Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

Budget Cuts in Music Education Tyler J. Goehring The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

Introduction: Music has always been a large part of my life. Although my first experience playing music came when I was in the fourth grade, I had grown up listening to music from almost every genre because my Mom was always listening to some music. My elementary school offered instrumental music lessons once a week and a string orchestra and a band and chorus. At the beginning of the fourth grade, we went to the auditorium and saw a small presentation on musical instruments. The music teacher had a large table set up full of all kinds of instruments. At the end, we were given a sheet of paper that had all of the offered instruments and we were told to circle the one we wanted to play, if any, and have our parents sign it and return it to her by the following week. I was very interested in my heritage at this point in my life. I was doing a project on my Irish half for history and it seemed extremely interesting. I decided to play the violin because it is used a lot in Irish music. I really liked the way the violin sounded and the way it connected with my heritage. I played the violin until the tenth grade and I really enjoyed playing but, I had lacked confidence in my preforming ability. Once I made it into the seventh and eighth grade, we had to audition at the beginning of every semester to be seated. People are seated, in an orchestra, by their playing ability. Once a week we had challenge days where we would play in front of th e entire orchestra to try and out do the person sitting in front of you so that you could move up a chair. I always attempted to challenge the person in front of me; However, I lacked confidence in my ability so every time I got up to play I would begin to shake from the nervousness. I improved slightly over this period because I always was attempting to challenge myself. By the ninth grade I began taking private lessons from a teacher outside of the school program. I learned a lot about the basics and began to solidify my musical knowledge. At the end
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

of ninth grade I was approached by my orchestra director and asked if I wanted to learn the viola. There were only five violas at the time compared to the thirty violins. I decided this was a good way to just experiment and enjoy something new. My private instructor was a violist but she taught violin so when I told her I was going to switch completely over to viola she was excited. She began to challenge me with music. When I went back after the summer had gone by I had improved a lot as a musician. When we auditioned for seating I had gotten second chair and I had beaten three people who had played since fourth grade. I then continued to work hard and by the eleventh grade I was first chair. My senior year I was second chair. Outside of the orchestra classroom I have had the opportunity to play at the PMEA (Pennsylvania Music Educators Association) District orchestra twice and the region orchestra once. My senior year I also had the opportunity to play with the Pittsburgh Symphony in a Side-by-Side program. My experiences in public music education have changed the way I view music and education. As a participant in this system and as an aspiring music educator, I have a strong opinion that music needs to remain in school systems. I have seen how it can help students, such as myself, develop excellence in other areas of education. I also believe that string education is just as important as band oriented instruments. I have gone to my high school board meetings with the attempts to get a new teacher hired after one of the teachers retired. This research is directed towards those who have an opinion on music education in schools and have interest in how string education fits among this age of budget cuts. My research is going to focus on how to maintain music education, why maintaining music in school systems is important, and how string education is under emphasized within the music world. Literature Review:
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

Music pulls students young students out of the classroom and reduces instructional time for other more core classes. Music is not necessary to achieve proficien cy on state standardized tests. Music takes students focus away from core learning subjects. Who needs music in schools? If they want to play music they can find teachers outside of the school. If they are interested in it, they will seek opportunities outside of the school day. So why should we not cut music? All of these, I have personally heard directed towards students and teachers alike by other teachers, guidance counselors, school board officials and even friends. How do you respond to these questions? How can one persons word or reasoning change one everyones mind towards music? Is it possible? There are several options. Building a strong, developing music program will help to bring children closer to music. Before you start the music program, a starting age must be set. This is a critical step. If you start children to early they could become frustrated because they cannot physically do something on the instrument. If children start late they could feel defeated by children their age playing at a far higher level. Early or late starting ages can led to children quitting early and not continuing music. The retention of students in music after their first year is important in creating a growing music department. The performance ability of students beginning at a variety of ages shows that kids who start strings in the fourth grade out preform students who start in the sixth grade (Hartley& Porter, 2009). Can learning be active and yet instructive? In my opinion, it must be to keep the focus of students and to keep the mind wondering because curiosity leads to excellent questions which help learning. By including children in their own learning they become excited to try new and learn new things. When students become involved, they often bring their parents into their learning. Watching a child master something that has challenged them for some time can lead parents to defend the subject (Feldstein, 2006). The flow of music and its preservation begins
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

with the educators and spreads to the children who chose to learn instruments, specifically strings, and it spreads again to the family members of the children (American String Teacher Association, 2010). Parents are influence by their childs likes and dislikes. I have seen many parents go to sporting events simply because their child was in the event and not because they enjoyed the sport. Parents enjoy watching their child grow. Advocacy for music is critical. Advocating for music is the only way to prevent budget cuts. Although many believe that the idea of keeping music or history of the program will save it, it often does not and it is cut before people realize. Advocacy groups are key, in many cases, to preventing budget cuts. The center of these should be the music educators but, they must include parents and past students because these are the people who are connected very tightly for a purpose other than a job (Benham, 2011). Enter the Conversation: The process of advocation has saved many programs across the country and prevented major cuts that could destroy a program (Benham, 2011). However, the way advocation is displayed has led to some misleading assumptions. Advocacy for music programs normally only occur when some cut is proposed or a teacher is retiring and is not going to be replaced. This panic to save programs has caused many to believe that advocacy is only used to save a program and that many have just disappeared. The media has recently spoken about the disappearance of music from schools rather than the successes or the existence of programs across the country. The way music is being advocated for has caused a misconception by allowing the public to believe that music education is dwindling because of using only terms such as budget cuts rather than allowing more positive terms to surface. Dialogic exchanges between administrators, the pubic and educators will help
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

to see what makes music important and make it easier to preserve (Slaton 2012). Music advocacy needs to begin before the cuts are proposed in order to be successful otherwise people are fighting a tide as it has already hit them. This is why advocacy must being immediately to produce and maintain good programs. Music is not necessary to achieve proficiency on state standardized tests. Music takes students focus away from core learning subjects. These are just two of the many excuses people use to justify the cutting of music budgets or removal of the entire program. Music needs to be seen as a dynamic subject that may experience budget cuts but, the program will continue and it will continue to teach students music. Playing an instrument opens kids to the idea of learning and it makes it easier to teach them new ideas and topics. Incorporating music into education can incorporate a more holistic approach that makes learning more than a sum of its parts. Rather than learning history to learn history, you can apply it to music and learn about a composing period and why music developed that way because of the events that were occurring (Brown, 2008). When people are interested in a subject it makes it easier to learn. When you can that one subject to a variety of others it makes it much easier to learn the subject because you are interested in it. Musics fundamental nature makes it a holistic subject. You cannot have a piece of beautiful music without intonation, rhythm, balance, theory, dynamics and more. Music is one of the few subjects that is actually approached in this manner. Students learn rhythm, dynamics and intonation. They then learn how to incorporate these into the music and how balance and the theory build the music. When you change any of these you can get a new style of music. Once students are captured by their first performance, it makes them want to continue to learn the new styles and new pieces of music. Budget cuts in the Music programs affect other aspects of education which are often unseen. When a music class or teacher, that had a large number of students, is cut, the students
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

must be place somewhere else. Where do these students get placed? They will end up in other classes. This then raises the demands of those classes and teachers and adds stress to more people. So although you removed a part of the budget, now you have to compete to find room for those students (Benham, n.d.). Large class numbers makes it harder for students to get individualized attention and this creates a problem for the teacher because they must attempt to get all of the information to all of the students. It also creates problems for students because there is no longer any recognition of any problems they have or any personal feedback. These factors led to a subpar education for the students. The percent to student that pass state standardized testing will fall and this will result in the need to hire more teachers to help these students achieve proficiency. Schools, by attempting to cut music, raise the stress on other teachers causing a need for additional teachers to teach the classes. This is reverse economics (Benham, n.d.). So What? Why music? It is necessary because it can provide a more holistic approach to the world of education. This could help to engage children with this interest. This would also aid their learning and the retention of knowledge that is tested in state standardized tests. Education should not be a regurgitation of information for the test but, rather information that says with the student and is useful. In order to sustain the music it is necessary to encourage the growth of professional skills that music teaches. These professional skills are any skills that can translate into careers such as confidence and a sense of self. These are unlike the life skills like math or reading that are important so that people can do them whenever they need them (Wood, 2012). Specifically, independence is taught through music because each persons sound effects the whole they must be able to be independent of other sections to stay together and have a blending
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Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

sound. Although independence is just one of many professional skills, it proves that these are skills that are learned through music and can easily be transferred into life. In order to continue to advocate for music, there is some future research that must occur. A future area of research needs to be into whether students who learn subjects holistically score better on standardized tests and remember the information longer than students who do not? This is a specifically important topic because it can help education in all areas improve and work on tying all subjects together to make it easier to learn. The topic of reverse economics is extremely powerful for advocation purposes. Further research should be done on this topic to see if when Music is cut entirely if new teachers get hired to teach the students or if class sizes rise. This could then be compared with how large student to teacher ratio students do on standardized tests compared to low student to teacher ratio students.

Running head: BUDGET CUTS IN MUSIC EDUCATION

REFERENCE LIST American String Teacher Association. (2010). The future of strings: a green paper prepared for americans for the arts. Retrieved October 3, 2013, from the American String Teacher Association web page: http://www.astaweb.com/App_Themes/Public/Uploads/PDF/AmericanStringTeac hersAssociation_GreenPaper.pdf Benham, J. (n.d.). Defending music programs with economic analysis. Retrieved October 3, 2013, from: http://www.cmebc.org/resources/defending Benham, J. (2011). Music advocacy : Moving from survival to vision. Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield Education. Brown, R. (2008). The value of music education in public schools. [Youtube video]. Retrieved October 1, 2013, from website: http://www.make-music-better.com/musiceducation-resources.html#I Feldstein, S. (2006). How can music educators save their music programs from budget cuts? Retrieved October 1, 2013, from website: http://www.artistshousemusic.org/videos/how+can+music+educators+save+their+ music+programs+from+budget+cuts Goehring, T. (2013). How is an orchestra a figured world: an observation [Word document]. Retrieved from: https://moodle2.uncc.edu/course/view.php?id=17621 Hartley, L., & Porter, A. (2009). The influence of beginning instructional grade on string student enrollment, retention, and music performance. Journal of Research in Music Education, 56(4), 370-384. Retrieved September 28, 2013, from JSTOR database: http://www.jstor.org.librarylink.uncc.edu/stable/40204940 Slaton, E. (2012). Collegiate connections: music education budget crisis. Music Educators Journal, 99(1), 33-35. Retrieved October 3, 2013, from SAGE database: http://mej.sagepub.com/content/99/1/33.full.pdf+html Richerme, L. (2011). Apparently, we disappeared. Music Educators Journal, 98(1), 35-40. Retrieved September 29, 2013, from SAGE database: http://mej.sagepub.com/content/98/1/35.full.pdf+html Russel, J. (2008). A discriminant analysis of the factors associated with the career plans of string music educators. Journal of Research in Music Education, 56(3), 204-219. Retrieved September 29, 2013, from JSTOR database: http://www.jstor.org.librarylink.uncc.edu/stable/40204927 Wood, M. (2012). Music to our ears. USA Today Magazine, 141(2808), 2, 34-35.