The Empire State Partnerships (ESP) Project promotes standards-based, integrated K-12 arts education through partnerships between schools and cultural organizations. The project is itself a partnership between the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the State Education Department (SED), in collaboration with the New York State Alliance for Arts Education (NYSAAE). This new interagency initiative unites SED's plan for raising standards for all students with NYSCA's goal of integrating and reinserting the arts into classrooms.

We researched and evaluated the project with emphasis on three areas:

1. Providing formative evaluation of the project's development and effectiveness
2. Documenting the process and achievement of partners' goals, including gathering examples of promising practices in arts education
3. Reviewing the local student achievement and project assessment data, and then synthesizing the evidence of the impact and effectiveness of the ESP Project.