Sometimes Big Government is a Good Thing

Congress left the music education world a last-minute Christmas present when on December 9 it ratified the Every Student Succeeds Act.

Known by its shorthand acronym ESSA, the act replaces the much-reviled Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, whose lack of vowels made it a rather clunky acronym and whose tenets raised the ire of parents and educators with its intense focus on relentless student testing.

It’s ESSA’s focus on “WELL-ROUNDED education,” to use the ALL CAPS exclamation preferred by the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) in its analysis of the law’s impact on arts education, including music, that makes this a landmark moment for music education.

In a .pdf, NAfME scoured the lengthy law’s verbiage, looking for references to music and arts, and they found plenty of them. “Programs and activities that use music and arts, are referenced specifically, as tools to support student success, through the promotion of constructive student engagement, problem-solving, and conflict resolution,” reads one section called out by the organization, which also lobbied for ESSA’s passage with direct phone calls and letters to their legislators, and last June joined State Music Education Association leaders in visiting the offices of U.S. Senators and Representatives to advocate for it. More importantly, they draw a connecting line between arts education and funding, noting, “From reserved funds, the U.S. Secretary of Education shall award grants, contracts, or cooperative agreements, on a competitive basis, to eligible entities for the purposes of enriching the academic experience of students by promoting arts education for disadvantaged students and students with disabilities.”

A Boost To Community Programs

The law opens up federal grant funding for states and local school districts to support music education programs and train music teachers. There will also be opportunities for federal grants to fund music education at community centers across the country. This will give a boost to community programs like, for instance, Nashville’s Music Makes Us, which recently celebrated an all-time high number of students enrolled in music education programs, according to the Nashville Tennessean. The program, which reports that over 48,700 Metro Nashville public school students – 56 percent of the district’s enrolled – take part in music education classes, already receives substantial gifts from locally affiliated manufacturers like Gibson and Yamaha, and recently was awarded a $10 million grant from the Country Music Association. ESSA is like an afterburner on a jet engine for an organization in an environment like that. It’ll be a huge jump-start for those elsewhere, too.

NAMM president and CEO Joe Lamond said of ESSA, “We envision a world in which every child has a deep desire to learn music and a recognized right to be taught. The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act is a significant step toward the realization of that vision.”

The Takeaway

Not to be too opportunistic regarding what is a very positive development in national education legislation, but ESSA also presents MI retailers with some pleasant prospects. Schools will have additional funding to purchase more musical instruments and consumables. The very long-range pool of potential customers will deepen considerably over the time the law is in effect. It also offers an opportunity for retailers to show parents the benefits of adding music education into their children’s curricula, because ESSA is going to make music education more affordable in the long run. For instance, a ten-year study for the Music Empowers Foundation that tracked over 25,000 middle and high school students showed that those in music classes receive higher scores on standardized tests than students with little to no musical involvement. The musical students scored, on average, 63 points higher on the verbal section and 44 points higher on the math sections of the SATs than non-music students.

ESSA opens the door to a broader conversation, one between schools, community centers, retailers and manufacturers, as well as students and their parents. Christopher Woodside, NafME’s Assistant Executive Director, summed it up when he told NPR, “The main reason why we’re so happy is because in the well-rounded education definition, which appears towards the end of the bill in the general provisions but informs the entire legislation, there is a distinct stand-alone listing for music for the first time in American history,” which along with other arts had suffered under No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on testing math and reading.

MI retailers can use this as an opportunity to make stores a hub of that conversation. It’s critical to act quickly in order to underscore ESSA not just as a piece of legislation but as an inflection point in the evolution of music education as it relates to the larger education infrastructure. Like most of what comes out of Congress, ESSA is huge and unwieldy – take the time to point out what it does for the arts in general and music in particular. Make the connections between participation in music classes and better performance in all aspects of learning. And get ready to leverage some of the positive things that can happen when something comes out of Washington, D.C.