School accountability, meet the new music advocacy

(Nov 21)—Christopher Woodside, assistant executive director for the National Association for Music Education, presented a webinar earlier this evening, describing the highlights of the association’s new campaign, called “Beyond the Bubbles,” for advocating music education programs in K-12 schools.

He maintained that music educators, as much as any administrator or other teacher, support the accountability movement and back it with full force. He did say, however, that music teachers, given the amount of dedication they show to their students, the months they can spend working on a single piece, and their unwillingness to accept failure, probably serve more as model teachers from which others can learn more about truly engaging students.

“The real underreported crisis of the current education reform movement is that great kids are all too often getting ‘lost’ in the maze of high-stakes testing. … All too often, (music is) taking a back seat to math and reading assessment, and that’s wrong,” the organization wrote to promote the webinar.

The new campaign, which should hit schools in a few weeks through state associations or the national office in Reston, Va., comes with bright printed material and a Windows 8-like landing page on the website, complete with tiles featuring the different talking points for music education. The message is that kids are “more than their scores,” and the marketing pokes fun at reducing students or teachers to scores on standardized tests with a poster that has a treble clef sign made out of colored-in scan-tron bubbles.

During the webinar, Mr Woodside explained the big push behind the Beyond the Bubbles campaign: replacing arguments that weakly promoted music education with fresh ones that are likely to be more effective with most audiences. The old, worn-out arguments about music study enhancing other academic areas, such as spatial reasoning, language processing, GPA, for example, have been bumped into a secondary status.

“Far too often, music educators are arguing for the value of a classroom music education based on criteria such as how music benefits learning in other subjects and even how it helps to better prepare kids for Common Core testing,” the organization said. “Music education should be, first and foremost, about the joy of experiencing and performing music, and NAfME’s new ‘Beyond the Bubbles’ campaign is aimed at reminding advocates of exactly that.”

I never liked those arguments, anyway, since I believed they put music in second place, after algebra or whatever other subject music supposedly enhanced. Music should always be on equal footing with any other subject, I have always maintained, so the argument that schools should continue to offer music in order to improve students’ scores in algebra never held any weight with me.

Besides, there’s the whole correlation-vs-causation abuse of this argument, which Mr Woodside, in a one-hour presentation, failed to mention.

Furthermore, music isn’t the only thing that correlates with enhanced reading or math performance, the linchpins of the Common Core, now adopted in a majority of states. Physical education, for example, has been shown to correlate with academic success. Mr Woodside said he wouldn’t want to force a choice between music and any other subject, since music offers value in its own way.

He also mentioned that the STEAM movement—science, technology, engineering, math, and the arts, where arts are always considered sort of an add-on rather than part of the core—has been incorrectly emphasized in several places where it is being used. The STEAM movement and these other “inside the bubble” arguments have their place, with certain audiences, he said, but as a general rule, the first line of argument should come from a set of new ideas the association believes put the correct emphasis on music education and the education of whole children.

Instead of using “inside the bubble” arguments with school administrators, board members, or legislators, he recommended looking at music education for its own sake. It gives students grit, because there’s often a long process of rehearsal, failure, more rehearsal, and finally the finished product. Along the way, it provides students with real-life experiences that help them understand processes and make adaptations to processes on the fly. And it can help kids “find themselves” during a formative time in their development, he said, by allowing them to explore the world and their place in it, creatively using information that goes far beyond the limits of language or even mathematics and collaborating with other individuals.