The Right Brain Initiative is releasing new data that demonstrate the impact of rich classroom arts-integrated instruction on student test scores.

Right Brain is a K-8 arts integration program in Portland, Oregon, the first effort to systemically grow arts education throughout the Portland metro area. Right Brain teacher/artist collaborations and robust professional development arm principals and classroom teachers with strategies to seamlessly blend creative thinking throughout their ongoing teaching practice. The program entered classrooms in 2009, and since that time has been committed to demonstrating how this approach to arts education can truly help students learn.

The research firm WolfBrown, with support from the Portland State University Center for Student Success, has reviewed standardized test scores for all 18,711 unique students who attended Right Brain partner schools between the 2007-08 (the year before we entered classrooms) and 2012-13 school years (a year where 44 schools partnered with the program), with compelling results:

• After students began working with Right Brain, their scores more than doubled in reading and math.
• English language proficiency scores increased at least ten times as much after students participated in the program. 
• In all cases, the increase in scores continued to rise over time. That is especially true for English Language Learners. 

Read more about this new data, as well as other stories about the program's impact in schools, in The Right Brain Initiative 2013 Progress Report. If you have other questions, or want us to share this information in greater depth with your association, please visit TheRightBrainInitiative.org.