Ingenuity State of the Arts Progress Report 2015-2016 | Page 45

Taken together, these findings on the amount of instruction in the arts offered in CPS elementary schools and the share of students that receive access to this instruction show that while elementary schools are likely to provide at least some arts instruction to nearly all students, they are not always able to offer the desired amount of exposure. Increasing the number of instructional minutes offered to students across the district may be the area with the most opportunity for future growth. These findings about minutes and access also reveal an inconsistency. The data suggest that elementary school staffing levels have 17 the arts in CPS / instructional minutes and access INSTRUCTIONAL MINUTES AND ACCESS SUMMARY continued to improve across the district. However, the minutes and access data presented in this section suggest that increase in staffing was not, in 2015-16, connected to an increase in minutes of instruction provided or in the share of students offered that instruction. One possible explanation is that, while the addition of media arts as a discipline this year led to an increase in the staffing numbers, the coursework these teachers were offering was already accounted for in previous years’ surveys. Whatever the explanation, the inconsistency merits revisiting after another year of data collection. Percentage represents schools with 100% student access to arts instruction. 45