Abstract
Some Concerns about the Core Standards
The September 2014 MEJ introduction of the 2014 Core Standards (CSs) by Scott Shuler and Martin Norgaard caused me some concerns. When the CSs came out in June, I downloaded and compared them with the 1994 National Standards (NSs), and was surprised by how much the two standards differed. The CSs were not simply a refinement, as I had heard they would be. Whereas the NSs focused on a comprehensive array of goals for student acquisition of concrete musical skills, the CSs focus on a prescriptive list of processes that students should think about. The NSs gave expected outcomes and let teachers decide how to accomplish them. The CSs tell teachers what to do, but do not give specific expected musical outcomes, only that students be engaged in the processes. The most puzzling difference is the complete absence in CSs of any reference to the musical skills of singing or playing, the fundamentals of music-making! The CSs focus on what students think about music, not what they can do with music.
I can see that the CSs, as Shuler writes, “authentically [reflect] the discipline of music” (p. 41), but it seems the important word is “reflect” rather than “discipline of music.” The CSs indeed focus on getting students to reflect, i.e., think about music, rather than make music. Shuler states that teachers who aligned “their curricula and instruction with the [NSs] and empowered their students to function with some degree of musical independence” (p. 41) would find it easy to adjust to the CSs. I was one of those teachers, but I wouldn’t find it remotely easy to teach to the CSs if I were still teaching. Throughout my forty-year career, I was less interested in what students could reflect on (e.g., how the clarinet works), than I was in what they could do with the instrument to make beautiful music. I have never believed my job was to prepare students to just think about music in the abstract, but to both make music in concrete ways and think about what they are doing, which must take place to reach the highest levels of musicality.
The framers of the CSs seem to value abstract thought over technical skill. I agree with Schuler that focusing narrowly on technique and notation would not be a good thing. I made sure my students had meaningful experiences in all nine of the NSs. Many music educators have shied away from composition/improvisation, mainly because these took so much time and educators had little training in them. My students, even at the kindergarten level, were able to improvise and compose. I never encountered a music teacher who confined instruction, as Shuler states, “narrowly on technical skills and notation” (p. 41). It indeed takes a village of broad skills to make music: listening skills, evaluating skills, skills of relating to all sorts of humans and human experiences. Any teacher weak enough to teach as narrowly as Shuler suggests would have had to do so by ignoring the broad goals of the NSs.
The CSs rely on the constructivist approach, asking even very young children to give their opinions about music. While I believe there are useful places for a constructivist approach, I agree with Kodály that the children need to learn some basic musical vocabulary, listen to a great deal of music, and be involved in many musical activities before they have sufficient experience to construct their own ideas. If our goal was to teach the Mandarin language rather than music, would it be logical to start by asking preschoolers what they thought about Mandarin? Would we ask elementary children to create their own phrases and sentences in Mandarin and express them in Chinese writing? That scenario is absurd: How can children be expected to have skills in something they’ve never experienced before? While some children enter school with a rich background of musical experiences, many come from families with little musical involvement. Like Johann Pestalozzi, I believe school music needs to give children direct observation and experience with music before asking them to reflect.
In the second section, Martin Norgaard tells of two hypothetical bands at contest, and asserts that the band that may have been taught under the CSs reads notation better than the band taught otherwise. How did those students learned to read so well if the teacher didn’t devote at least some time to technical skills and reading notation? Norgaard asks if playing already-composed music is creative and concludes that it is not under the NSs, but would be under the CSs, because the teacher asks for student input, rather than tells them everything. I beg to differ! It’s not the NSs causing a problem—it’s poor teaching style. I taught with the Socratic approach for many years under the NSs, drawing their thoughts out and experimenting with their ideas—from choosing the music we performed to making group decisions about musical nuances of tempo, dynamic balance, phrase shaping, etc. (See my 1998 MEJ article, “Would Better Questions Enhance Music Learning?”) Yet, I wouldn’t call this creative compared with students’ making up their own music and going through all the thinking and decision-making involved in composition. I agree with Norgaard that the CSs look messy, but I have greater concerns.
It is important for any profession to have one or more organizing philosophies to guide and align the professional activities toward common goals. These philosophies need to be grounded in actual practice and what can be accomplished under given conditions. With their emphasis on creativity, the CSs lack understanding of the given condition that schools do not allocate much time for music instruction. Most schools schedule students for one or two music classes a week, sometimes once every eight or 10 days, usually for 25–35 minutes. The typical school year lasts thirty-nine weeks, but children often miss music class due to testing (which seems to be taking more and more time away from instruction every year), fire/lockdown drills, sick days, field trips, and assemblies. The strategies suggested in the CSs demand a huge amount of attention to individual students and cannot be realistically accomplished in large classes, yet districts often put 30–35 students in a class. Many CSs tasks require the teacher to work individually with students as they compose. In practice, this is impossible in public schools, however desirable it may seem in the abstract. What do the framers of the CSs suggest be done with the other twenty-nine students in the room (who won’t be sitting quietly) while the teacher works with one individual?
The CSs would also be difficult to implement for other reasons. Many schools have huge annual turnover—30 to 50 percent—that makes sequential building of concepts and skills much more difficult than for a stable school populations. Some students are placed in music class for its social-inclusion value, regardless of their ability to comprehend the music lesson or participate. Many CSs assignments are too difficult for certain students and would embarrass frustrate, and demoralize them. Many of the goals are not realistically achievable by the majority of students. The composition expectations for students in grades 6–8 would be difficult for college theory students. While asking too little of students wastes their potential, asking too much destroys their self-confidence and leads to all kinds of discipline problems. The emphasis on process plays down the childhood need to participate in active music-making. Children like to learn new ideas and skills. They want to increase their understanding and mastery over the world. Children enjoy listening and moving to music, singing and playing music, as well as making up their own music and learning about music in different cultures and throughout history. A well-balanced, child-centered music program is a strong program. The CSs overlook the need for balance and asks children to think as if they were adults, which their brains are not yet equipped to do.
In so many expectations of the CSs, the framers tried to come up with a small variation at each grade level to simulate progress, but learning music does not proceed in such neat, artificial boxes. Much layering takes place in teachable moments depending on the literature being learned and the abilities and interest of the students. Learning does not proceed from one cell in a grid neatly to the next cell—many skills and concepts need reinforcing in subsequent years. Teachers don’t need a straightjacket of proscribed “progress”—inventing engaging lessons is already difficult enough.
I did a careful line-by-line analysis and put together a summary of how the CSs correlate with 1994 National Standards in Music Education:
I spoke of these concerns with NAfME president Glenn Nierman at the Port Alegre conference of the International Society for Music Education this summer, and he assured me that plans were under way to combine the two sets of standards. This would make a powerful blended focus of practical outcomes guided by suggested processes. The NSs needed help with processes; the CSs need grounding in rigorous, yet accomplishable musical skills. Before the CSs are fully implemented, we need to flesh out a scope and sequence of how they could be implemented in schools. Finally, evaluation tools need to be developed that accurately assesses student progress in developing music skills and concepts. The CSs are not ready to implement as they are, but can be an important addition to the National Standards that have guided our profession for the past twenty years.