It is a universal truth, well known, that when budget cuts are imposed by the state, teachers of the arts are the first to go. I recently met with a leader of the arts community in Houston who told me that she wanted to make a gift of art supplies but could not few elementary schools with art teachers.
Some advocates for the arts–music education, especially, claim that the study of music increases test scores.
Peter Greene says: Don’t do that! See here too.
There so many important reasons to treasure music, and the pursuit of higher test scores is not one of them.
“Music is universal. It’s a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch– music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?….
“In music, everyone’s a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they’ve got, there’s just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical “competitions” has led to many programs that have forgotten this — but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome….
“Do not defend a music program because it’s good for other things. That’s like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that’s all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, “Beauty is its own excuse for being.” A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Saying music raises test scores is like saying kids who take more foreign language courses have higher SAT scores. Of course they do, but not because of the foreign languages.
But kids who seriously do arts seem to be better students. (I taught math in an arts magnet school). They seem to be able to stay more focused and on task and took more responsibility for their learning. And of course could be flakey.
But maybe they either learned or were taught the drive that helped them in both arts and academics.
The arts may not be a cause, but success there might be a good predictor.
Actually Peter, science has proven that learning musical instruments raises IQ. Having a 2nd language delays the onset of dementia related symptoms by 5 years. So, the empirical evidence is there.
Music is intrinsically good for myriad reasons, many of which have already been stated. Nonetheless, there is a well documented positive correlation between good math skills and students who have learned how to play instruments at an early age. That said, having art, music, foreign languages, physical ed, literature, health and nutrition included in any curriculum enriches any student and our culture as well. No one should ever have to defend the inclusion of any of these fields, period.
Children have learned to read, count and spell using music. Music has always been important in school. We have to defend it because we have allowed the deformers to define what is important.
I taught music for years until retiring some 24 years ago.
It depends a great deal on HOW it is taught I believe. I had students tell me that they did better in every class they took because of me. I implemented a great deal of the Kodaly philosophy which in Hungary when taught by the best teachers, yes there too, students did better in every class even gym. This is MUCH too complex to even try to explain here but it has been well documented.
Music because it appeals, when taught this way, has the advantage of being both spiritually uplifting as well as academically nurturing in a way that pure academics find it difficult to emulate..
I believe most any subject can be nurturing in the best sense of the word depending on whether the teacher is an educator or just an instructor but the arts do I believe have an added benefit inherent in their subject matter.
Education: the search for ultimate truth, beauty, and good.
Too, I believe also that music can help bridge the gap between ethicities plus religions when shared at a very nurturing level by sharing in the beauty and power inherent in these cultures. I do believe that the arts, and of course because perhaps I was a music teacher, choral, that this is true. Some will disagree but I firmly believe that in the public schools are the perfect place to share in each other’s cultures and in a way that pure academics cannot do. AND, where else will these possibilities be taught?
For the benefit of persons unfamiliar with the Kodaly philosophy and some of the teaching methods that informed Gordon Wilder’s teaching go to https://www.oake.org/about-us/the-kodaly-concept/
Coherent teaching and study in any one of the arts is rare in public schools unless these are magnet schools or arts intensive schools with selective admissions, Many of the selective admission schools are career oriented and training grounds for entry into the performing arts (music, dance, theater and hybrids of these).
The concept of general education in the arts, suitable and (heaven forbid) required for all students K-12 has not taken root in American public schools for many reasons.
New standards in the education in the arts–visual, media, dance, theater, music–have just been published. The standards express the hope for more time in the curriculum and for assessments that are integral to instruction.
Hope springs eternal, but at the policy level, the federal and state preferences are likely to stay with investments in the 3R’s aka Common Core, and STEM (science, techology, engineering, and mathematics). The effort to get some programmatic investments in STEAM (add the arts to STEM) illustrates how advocates will jump on any opportunity to leverage some attention to any aspect of any of the arts in education.
A long time ago when I entered teaching, arts advocates were promising that more and better arts education in schools would develop the creative thinking that we needed to beat the Russians in the Space Race.
In his THE EDUCATOR AND THE OLIGARCH (2014), Anthony Cody points out that the rheephorm movement—with the Gates Foundation in the lead—talks about multiple measures when assessing educational “outcomes.”
That’s the rhetoric. As distorted and shaped by self-imposed Rheeality Distortion Fields. Put in the service of generating $tudent $ucce$$ aka “profit for good” as the corporate education reform crowd (a subset of free market fundamentalism) puts it.
Yet the multiple measures keep circling back, over and over and over again, to the numbers generated by standardized tests. In other words, what correlates and seems to produce greater “achievement” aka high test scores is good. What doesn’t, is bad.
This inevitably deflects from, and avoids talking about, genuine learning and teaching and assessment. And it masks the very narrow goals aka assumptions undergirding the self-styled “education reform” establishment.
One of the most telling omissions from rheephorm talking points: the heavy hitters of rheephorm ensure that THEIR OWN CHILDREN don’t suffer the same putative ‘cage busting achievement gap crushing 21st century world-class education’ that they are mandating and cramming down the throats of OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
One example tells all.
Lakeside School. Bill Gates and his children. “School Life Overview.”
[start]
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT ACADEMICS
Lakeside believes there is more to life than academic success. We actively uphold a balanced approach to education; one that develops students who excel both inside and outside the classroom.
We offer a diverse array of activities, from leading-edge experiential learning programs to numerous athletics endeavors, arts experiences, and student activities and clubs. Everyone can find whatever it is that interests them to deepen their involvement in our vital community.
Lakeside also recognizes that it can be hard for some students to achieve that balance. That’s why our student support team is ready to help. Thoughtful and motivated counselors, teachers, and administrators work with students and their families to ensure that all have the opportunity to reach their full potential at Lakeside.
[end]
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=120815
Don’t believe them? Go to their home page and read a 6-16-2015 piece. As part of school improvement, ponder what the school describes as the need to build a new performing arts center and performing arts practice space.
Music for its own sake? Lakeside School bought in to the concept.
So opt out. Opt in to genuine learning and teaching. Lakeside School for everyone. No excuses. No exceptions. Whatever it takes.
And are numbers all-important?
“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” [variously attributed, including to Albert Einstein]
😎
“Argument for Music”
Math’s for higher test score
So is language arts
But music is the best for
Testing off the charts
He is right that this should not be the main argument for music education–test scores.
Yet, it is a fact that numerous studies have shown that real musical training (not just music listening–the so-called “Mozart effect” has been debunked) increases the child’s ability to learn in all areas. It certainly doesn’t hurt to point that out.
In fact, I created a page years ago with many links on the subject of music education and cognitive development, at http://mspector.us/research.htm
This has been the profession’s main advocacy strategy for the past decade or so, a time that coincides with a massive slashing of school music programs. So while it “certainly doesn’t hurt to point that out”, it doesn’t seem to be working too well.
Mitchell, this has been one of the professions advocacy points for more than 25 years. When we started, the arts were not a core subject and many programs had suffered through the 1980s. Fast forward and we see the arts are now recognized as a core subject, there has been an INCREASE in the number of high schools with music programs and the course offering have greatly diversified. This started with the addition of the arts as a core subject (1994) and the release of standards for arts education (also 1994).
The fact of the matter is that music education is nearly universally available in the United States. Following the Great recession (between 2008 and 2012) of the 54,000 instrumental music programs in the United States, less than 1/2 of 1% of programs were cut.
Propagating the myth that there has ben a “massive slashing of school music programs” plays into the hands of those that want to do just that… making it “OK” to cut programs since “everybody is doing it.”
The reality is a music program cut is the EXCEPTION in our country… not the rule. And people should be advocating from this position of strength based on the principle of equity (why are we denying our students something the vast majority of students benefit from).
So you are wrong on both points… the various strategies deployed by music and arts advocates (which includes the extrinsic values) have actually led to increases in arts education in many communities across the country… and the “massive slashing of school music programs” is a statement with no basis in fact that only seems to be promoted by the uninformed or those whose main agenda IS TO SEE A DECLINE in these programs because of some ulterior motive .
@Bob Morrison, that’s not what many music teachers are seeing. In an adjacent district, loss of State funding has resulted in the outright LOSS of band and chorus programs in a number of middle and high schools, or at the very least in halving the schedules of some of those teachers. The programs may still exist, but not in their previous forms.
In the county where I most recently taught, arts classes are still available in elementary schools, but for many years have only been offered once weekly in elementary school, and their primary function from an organizational standpoint is to provide classroom teachers with contractually-mandated planning time. In fact, student allotment for elementary instrumental music teachers is about double what it was when I began teaching. Instrumental teachers have had to take on larger and larger classes and cut offerings in some instruments because their time at each school has been cut even while their numbers climb; the last place I taught 4 days a week (large school) is now down to 2-1/2 days for the same school, same size, same number of classes as far as I know. A number of local districts that used to offer instrumental music and chorus to 4th and 5th grade are dropping chorus and only offering band/orchestra instruments to 5th grade, or even pushing off instrumental music until middle school (because who doesn’t learn a new instrument best in a large mixed-instrument group, right? @.@).
The cuts are most obvious in poor schools, where simultaneous efforts to increase classroom time for students (to raise those test scores) and inability to pay specialists have indeed cut the arts; when one has to choose between keeping scores up just to keep a school open and paying a music teacher they can already barely afford, guess what gets cut?
My older daughter’s middle school cannot keep a chorus teacher at only 2 classes a day, but offerings won’t be added (general music, guitar) in order to bolster the position, so every year there’s a new teacher (often a long-term sub); at our local high school, a new offering was indeed *offered* – IB Music Theory – but then DROPPED because “only” 10 kids signed up for it. (10 kids in a small high school signing p for a music theory class is HUGE!)
You are using numbers from 2008-2012 to demonstrate something that is happening NOW, and has BEEN happening; I think if you’re going to make the assertions you’re making, you’re going to have to back it up if you want your claims to be credible. What you’re describing doesn’t jive with either my own experiences or those of music teachers I know who are still in the trenches.
@Crunchydeb – I am using the numbers that are reported for the most recent period available. When I look at states with data available for the most recent school year we see the same thing. Continued access to music and visual art at the elementary school and increasing participation rates in High Schools. Anyone can pull a set of anecdotes to make a case that things are great or things are bad. I am telling you based on the evidence available and the facts based on presence of programs and participation that music and arts education have not been eliminated from our schools. Are there places where there has been narrowing? Yes… especially in the 2014/2015 school year because of PARCC testing. But we also know that major urban areas like NYC, Boston and Chicago have all announced major initiatives to restore arts education programs in schools. Music and arts education is the RULE in our schools… NOT the EXCEPTION. We need to stop whining about this and focus on the exceptions where the programs have been cut and advocate for their restoration based on facts and equity. I do not doubt what you have experience is true. But to say this is true for the country just does not stand up in the face of the facts.
There so many important reasons to treasure music [, read stories and poetry, study history, draw pictures, play soccer, learn how plants grow, and dance], and the pursuit of higher test scores is not one of them.
I’m with you, James. We have documented evidence of people making musical instruments from about 40,000 years ago, the same time period to which we date the oldest cave paintings. So people have been engaged in the arts for 1000s of years. I bet none of them ever judged the value with test scores (although I suppose they had rituals that involved both to improve hunting or harvests). People make music. People draw, paint, dance, play,… and always have. I don’t need studies that show improved performance in areas we now deem critical for success in the 21st century because of some contrived musical intervention.
It’s no coincidence that some of the academically strongest students are involved in music programs, but music does not necessarily make them “better “students (if one can define “better” fairly, anyway). It may be that “better” students are attracted to and find success in music programs.
That said, there are plenty of successful music students who aren’t at the academic top of the class, too. Music has so many different benefits for all people–I think the short-sighted are those who attempt to define these benefits with a narrow measuring stick, i.e. test scores, Mozart “Effect,” competitions, etc.
Mr. Green has probably never had to defend a program and if we followed his advices over the past 25 years the arts would not be a core subject and millions of students would have lost programs. We have to use all the tools in our tool chest including both the intrinsic and extrinsic value music and the arts provide to students. I wish this were not the case but as a full time music/arts education advocate for the last 25 years… this is the reality.
And by the way. Here is the justification for putting music into public education in the first place back in 1838:
“Public education in the United States first offered music as part of the curriculum in Boston in the 1830s, and it spread through the help of singing teacher Lowell Mason, after he successfully advocated it to the Boston School Committee in 1838. The committee ultimately decided to include music as a curricular subject because it was of a moral, physical, and intellectual nature. Music was considered moral because it played such a part in religion, as well as the fact that had been documented to produce “happiness, contentment, cheerfulness, and tranquility.” It was of a physical nature because singing was exercise for the lungs. The committee justified music’s intellectual nature by stating that it had been studied as a part of the quadrivium in the Middle Ages, and that it “contributes to memory, comparison, attention, and intellectual faculties.”[1] (p. 13-14).”
Looks like even when music education was first introduced the administration was interested in both the intrinsic and extrinsic values. Ignoring either makes no sense.
Perhaps if Reformers prove 440Hz increases intelligence we could pipe a concert A into every statehouse.
I also challenge the fact about it being a “universal truth that music and the arts are the first to go.” While there certainly have been cuts and the testing frenzy has reduced time for instruction there is no research to support this claim. Speak to our social studies colleagues and world languages. If we are going to be persuasive with decision makers we need to use facts and not hyperbole.
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
I strongly agree with this post. Music and the arts belong in the curriculum not because of some imagined benefit to math scores. We need to teach these topics because they have value in themselves.
Each of the arts has a different history, and a different history in public schools.
I think that readers of this blog should know that Bob Morrison has a long and distinguished history as an informed and super-savvy advocate for arts education.
He has designed and leveraged census-like research on access to instruction (better than data from the National Bureau of Education Statistics) to help policymakers make the case for music and arts programs for every child attending public schools.
In 2004 he led a California initiative based in a key document “The Sound of Silence: The Unprecedented Decline of Music Education in California Public Schools” that led to an initial $500 million reinvestment in music and arts education in public schools.
Prior to founding Quadrant Arts Education Research, Morrison served as the CEO of the VH1 Save The Music Foundation securing $25 million to restore more than 1200 instrumental music programs. He served as Executive Director of the American Music Conference, working with the late Michael Kamen and Richard Dreyfus to create the Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation.
Along the way, his savvy advocacy work has earned an EMMY, a Peabody Award and an honorary doctorate degree from the State University of New York.
Why bother with this resume? Bob Morrison knows that policies and practices must be sold, and that many people think arts education is in splendid shape when it is not…but can be made much better.
I hope Peter Greene will understand that the minute the arts enters a public school they have educational purposes or they are easily dismissed as a waste of time and money.
The most important purpose, first order, is securing time for teaching in the arts. If that is not front and center then policy makers will easily settle for incidental and ad hoc activities— little more than entertainment, a bonus, a frill, a luxury, a gig. Or they will tolerate, allow, permit the arts to enter schools if and only if they support and enhance other priorities.
Arts educators are aware that preserving the intrinsic values of art is NOT the hardest thing in the world to do if you can first get schools officials to honor and support the arts are worthy of study for all, not just the talented, not just the troubled, and not just to improve test scores in other subjects.
See more at: http://artsedresearch.typepad.com/quadrant/our-founder.html#sthash.EcBdxBoM.dpuf
I think what you say about activities that are “little more than entertainment” is true across the boards. I think the emphasis on “fun” in the classroom proceeds from a belief that education must be entertaining. I am certainly not opposed to its being entertaining, but that should not be the emphasis. When students come to expect everything to be “fun” they often dismiss what is not fun. Studying English for me was always fun, studying Math and Science was not, but I derived much value from pursuing my studies of them while in high school. I love play and play is an important aspect of life, but it is not the only thing that is important and if other lessons are not learned the amount of time that can be devoted fun and play will be substantially diminished over one’s lifetime.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Be that as it may, Laura, the bright picture he is painting of the state of arts education in the US is not what I’m seeing as a music teacher, nor what many of my music teacher colleagues are seeing in schools either.
In fact, Laura, on the link you provided, there’s a “newsfeed” on the right side whose contents as of this writing slant heavily toward arts *cuts*, not arts increases.
@crunchydeb… she posted an old link with a newsfeed from a few years ago. Proper link is here.
http://www.quadrantresearch.org/quadrant-ceo/
I am not painting a bright picture. I am painting an accurate picture based on data and facts. Notice I am not addressing quality since this is not something we can currently measure on a broad scale. But you cannot discuss quality until we have access so measuring access and participation tells us part of the story and that part of the story says the vast majority of students in the US have access to both music and visual art. I am open to any set of facts or data to the contrary. While you are on our site you may want to see all the state reports that support my position.
In my state, Louisiana, a conscious decision was made to not look at the effect of participation in band or choir on VAM scores. According to the VAM technical reports, that data is stripped from the data sets, so now we cannot know if band or choir yields more student growth in math and English according to the VAM. I strongly oppose VAM in teacher evaluations, and I think this shows that VAM has never been intended to find ways of improving student growth, but only to create teacher churn. (In our VAM system, the bottom ten percent of the stack-rank have been automatically declared ineffective in the past. Thankfully, that system has been modified recently.)
We had a state supervisor of music who wrote a dissertation showing that students who participated in band or choir had higher scores on average than their peers on our 8th grade state test. This held even for subgroups such and minority students and FRL. He did not establish causation, but his work begged for follow-up study. However, his supervisor position was eliminated shortly after he completed his work. (Shortly after the arrival of John White.)
Louisiana reformers seem to not want to look outside the tested subjects for possible ways to raise achievement. We could have the follow-up study simply by not stripping music class data from the sets and running a VAM score for students in music classes. How different would our schools be if those in power used VAM to study the effects of other in-school variables on student outcomes?
Diane,
I could not resist responding to this. Today we are dealing with several generations of people, including present day teachers, weaned on a diet of musical pablum that is tepid, puerile and lacking in depth. Much of today’s music is tasteless, with inane June/Spoon lyrics, coupled with crotch grabbing, rump gyrations, and sexually explicit moves on the part of the performers. It’s formulaic music of the worst kind, predictable and tiresome. Music teachers alone are staving off the demise of European culture, which has once again become the province of the wealthier class. It is rare to find an administrator
trained in the arts, so music and art teachers are at the mercy of uncultured louts at the helm. This is just another uncomfortable truth that you I’m sure you won’t like.
Ian
I have to say that in all of my many years of watching children’s musical performances, I have yet to see a student or teacher grab their crotch. It just would not fit in with the musical selections their teachers made. In what world do you find popular musical taste of the teenage population to be the fault of education? It seems to me that some part of the adult population has been scandalized by the musical tastes of their children for a long time? Wasn’t the waltz considered scandalous at one point? Music people, I am talking through my hat. How about someone who actually knows something taking a shot at this.
As an English teacher I see literature being squeezed out of the curriculum to make way for informational texts and “fact based reading.” My AP Language class is included in a Math Science Initiative grant because it helps to make science and math majors better writers. I was asked to help develop an English curriculum that would replace literature with science based readings. The issue of music is important, as is the issue of Art, Theater, and the rest of the “Arts” curriculum. But I think the problem is larger than this. As a nation we are culling from our public schools most things that contribute to the development of the imagination and the appreciation of beauty.
I like this passage from John Connolly’s “The Book of Lost Things”:
“’The stories in books hate the stories contained in newspapers,’ David’s mother would say. ‘Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They were like the street urchins hawking the evening editions all shouty and insistent, while stories – real stories, proper made-up stories – were like stern but helpful librarians in a well-stocked library. Newspaper stories were insubstantial as smoke, as long-lived as mayflies. They did not take root but were instead like weeds that crawled along the ground, stealing the sunlight from more deserving tales.’”
I think this captures the difference between “informational texts’ and real literature. Stop to think how information changes. I was taught that dinosaurs were lizards, that was information, that was a fact, but today I hear they are more like chickens. Will this fact still be a fact when kids today are my age. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t learn facts, only to say facts come and go and many do not hang around for very long.
I encourage students to consider these four things when reading a book:
Literature is inherently reflective – Reading encourages us to reflect on our own lives, the lives of those around us, and on the world in which we live.
Literature develops the imagination – The imagination translates the words on the page into images and actions, people and places, ideas and concepts. It also brings the consequences of the things that are done into focus.
Literature helps define for us our values – Through the actions of characters and the consequences of those actions values such as honor, courage, and integrity are given substance as are also “the evil” that people do, things like dishonor, cowardice, and deceit.
Literature develops empathy – To read well we must empathize with those depicted in the literature (whether it is fiction or non-fiction there are people we must care about if the text is to resonate with us). As a result we are able to see the world through the eyes of others and better understand points of view that are different from our own and why those views are held.
I ended a blog I wrote once with:
Flowers do not really serve a purpose in a utilitarian sense. They are not a source of food (they can be I suppose, but their nutritional value is limited), they do not keep out the wind or the sun, they are not much good for anything other than to look at. They are beautiful. They add color to a drab world. Some of us buy flowers and put them on our tables. Others look at those who buy flowers as foolish, as the flowers cost money, sometimes a lot of money (many in Holland became bankrupt when the tulip market crashed). But they offer little in the way of a material return on the investment. They last a week or so and then must be thrown away and replaced. When Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with oil she was criticized because the oil was expensive and it could have been sold to buy food to feed the poor. But Jesus called it a beautiful thing. For those that appreciate it, beauty brings healing, it opens the heart and mind to forces in the universe that are greater than the material objects that surround us, greater than what the senses alone can perceive. Whether one is religious or not beauty helps us escape ourselves and points us to wisdom. The presence of beauty in the world suggests we were not placed here solely to earn our bread by the sweat of our brow. If it does nothing else it reminds us that pleasure is a part of life and that part of our purpose here is to experience joy and delight.
I believe music, art, literature, theater and the rest offer us something beautiful that is transcendent, but to comprehend what beauty does for us you must recognize the aesthetic difference between a forest and a parking structure.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
Excellent post; I agree 100%. Sometimes in my English class, when we have finished reading a poem or story out loud, the students will actually applaud. Countless students have been touched, moved and/or inspired by the literature read in class or films viewed; they are always looking for role models and “life lessons”; here they have found them
This has been my experience. Even when students do not read the books, they are moved by the discussions and recognize some of the larger issues raised and understand a bit why people have been reading these books for many years, in some case hundreds and thousands of years. Where most of the facts the ancient Greeks believed are seen as foolishness today, Homer’s poetry is still revered.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
“I believe music, art, literature, theater and the rest offer us something beautiful that is transcendent, but to comprehend what beauty does for us you must recognize the aesthetic difference between a forest and a parking structure. ”
Perfect close to an insightful post.
And how does one measure “transcendence?”
I hope you were being sarcastic.
Well said. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot,” indeed.