Arguably, students in lower-income schools need exposure to creative subjects the most, but as you can see from the map below, the city’s arts programs are sharply divided by neighborhood. Each of the dots represents a school that doesn't have an art teacher.

Courtsey of ProjectArts, Presented at Pulse New York in May

While state law mandates that every middle and high school student has a certified arts teacher, the report found that more than 400 middle and high schools in the city don’t meet that criteria. Forty-two percent of these schools are in the south Bronx and central Brooklyn, both lower-income areas of the city. And nearly half of the schools that don’t have a certified arts teacher or an arts partnership are in poorer districts. “It shouldn’t make a difference what neighborhood you live in,” says comptroller Scott Stringer. “Every student in New York City should have the opportunity to receive a strong education in the arts.”

Eric Pryor, executive director of The Center for Arts Education, an arts-education nonprofit that works in New York public schools, describes a “perfect storm” that created this situation. For one thing, local politics have worked against arts education. During Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration, there were few programs around the city. Eventually, the mayor established the Project Arts program, allocating money for arts partnerships and education in public schools. But Michael Bloomberg took a different approach, using a “principal as CEO model” that gave administrators the autonomy to use resources as they saw fit. Project Arts money was still part of schools’ budgets, but principals could choose to divert the money to other areas. In poorer neighborhoods, that often meant cutting the arts.

Around the same time, the federal government unveiled No Child Left Behind, standards-based educational reform that ushered in a culture of “high stakes testing.” As a result, teachers spent more time on subjects like English and math, and less on the arts. As New York started feeling the effects of the recession, it had to tighten its budget. “Because we test literacy and we test math levels, subjects like foreign language and PE and yes, arts, are among the first to be cut,” Pryor said.

Ironically, the Bloomberg administration has commissioned large-scale art pieces by famous contemporary artists, such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates and Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls. This may have boosted tourism and was certainly appreciated by some New Yorkers. But meanwhile, the most vulnerable students in the city saw their arts education systematically cut, says Adarsh Alphons, founder of ProjectArt, an organization that works with libraries on arts programming.

“It’s particularly heartbreaking because it’s youth from lower-income neighborhoods that the arts have the highest impact on,” Alphons says, citing a 2012 National Endowment of the Arts report on the arts and at-risk youth. “Teenagers from low socioeconomic status who don’t have access to arts education have a five times higher chance of dropping out of school. Studies show that students in the arts outperformed their non-arts peers on the SAT by 96 points, while a child who has continued access to arts education has a 74 percent higher chance of planning to attend college.”