Abstract
I see that the results of the 2016 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assessment in music and art have been released, and I would like to share a few observations. I’m speaking as one who has been closely involved with NAEP since before it existed. I attended the meeting of education associations in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1968 at which Ralph Tyler—probably the nation’s leading authority on educational assessment at the time—described a proposed plan for what would eventually become NAEP. I was involved at every stage of the first music assessment, in 1972, including planning, item writing, developing scoring criteria, and interpretation, and I have been involved since as well.
To begin, I am both amused and offended by the egregious ignorance reflected in the claim that there have been only three NAEP assessments in the arts—in 1997, 2008, and 2016. The truth is that the 1971–72 assessment was the only serious effort in the history of NAEP to assess music and art. It didn’t do all that we arts educators wanted, but it was a monumental step forward.
In 1971–72, kids actually sang and played instruments. They actually created and improvised music. Their responses were recorded and later evaluated by carefully trained scorers. This was a far-reaching and comprehensive assessment, and the results offered a valid and meaningful perspective of music education in America. But it costs money, and the three subsequent arts assessments have been pale shadows of the one completed in 1972. They have all been stunningly incomplete and pitifully inadequate. After all, when you ignore performance entirely and deal with creativity only in a sketchy and perfunctory way, what you have left is scarcely a valid portrayal of the full, magnificent reality of music education.
I am also amused and offended by the summary finding that the results in music show no progress since 2008. The implication is that music education is stagnant and going nowhere.
First of all, as noted, this assessment dealt with only a miniscule slice of the dazzling scope of what music educators do. When you include only a trivial smattering of paper-and-pencil items, you fail miserably to provide a meaningful picture of the breadth and vitality of American music education. This assessment can report only changes in kids’ responses to this tiny handful of items and nothing more. No sweeping generalizations are justified. These findings are so superficial as to be almost laughable.
Second, as for the claim that there has been no progress since 2008, what can one expect under the circumstances? In 2008, the United States suffered its greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and schools were affected disproportionately. At least half of the states have still not returned to their 2008 levels of per-pupil expenditures for K–12 education. And music programs may have suffered disproportionately, though I’ve seen no figures on this.
Third, the lack of progress in music may simply reflect the lack of resources available to music teachers and the lack of comprehensive curricula in music. If we take seriously our National Music Standards defining what kids should know and be able to do, then schools must provide the necessary time, materials, equipment, and teachers to do the job. Any shortcomings may not be the fault of music teachers but rather the fault of school systems. In one report I saw, the progress in music was compared unfavorably to the progress in math. Is it possible that more effort and more resources have been devoted in recent years to making progress in math than to making progress in music?
If the results from NAEP or state assessments are to be taken at face value, there are three conditions that must be met: (1) Every teacher must be given the time and resources necessary to do his or her job properly, (2) the socioeconomic status of the students and their readiness for learning must be taken into account, and (3) the assessment instruments must be reliable and valid. Currently we’re nowhere near meeting any of those criteria.
Finally, if NAEP is to be useful in music and art, it must give up trying to measure short-term gains, such as those between 2008 and 2016, and devote its limited resources instead to measuring long-term gains. Granted, the data from 1971–72 are obsolete today, but even so, I would be more interested in knowing how today’s results compare with those of twenty or even thirty years ago than in knowing how they compare with those of eight years ago. If NAEP wants valid and helpful results in music, it will have to commit the necessary funds to measure performance and creativity at least as well as it did in 1971–72, and this will mean doing so less often.
In my view, the 1971–72 results represented a milestone in music education, and I regret that those results appear to have been erased completed from the memory of NAEP.