Since many young people are graduating from college right now, pretty close to their 22nd birthdays, we take a quick trip back into the archives of school news to the hot month of June 1991. It was so hot, in fact, that schools in Washington, D.C., simply told students they didn’t have to come in for the last few days of the scheduled school year. The weather this summer seems stormier than usual.
Now, this is only a blog post, so we’ll only look at a few details that touched our lives tangentially. The stories still show, however, that things really haven’t changed all that much. For example, kids in Baltimore County, Md., complained last month to the school board that they were sweltering and unable to focus in their hot elementary school classrooms, and Chicago teachers went on strike at the beginning of the year over many principles, one of which was the lack of air conditioning in their buildings. In schools 22 years ago, we would’ve just sent the sweaty kids home before they fainted, but in 2013, providing kids with every possible minute of instruction is the order of the day, regardless of the heat.
And things haven’t changed much in music classrooms, either. One junior high school band director in Boston, whose group played “Hail to the Chief!” to welcome President George HW Bush to their school—in tune too, which is no small feat for junior high bands—said budget cuts were forcing the school’s music programs to become after-school activities for which students would have to pay participation fees. According to a published report in the Boston Globe, the president said the song was music to his ears, but the paper editorialized: “Because we live in both a state and a nation that have given public education the back of their hands, the band that played for the president may not have much of a future.”
“We have to show that the more creative our children are, the higher skilled a work force they become, the more money they make, the more they can pump into retirement and Social Security,” the Globe quoted Michael Persico, the director of the first middle school band to welcome a sitting president with “Hail to the Chief!” at Mashpee Middle School, as saying.
The school was losing its industrial arts and home economics programs as well, and while it’s difficult to track kids who went to middle school 22 years ago, we have to assume most of them came out just fine. Today, schools in Philadelphia are facing similar budgetary challenges. Music, art, and athletic programs will be cut from every public school in the city if the district doesn’t come up with something close to $304 million soon. The schools could also lose guidance counselors, nurses, support staff including teacher assistants and assistant principals, and money for classroom supplies.
In an open letter to the schools, members of the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra begged the School District of Philadelphia not to cut music programs:
We are talking about our collective soul and humanity. In the life of the musical mind, in the process of learning to play an instrument, a new expression to one’s “voice,” as well as a new joy in the collective making-music process, comes to light. We are about to deny that opportunity for a whole swath of population for the next generation. One of the nuances of music-making is discovering how to translate the sound of an instrument into ideas and images, and the reverse process of translating ideas and images back into sound. For example, as one progresses in music-making, one discovers that the tremolando of the bow on stringed instruments can be a stream of light through a cloud, a shiver or nervous fear before a coming storm. … This is a sweeping statement, but one I firmly believe to be true: To deny the opportunity to explore this musical poetry with our youth is to deny our full humanity as civilized beings.
In June 1991, the annual conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League opened in Chicago. Attendees considered, among other topics, how best to prioritize spending to introduce young people to the symphony. Yes, they also held symposiums about the place of contemporary music and pre-16th-century music in orchestra repertoires, but one Chicago Symphony Orchestra trustee talked about how it might be more beneficial to spend money on supporting music classes and performances in students’ own schools and neighborhoods than on “youth concerts” at Orchestra Hall.
“This is a far more serious problem than it was last year, when I thought it was serious enough,” the Chicago Sun-Times quoted Ellen Harris, former chair of the University of Chicago’s Department of Music, as saying. “States are cutting budgets. We’re losing teachers, losing programs and increasing class sizes. It is a situation in which it almost becomes a civic responsibility for the symphony orchestras to do something.”
