The Boston Arts Academy is committed to a rigorous academic and arts education for students who are eager to think creatively and independently, to question, and to take risks within a college preparatory program. As a pilot school within the Boston Public Schools, the Arts Academy is charged with being a laboratory of academic innovation and a beacon for arts education.

The Boston Arts Academy is a collaborative project between the Boston Public Schools and ProArts Consortium, an association of six internationally known institutions of higher learning specializing in the visual arts, performing arts, and architecture: Berklee College of Music, Boston Architectural Center, the Boston Conservatory, Emerson College, Massachusetts College of Art, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

• Our mission reflects the key components of our philosophy as a school
• We are a school that demonstrates a commitment to performing and visual arts.
• We are a school that demonstrates a commitment to arts and academics- in a way in which the two, rather than just coexisting, support, and compliment each other.
• We are a school whose graduates will be prepared either to go on to college or a profession in the arts.
• We are a school that is both a model of academic innovation and a model of arts education. We are a school that has strong, productive partnerships with higher learning institutions, particularly with the ProArts Consortium.
• These partnerships are made manifest in our students doing course work at those institutions, in staff from those institutions working with us on curriculum development, in those institutions providing professional development for our staff, and in those institutions providing summer programs for our students.
• We are a school that exemplifies the best aspects of the Coalition of Essential Schools: helping students to "learn to use their minds, bodies, and spirits well"; emphasizing depth over breadth; applying goals to all students to demonstrate mastery through exhibition; stressing unanxious expectation, trust, and decency; considering teachers as generalists as well as specialists with a commitment to the whole school; and modeling democratic and equitable practices.