do we have enough representation of the South Side?” she said.
Rodden also reached out to CPS for clarity on what happened with this year’s submissions. After more than a week of silence and multiple follow-ups, a CPS official informed Rodden that the district gave six of her students an honorable mention, now adding them to the virtual showcase. Rodden questioned why her students were only now being considered and what rubric was used for the selections. In response, CPS offered to include all of her students in the virtual showcase, according to emails provided to Block Club.
“While I appreciate this, it raises serious questions about the integrity and fairness of the selection process,” Rodden said in an Instagram post.
The All-City exhibit receives thousands of submissions, and the district is increasingly considering factors like inequality in its process for selecting art to be showcased, said Danielle Holtz, program director for arts education student programs at CPS.
Block Club asked CPS officials behind the All-City Selection process how equity is considered when making the selections.
“All-City has about 3,000 submissions and we’re still learning what we’re able to accomplish,” Holtz said. “We want to make sure that everybody has access and that’s true, but we also want to make sure that, as we are reviewing the works, we are taking into consideration the historical disparities.”
This year, CPS began integrating equity metrics into the selection process for its student art festivals, starting with the Reverberate multidisciplinary arts festival in April. The district plans to introduce this to the All-City selection process next year.
“We also used the opportunity index in determining our final selections, and that was very successful for us in really making sure that it’s not just access, it’s equitable access,” Holtz said of the Reverberate Festival, which had about 200 submissions this year. “That’s a practice that we want to bring to the All-City program next year.”
Improving Arts Equity
Equity has been a focus of CPS arts education programs in recent months. In addition to introducing school-based budgeting, outgoing CPS CEO Pedro Martinez on May 8 unveiled a new arts education plan for the district.
The district’s new Arts Education Plan 2.0 is centered around offering increased equity in access to the arts and high quality art education across the district, introducing a pre-K through 12th grade curriculum that is segmented by grade level grouping that “honors the natural progression of students’ artistic, cognitive, and social-emotional development, while remaining responsive to school-level choice, staffing structures, and community contexts,” according to the report outlining the plan.
The plan is built around increasing access to quality arts education, and centering accessibility in its assessments of its art program, according to the report. CPS will also look to boost staffing, increase time spent in arts classes, monitor school facilities and resources and add new art disciplines to schools.
“This is a bold new chapter in our district to committing to the arts,” Martinez said at a City Club Chicago event announcing the plan. “This plan not only renews our promise of equity, it reaffirms what we believe, [that] every child deserves to be part of an arts program that’s transformative.”
The Chicago Teachers Union’s newly inked contract with the city includes elementary middle school buildings being guaranteed at least three centrally funded elective or holistic teacher positions, which includes fine arts, according to the union.
“The reported under-representation of South and West side artists in the CPS All-City Visual Arts Exhibition shines a light on the urgent need for CPS to address inequities in its city-wide arts programming, and to make good on the commitments it has made in its Black Student Success Plan,” the statement continued.
While art teachers and students wait to see this progress, Rodden said she will continue submitting her students’ work to the All-City showcase. But she is focused on making sure her students do not solely rely on the district for opportunities.
“Our kids are really talented and I think that they do amazing work. It deserves to be seen and recognized,” Rodden said. “We are going to give them a platform, and we’re going to continue to do this type of work and shows like this, but we need to find some sort of way to make that more widespread for other kids, too.”
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