News New Mexico: Music Matters - So Do Other "Activities"

Del Hanson

Years ago, my grandfather, father and I were trying to pull a corner post out of a fence line on the ranch with our 1966 Chevy pick-up. We wrapped it up real tight with a logging chain and put the hook on our rear bumper. Dad gunned the truck and we watched as that old corner post stayed standing and rear bumper clunked to the hard-packed earth. We looked at each other in silence, and then my grandfather broke the tension with a laugh and said, “Well, I guess we just ain’t that smart.” A study conducted by the American College Testing program a few years ago posed a series of questions to high school seniors taking the test. They were searching for the best predictor of future success in life as determined by the controlled situation in high school and standardized testing.

The study would establish whether having A. a high grade point average in high school, B. a high grade point average in college, C. a high score on the ACT test, or D. taking a meaningful series of electives in high school and being successful in them would be the best predictor of future success. The entire premise of the ACT and SAT exams is to predict potential success in college. The results were interesting.

Meanwhile, in our public schools, operating under the ominous shadow of No Child Left Behind, administrators and teachers chase the elusive rainbow that is AYP. To reach this ever-escalating proficiency, schools, by law, must provide students with tutoring and transfers to passing schools. As Diane Ravitch points out in her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School system: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, the central points underlying the massive education bill don’t work. It has been a dud and is getting worse. Ravitch, by the way, was the assistant Secretary of Education in the Bush administration. She helped implement NCLB and by 2005 had determined it was failing. How ironic. However, the bill still exacts a lethal stranglehold on school districts, and to appease the testing gods, principals and curriculum advisors require students not proficient on the exams to be yanked from class and provided “extra help.” Some of this “extra help” can be beneficial, but often it is grindingly tedious worksheet or computer practice, sometimes taught by persons not certified in the area being reviewed.

The results of the ACT inquiry discovered that the best determination of whether a student achieves success in later life is D., taking a series of meaningful electives in high school and being successful in them. Mentioned most often were music courses, but also athletics, art, and drama. Students who take music are more likely to succeed, stay in school, achieve high grades, graduate, stay out of trouble, have better reading comprehension and speed, do better in foreign language classes, and get along better with peers. Students yanked out of classes and forced into numbingly boring remediation due to poor exam achievement, are most often taken out of elective classes. Music is an elective. Although taking music is one of the best, if not the best, predictor of future success, schools diminish, curtail, or cancel music in lieu of providing basic remediation. We are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I will make a bold statement that I think I can back up: there are no great schools which do not also possess great music programs. There may good music programs which exist in spite of a poor school, succeeding out of instructor tenacity, but great schools have great music programs. Why then do superintendents and school boards weaken or diminish music programs through funding cuts and personnel reductions? Why does elementary music gravitate to the top of the list when cuts are announced? I believe it happens out of abject ignorance. It is just dumb, but dumb decisions have become so commonplace that we almost expect them. Every decision made in every public school district must be predicated on one and only one idea: is it good for kids? Not good for school boards. Not good for superintendents. Not good for district report cards to the legislature. Not good for P.R. Not good for salaries. Is it good for kids? If not, then don’t do it. Period. It seems decisions are made on a daily basis which do not benefit kids. Eliminating music programs hurts kids.

A friend of mine who was an amazing teacher and administrator in Clovis, New Mexico, once made an astute observation of a group of sixty choir students as they stood on the risers. He said, “This may be the only time in their lives that all these kids, some black, some white, some Hispanic, some rich, some poor, some from good families, some not, some tall, some short, will be absolutely equal and treated the same.” He was right. Music and athletics in our schools teach so much more than practicing the clarinet or running plays. They teach about life. It is something paper and pencil jobs can’t assess.

I hear all manners of excuses made for NCLB from apologists on both sides of the political aisle. There may have been some good premises for the law in the beginning. But what it has morphed into is a monstrosity that has sucked precious resources from the classroom and reallocated them to testing companies with no particular interest in children except that they are a means to their end of making a profit for their company. Testing companies don’t care what happens to any particular child. They are just doing their job. Teaching is more than people just doing the job. Educators are in the people business, or at least used to be before short-term assessment and data analysis became more important than connecting with kids. The last I checked, children are people. Instead, they have recently become statistical inferences and trends. Inferences and trends don’t have a heartbeat and feelings and emotions. Schools that have vibrant and flourishing music, art, and athletic programs also excel at academics. Coincidence? Not hardly. Why then do we chip away and weaken the very programs that enhance and bolster student learning and school participation? Well, I guess we just ain’t that smart.”