After a steady increase throughout the middle of the 20th century, arts education has been in decline since the 1980s. Teachers attributed the declines to test-score pressures, budget cuts, or both. These trends have been most pronounced for students of color, who are more likely than white students to attend under-resourced schools and about half as likely to experience any arts education, on average. How are these changes affecting American students? The authors investigate the causal effects of arts education by looking at the Arts Access Initiative in Houston, which brings teaching artists, performances, and workshops to under-resourced public elementary and middle schools from the city's ballet, symphony, and fine-arts museum, among many others. This analysis compares schools that were enrolled by a random lottery to schools that applied to participate but were not chosen, in the first large-scale randomized control trial of an arts education program in an authentic school setting.