I went to the HS of Art and Design. Guess they will define tagging as true art if they haven’t already:-)
I had a seminar at a mostly minority school in Queens. There was an overwhelming odor of oil paint (I actually had to leave due to a medical breathing emergency a little while later). Turns out the school (actually, its lesbian principal) hired professional graffiti artists to cover the hall walls on all floors with urban graffiti, in order to make the students feel "more at home". I kid you not. At least they could have drawn pictures of scientists, planets, fields of crops, something occupation oriented. But no--it was distorted faces, people in urban settings, and other crap like that. The message I perceived was "You are ghetto, and that's all you should aspire to be."