Mead is dubious about the idea that music appreciation is a worthwhile educational goal. She puts “creativity” in quotes, as if it weren’t a real, teachable thing. She suggests that memorizing key artists and composers, vocabulary, and historical periods will build students’ “cultural literacy.” Unspoken: These items are easy to fit into a standardized, machine-scored test, unlike “subjective” human evaluation of student performances, products and understanding.
Key point: Why would we deliberately advance a ques- tionable (and expensive-to-develop) mode of assessment for something as crucial to kids’ well-being and our own economic vitality as the arts?
The humanities are a creative wellspring for individual and social innovation. They cannot--and should never be--re- duced to rote, bubbled-in recitation of dry facts. What most standardized testing in music and the arts yields is mere quantification of students’ ability to memorize. The tests tell us nothing about how students will apply artistic skill and expression to their real lives and careers. Further—and this point has become increasingly important--they tell us nothing about the instructional quality of their teachers.
Why is this so difficult for policy-makers to understand? Didn’t any of them play in the school orchestra or sing in the chorus of “Annie Get Your Gun?”
Let’s start by debunking this myth: Standardized testing in the arts should be applauded because investment in test development means arts teachers might get to keep their jobs. This is like saying thank goodness for all those infarc- tions, because now we can staff our high-tech cardiac unit. Setting information-replication tests into concrete will only make it easier to package and standardize bunch-of-facts arts curricula for broad dispersal--perhaps on-line--com- pletely avoiding “ineffective,” time-consuming practices like singing together, rhythmic movement games, free- range dancing, playing the bassoon or putting on a show.
Besides, the arts have been considered dispensable, fringe disciplines by educational reductionists for a long time, well before compulsive standardized testing and the Com- mon Core State Standards. Tests won’t preserve the things that make the arts essential in human expression--and may well hasten their demise in the curricular pantheon, crushing them by turning vibrant culture into flat pellets of knowledge.
Says Mead: Arts and music instruction in our schools has often ignored cultural literacy and key concepts in favor of performance and “creativity.”
I’d like to assure Mead that cultural literacy is alive and
well in high-quality music programs, and goes far deeper than knowing names of major composers, historical pe- riods in Western music and components of theory. Good music teachers connect music to social movements, the physical properties of sound, theories of self-critique, and communication in a completely new, aural language. They teach analysis, application, purpose and relevance of music construction—i.e., theory and composition--and, in the pro- cess, genuine appreciation, a word that means a great deal more than being free to “like” something.
Music teachers do put an emphasis on performance. The primary reason is because doing something is the quickest way to engage students--and music teachers don’t get a lot of instructional time. I don’t know many music teachers who wouldn’t rather teach harmonic improvisation than sit in the bleachers on frigid Friday nights with the marching band--but performances are how we connect to the com- munity. Good music curriculum is built almost entirely on using the tools, history and language of music to create something new--a new song, a new level of performance, a new source of joyful expression.
Music educators need to ask: Why should students care about this?
If the answer is “so they can pass the test,” we’re not de- scribing first-rate music curriculum or instruction.
What I know as a music assessment specialist: We measure what we value. We can shoot to expand teachers’ own as- sessment literacy in the arts. We can enhance their instruc- tional and curricular repertoires. But we won’t raise teach- ing quality in the arts by creating standardized tests.
So how do we measure learning in the arts, if we don’t use some kind of standardized assessment?
First, two critical observations:
Nobody is suggesting that learning in arts education can’t or shouldn’t be assessed. The arts are not too creative/expressive/ethereal/woo-woo for teachers to properly evaluate what their students have produced and learned. Assessing learning in the arts is precisely how students grow in arts knowledge and skill--with the assistance of their teachers, who use those assess- ments to tailor and improve their instruction as well.
The contention that we can’t measure something un- less we standardize it is driving a whole lot of truly damaging, excessive and deceptive testing right now, and not just in the arts. How many times have we heard this: “If we don’t use standardized tests, how
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