The Enduring Power of Arts Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Remember when STEM became STEAM? That change happened about 16 years ago, after arts leaders and advocates began adding “A” to the educational acronym STEM to lobby for the integration of art into the instruction of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in classrooms across the country.

Ask parents, teachers, or students what the “A” in STEAM stands for now, and they may say, “artificial intelligence.”

This rapidly evolving technology was top of mind for educators and arts advocates attending the Getty’s Creative Engagement Forum: Amplifying Youth Voices through Arts Education, held on October 3 at the Getty Center. The convening brought together more than 350 classroom teachers, youth advocates, arts educators, and artists from across Southern California and beyond to discuss the challenges and opportunities facing arts education today. Among these are the pervasiveness of technology in young people’s lives, public policy affecting the arts, and how to fund arts-driven initiatives well into the future.

The day kicked off with the inspiring debut performance of 2025 National Youth Poet Laureate Evan Wang’s poem “High Art,” commissioned by Getty for this event, and closed with a vibrant musical set by Palmdale Academy Charter School’s Mariachi Los Jaguares. A series of panels explored the impact and possibility of in-school and school-adjacent arts programming, highlighted successful examples of arts integration partnerships in schools throughout the United States, explained California’s landmark arts education measure Proposition 28, and discussed the perils and promise of AI in the classroom and beyond.

While panelists offered varying views of the technology, across conversations, they presented the arts as powerful antidotes against screentime and engaging tools for amplifying young voices, nurturing creativity, and building in-person community and connection.

Mary Dell’Erba, assistant director of Arts Education Partnership in Washington, D.C., encouraged educators to draw on their arts background to navigate AI’s uncertain frontier.

“The art community was talking about STEAM education for decades before states started introducing legislation around STEAM education,” Dell’Erba said. “Eventually when policymaking catches up, all of you can be at the forefront of those conversations.”

Facing a new frontier: “Agency and Creativity for Youth in the AI Age”

During an afternoon conversation focused on the intersection of AI and youth creativity, Dell’Erba and Kylie Peppler, director of The Creativity Labs at the University of California, Irvine, and a professor of informatics and education there, addressed the challenges and opportunities of the technology, including its impact on student mental health and developmental cognition. Privately and publicly, educators expressed concerns throughout the day over the abundance of screens and technologies in students’ lives, which seem to be contributing to challenges ranging from brain rot to the inability to braid or tie one’s shoes—even existential dread about the future.

“You see this affect their mental health and wellness,” Peppler said, addressing an audience member who asked how educators can help students “make sense of headlines that are telling us that AI is going to destroy us all.” “They’re taking on the entire weight of the world,” Peppler continued. “So how do we have a conversation and not dismiss these worries? Because they’re real.”

Peppler encouraged educators to look to history for examples of how to cope with technological disruption and how to rethink the ways new innovations could reshape learning. She noted that the invention of the Gutenberg printing press contributed to mass literacy and that the 19th-century fear that printed books and reading materials would harm people’s eyesight did not come to pass. Likewise, the creation of new toys, such as Matchbox cars, did not blunt children’s nascent engineering skills but instead improved “their sense of physics and gravity.”

Rather than embracing the latest AI tools or opting out of using the technology completely, Peppler urged educators to go back to the basics of creativity theory: play, collaboration, iteration, and feedback.

“What makes something creative in the age of AI?” Peppler asked the audience. “What grounded us beforehand? What is the enduring thing that is part of human creativity?”

Dell’Erba echoed the sentiment, urging attendees to tap into their inner creativity as arts advocates and practitioners. “The arts are always ahead of the curve when it comes to understanding new technologies, anticipating problems, and coming up with solutions. It is just inherent to what we do as artists,” she said.

Beyond test scores and technology: How arts programs boost student engagement and attendance

Earlier in the day, panels highlighting successful in-school and school-adjacent arts programming, as well as arts integration partnerships with nonprofits throughout the country, underlined the powerful role the arts continue to play in developing youth’s engagement with their schools and academics, their socio-emotional abilities, and connections with their peers and communities—despite emerging technologies and decades of emphasis on STEM.

In a panel moderated by LeAnn Binford, senior director of consulting services at Big Thought, Amy Rasmussen, executive director of Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), said that in her nearly 27 years working across nonprofits and schools, she has observed a noticeable shift from policymakers fixating on student math and reading scores to prioritizing programming that nurtures students’ soft skills and encourages them to get to class.

“That kind of conversation has really shifted away to more social and emotional learning priorities for students,” Rasmussen noted. “Today, one of the biggest challenges we’re asked to confront is engagement, enrollment, and attendance at schools.

“And I feel they’re getting bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said.

While those challenges have grown, Rasmussen has also noticed more opportunities to fund arts programming from nontraditional sources such as criminal justice and violence prevention funds, highlighting how arts educators and artists can position and fund their programming as public services.

“The arts education [funding] pie is very small,” said Rasmussen, advising arts educators and advocates “to learn to speak in a language that social service agencies, youth development, and career trajectory kind of organizations speak” to support their initiatives.

By way of example, Lucy Chen, vice president of advocacy and community engagement at Cathedral Arts Project (CAP) in Jacksonville, Florida, highlighted how the arts could combat low attendance in schools in her state and beyond. In Florida, about one-third of students are chronically absent, according to the state’s Department of Education.

“So what is the cure for that, right? Maybe it’s not about adding another exam but having this innovative approach to get students first and foremost excited about learning,” she said, noting that students enrolled in CAP’s arts integration programs attend roughly two to five additional school days compared with unenrolled students.

Additionally, presentations on Big Thought’s Creative Solutions arts workforce intervention program for young people in Dallas’s juvenile justice system and Urban Word’s National Youth Poet Laureate program highlighted the transformative power of hands-on arts experience. Big Thought’s Vincent Coronado noted that Creative Solutions participants maintain a low 10 percent recidivism rate, while National Youth Poet Laureate founder Michael Cirelli showcased how the program has catapulted alumni like Wang, the Engagement Forum’s opening speaker, and 2021 presidential inauguration poet Amanda Gorman to prominent stages.

“When I take poetry into rooms like Google, like the White House, I’m showing a young writer in Pennsylvania, I’m showing a young writer in Florida, I’m showing a young writer in California that poetry can take you here. If one person can make it, you can make it too,” Wang said during that morning’s inspirational kick off speech.

Getty’s own Teen Gallery Guides program, a paid summer internship that trains teens to lead tours at the Getty Center and Getty Villa, stood out as a strong local example of how young people can leverage their arts experience to build skills across personal and professional pathways. Program alumna Brooke Santos, an art history student at UCLA, said the program not only helped her prepare for college and introduced her to a variety of art careers but also left her “with a greater understanding of what it means to learn from art and ultimately give back to it.” Jacob Granados, now an engineering student at California State University, Pomona, said the program helped him venture outside his comfort zone and learn how to engage in dialogue with people across generations, communities, and perspectives.

“Art builds conversations, and when you allow that conversation to flow, there are really no wrong answers. That’s what we’re taught with art. Everybody’s interpretation is their own. So instead of teaching them about a piece of art, you allow them to pretty much teach you,” Granados reflected.

Brittany Prieto, senior education specialist for teen programs at the Getty Museum, said that these communication skills are highly “transferable” for young people throughout their lives.

“One of our goals in this program is for each individual to feel welcomed in this space and to transfer that welcome onto the many thousands of people who come through and have tours with them and to walk away with marketable skills, skills that will be valuable to them in life, in their academic pathways, and their professional pursuits beyond the program,” Prieto said.

More generally, John Lawler, CEO of Los Angeles–based P.S. ARTS, observed that arts classrooms not only serve as safe havens and spaces of “joy” for students but remain essential incubators for young people’s creativity—and humanity.

“Real art making, not compiling from a lot of different sources into a weird montage, but real art making, real creativity, real human expression has to be analog, and it has to come from humans,” Lawler said.

Navigating Proposition 28

Among the pioneering examples of arts education and technology discussed was California’s Proposition 28 (Prop. 28). Approved by the state’s voters in 2022, the Arts and Music in Schools Funding Guarantee and Accountability Act provides ongoing arts education funding in the state’s public schools—about $1 billion per year—and requires most schools to spend at least 80 percent of funding on arts education staff, with the remaining 20 percent available for costs, such as art supplies, professional development, or arts educational partnership programs.

During an update on the law’s implementation, Veronica Alvarez, executive director of Pasadena’s Create CA; Kyle Holmes, director of California County Superintendents Statewide Arts Initiative; and moderator Jeannine Flores, visual and performing arts coordinator at the Los Angeles County Office of Education, discussed how educators could use a specially developed AI tool called CODA and other publicly available online resources to learn how the funding works and could be applied to their schools.

“One of the ways that we’ve tried to use AI for good in this world is we have taken all the documents from CDE [California Department of Education] on Prop. 28 and fed them into a chatbot,” Holmes said.

Alvarez highlighted preliminary statewide findings suggesting that Prop. 28 is beginning to expand student access to arts education. According to the study by Create CA and WestEd, 62 percent of surveyed education leaders and staff reported more students participating in the arts, with half of respondents reporting a significant or moderate increase.

“I think we’re closing the gap,” Alvarez said, “and I think that’s a really great thing to hold on to.”

While Proposition 28 has made strides in expanding arts education throughout California, the speakers acknowledged that critical work needs to be done to dispel misunderstandings about its funding, which sit at the center of an ongoing lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District and has even led some schools to return the arts funding over litigation fears.

Busting a few misconceptions, Alvarez clarified that Prop. 28 funding is ongoing, not expiring; must supplement rather than replace existing arts funding; and can support partnerships with arts organizations.

Holmes highlighted how Assembly Bill 2440, which was signed into state law this September, aims to correct confusion around Prop. 28 by clarifying how the funds can be spent. By way of example, he explained that two schools could share their funding by hiring one dance teacher to work across two campuses and noted that the amendment helps schools determine where and how funds are allocated by requiring Prop. 28 expenditure reports to be posted publicly.

The panelists were hopeful that updated legislation or policies could increase the hiring of credentialed arts teachers and qualified teaching artists. While the budget for the Arts and Music in Schools Funding Guarantee and Accountability Act can range from $938 million to $1 billion per year, reports Create CA, “California needs at least 5,000 new art teachers to meet the demand,” according to reporting from CalMatters and a recent Stanford Research Institute Study.

“We are all having a lot of conversations right now about how do we help expedite the process for teaching artists to get credentialed and lower the cost because we know that the time and cost are the two biggest barriers for helping these individuals get credentials and get full-time in the classroom,” Holmes said.

“We don’t have enough teachers, still,” added Flores, underlining the need for human arts instructors.

This gave some attendees, like Santa Monica artist Federico Galavis, a ray of hope for the next generation, despite the persistent funding and policy challenges.

“If we’re moving into a more technological AI-driven world, art is what makes us think outside the box, even if you’re not pursuing arts or are planning to become an artist,” Galavis said. “So, this is what we need to focus on cultivating, especially among children and youth, because it’s what’s going to keep us ahead of the machine.”