Giving Compass' Take:

• Ingenuity is an arts education advocacy group using a tool called Artlook to match schools with arts organizations and programs. 

• How is your local school system supporting the expansion of arts education? What are the benefits? How can donors also help expand these efforts? 

• Read about arts education as career preparation. 

Since 2013, school and community leaders in Chicago have had a resource that measures arts opportunities for students in Chicago Public Schools, and now educators in six more cities will have access to the same kinds of data.

Ingenuity — a Chicago arts education advocacy group that created the tool, called Artlook — is working with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as part of its Any Given Child initiative, to expand the platform to Jacksonville, Florida; Baltimore; New Orleans; Houston; Portland, Oregon; and Sacramento, California. Any Given Child focuses on getting key leaders outside of the arts community, such as mayors and school superintendents, involved in supporting arts education.

The expansion comes as arts educators are calling for more ways to produce data about the benefits of arts programming for students and as some states are beginning to include participation in the arts as part of their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans.

Artlook was created to connect schools looking for arts education programs for their students with arts organizations looking for partnerships with schools, Steve Shewfelt, the director of data and research for Ingenuity, explained Thursday during a breakout session at the Arts Education Partnership annual conference.

The Artlook program combines administrative and school-level data, provided by an arts liaison in each school, with information on arts organizations that offer programs for students.

The Cathedral Arts Project (CAP) in Jacksonville was one of the organizations that were struggling to collect and communicate accurate data about arts programming, explained Allison Galloway-Gonzalez, the chief program officer for CAP, which is one of 27 communities participating in Any Given Child.

Read the full article about data platform helping arts organizations by Linda Jacobson at Education Dive.