Music’s Vital Role in Our Children’s Future
It’s a crisp fall day in the Bronx, New York. The year is 1968. A young Joseph Lento, palms sweaty with nerves, approaches his elementary school’s band audition. After a few too many sharp blows through the instrument that he can barely hold in his eight year old fingers, Lento does not make the cut.
After weeks of training his embouchure and hand placements, Lento took a seat with his fellow brass players, finally.
“A trumpet saved my life. Literally, I don’t know what I would have done. Had I not gotten that trumpet–which I wanted from the time I was a little boy–I don’t know where I’d be,” he said.
Lento–now a professional trumpet player, a Maestro, and a prolific music educator recognized by President Barack Obama in 2014 for his excellence in his field–knows the impact of music education and seeks to empower his students through teaching styles he’s picked up throughout his 40 years of teaching.
“I know what that trumpet did for me. I saw what it did for so many students over all these years,” said Lento.
When COVID struck in 2020 and schools shut down, music education suffered along with kids’ general confidence in school. When schools opened back up last fall, it was hard for teachers and parents to not see what kids had lost in that time online.
During online instruction, children lacked access to a balanced schedule of learning, among many other things. With this came losses in socialization, focus and overall engagement. When students and teachers in New York returned to the classroom in person last fall–masked up–teachers and parents initially noticed numerous drastic changes to kids’ behavior in class.
Ashira Mothersil, a music educator at the Urban Assembly School of Music and Arts, said, “I think one of the biggest challenges across the board, not just in my classroom, but in schools across the country was just a sense of structure and discipline.”
“We’re asking students to come back in and follow schedules and sit in classes. It was really tough for them to be able to sit in classes for a certain amount of time,” she continued. “Getting back into a space of really being able to receive some of the lessons and work was super difficult for them because the kids were accustomed to pretty much not being in class.”
Along with a general loss of confidence in the classroom, the pandemic has proven to have diminished many students’ academic performance and growth.
While math, science and reading scores are the primary focus of assessing student performance growth and loss, COVID has shown there are issues in education stemming from beyond these standardized scores.
Music’s Impact
In 1998, Lento conducted a study at his alma mater, Lehman High school, to see the statistical impact music education had on kids. His findings became part of the music curriculum at the Bronx High School of Science.
In terms of academic grades in major subjects, the results show Group 1 received, on average, an 87.4 percent in English, while Group 2 received a 71.2 percent–in Math, Group 1 received an 81.3 percent average while Group 2 had a 66.7 percent. Group 1 had a 90 percent membership in the Honors Society while Group 2 had 0 percent.
A 2020 study from the Journal of Psychology showed similar results to Lento. The researchers explored the idea that psychologists refer to as ‘transfer,’ which refers to how “cognitive, motivation-related, and social-personal aspects related to music education and practice may positively affect learning in academic subjects such as mathematics, English, and science.”
The study showed that music participation was related to higher scores in math, science and English. On average, students highly engaged in music were academically over one year ahead of students not engaged in music at school.
The study also emphasized that music training elevates motivation-related characteristics–learning discipline, self-efficacy, and mastery-oriented learning experiences. The process of music training–hours of practice and commitment among other obligations–may develop these characteristics to be utilized in other subjects and outside school.
Results provided by the Department of Education show NYC public school students grades 3–8 performed 51.5 percent proficiency in Math and 63.8 percent proficiency in ELA.
In 2019, kids grads three through eight had an average proficiency of 45.6 percent in Math and 47.4 percent in ELA, though these scores should not be compared. In accordance with New York State guidance, the 2021 ELA and Math assessments were optional for students to take, resulting in 21.6 percent of students in grades three through eight taking the English test in 2021 and 20.5 percent of students taking the Math test.
The DOE declined to comment on the issue of testing.
The problem in New York isn’t just lack of access to test results, but also the administering of the test themselves. Workshops to help schools with these math and reading tests have turned out to be “more technical than pedagogical,” writes Chalkbeat–there is an overall groan and aversion to tests from kids and teachers burned out by the pandemic.
While this makes it harder to assess the pandemic’s damage, it can show a need to not just focus on practical skills in math or critical thinking skills in English and to consider how to encourage kids in school in subjects outside the major ones.
Kristian Moton, an education coordinator at Kids Creative, a nonprofit children’s organization that provides after-school programs focused on music, said, “We’re seeing this huge amount of learning loss and the burnout score has always been arduous.”
“But that’s something that we’ve been able to at least excuse because the generation before us was able to deal with this. Right?” he continued. ‘It’s like, my mom did it. My dad and my mom did it. Her mom did it. So I could do it. But now you have a pandemic that said, hey, this never made sense on a fundamental level.”
Moton said that the pandemic revealed issues to him that were present before COVID. It made him want to fight harder for his students. He said a silver lining of the pandemic was actually seeing teachers band together to fight for better education for their students.
“We’re trying to learn different ways on how to engage them. And what we do know is that the arts take a center stage in that right. Visual arts, media and theater take center stage. These are the things that stay true no matter what,” he said.
For Megan Pringle and her daughter Maya, the search for the right music education in the pandemic has been tough yet enlightening.
Maya entered the pandemic as a four year old ballerina, obsessed with Cardi B and learning Spanish with her paternal grandparents. All of that was lost when lockdown began–her ballet school closed and her Spanish suffered as a result of isolating from elderly loved ones. Mrs. Pringle said the biggest change she’s seen in her only child in COVID is the dwindling of the confidence she once had.
“While I always have said I’m grateful that she went through COVID at such a young age because it didn’t really set her back,” said Mrs. Pringle. “She didn’t really suffer too much education wise, but she absolutely suffered in terms of extracurricular or you know, like the creative types of programming that we had her in so her ballet schools shut down.”
Since the reopening of programs across the city last fall, Pringle has gone lengths to find experiences to get Maya interested in music again to fulfill this vital role creative classes hold for young kids like Maya. Her ballet school couldn’t survive the pandemic, and Mrs. Pringle points out her daughter’s lack of engagement with learning a new musical skill.
When schools opened back up, Mrs. Pringle enrolled Maya in the pre-K program at PS115 on the Upper East Side where they greatly cherished the music teacher there, Mr. Sager.
Mr. Sager played the guitar outside during strictly scheduled pick-up and drop off times at schools. He brought the students together to sing and dance during class–Mrs. Pringle said Maya adored it.
When I asked Maya what she liked about his class, she said, “He said to us, ‘Don’t call me hey because that’s not my name. I got puzzled because you can call people hey and not like where cows poop in and what farmers chew.”
The Pringles haven’t been able to strike such luck in Kindergarten. Where she is now, Maya, approaching age six, has no music education in school so her parents have looked to places like the New York City Children’s Theatre Company and the Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem, which offers kids classes on the weekends.
Mrs. Pringle plans to have Maya start playing the violin with her friend who speaks Spanish–perhaps Maya can brush up on what she once knew. Right now, it’s unclear where Maya’s future in music lies, but her mom is heart set on finding the perfect fit.
Paolo Marinos graduated from the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies in 2020. He said, “we didn’t get to have our last show in person which killed me. But I’m so grateful I wasn’t a kid during this. I would’ve hated to miss the earliest parts of learning music.”
Marinos now attends SAE Institute of Technology, graduating early with a degree in music engineering.
Like Maya’s Mr. Sanger, many music teachers saw that learning losses in the pandemic meant creating new ways to make students excited to learn again.
At Kids Creative, the curriculum builds around student interests. Moton said that in the pandemic with online learning, their students became attached to technology. Instead of working against this, Kids Creative instructors leaned into it.
“It was a battle initially before the pandemic, but now it’s like, you got to figure out how to use it because the students you know, the paper isn’t really there,” Moton said. “The handwriting isn’t there. The literacy isn’t there, but they do know how to navigate an iPad. You have to work with the medium and now at this point. Separating a child from their tablet is tantamount to taking their shoes off.”
At the Urban Assembly School of Music and Arts, Mothersil said the difficulties of online learning enhanced the feeling students finally got when they finally performed again. The first few performances and recitals were performed for a virtual audience, one being the senior NASM exam.
For the exam, Mothersil provided the students with a robust set for her students. Opening up a space with a backdrop, lights and cameras gave them all the things to, “create a studio for them to record, you know, their songs for their NASM exam, created this sense of like, ‘Oh, we’re back and we’re singing again and I had other students who helped support that,’” she said.
When her students–who enroll at the non-audition school from all stages of music development–had online school, it was hard for all ranges of skill. She said most of her students were not comfortable recording their singing at home. Mothersil said that creating this space where they’re comfortable to record improved their confidence in the exam greatly.
Mothersil’s program also revolves around personal expression in her students, often building her performances around the cultures her students belong to. Marsha Baxter, a New York University Steinhardt professor specializing in Music Education, did a field study at Mothersil’s school and said, “culturally responsive curriculum can be incredibly beneficial to one’s experience.”
Baxter, an expert in a broad range of cultural music, said that the quality of music education, “has a lot to do with the vision and philosophical lens of the teacher. It’s so contingent on the teacher and that particular school and the vision of the school.”
Nick Kadajski, a music educator at Grace Church School, said to engage his students more in the jazz band he teaches, he had them choose their own songs to perform. The arrangements he chose for performances were geared towards their general ear for music.
Kadajski believes having kids make their own choices in class teaches them to develop a taste and also energizes them to practice. “Since music practice is often in solitude, I think it’s encouraging to practice music you personally like,” he said.
Kadajski said his students’ time online was tough, but he managed to still put together performances remotely, utilizing a half-time in person schedule for the students at his school to provide rehearsals. Like most teachers, he put the half of the class on Zoom into breakout rooms to practice certain parts while he worked on others with those physically in the classroom.
For the virtual concerts Grace Church put on, Kadajski had students send in recordings of each of their parts, clipped them all together on GarageBand and dubbed it over video of the students playing. “The work to put that on was incredibly time consuming, but totally worth it for everyone involved,” he said.
Music educators–all educators–in New York are fighting to improve what COVID took away and also resolve longstanding issues within education as well. Throughout the pandemic, these teachers often had to put extra hours into students who had a harder time or weren’t showing up, among dealing with other difficulties online learning reveals.
Burnout and Re-igniting the Fire
In her first week of online teaching, Mothersil remembers being on calls with students and families almost every night till 8:00 pm showing them how to download attachments, get their WiFi working and resolve other technician difficulties.
“As the year continued, we tried to create a sense of normalcy and a set schedule for the students,” she said. “But it became super exhausting having that screen time having four or five classes a day where I’m on the computer that was really tiring on myself and my body. And I felt like I was on the whole time.”
Pandemic burnout in teachers should be no surprise. In a 2022 poll that surveyed the National Education Association (NEA) 53 percent of educators indicated that they are ready to leave their jobs in education. There are 567,000 fewer educators than before the pandemic, according to the NEA.
Moton said that during online learning, educators in nonprofit education banded together to circumvent difficulties–like finding public WiFi programs and getting grants for tablets for students who would otherwise not be able to participate in school.
“It was kind of like scrambling,” he said. “But you normally see the labor of justice fall on the worker teacher or students because parents are like, just keep trying to keep a roof over their children’s head and just trying to be the best parent they can be.”
“Unfortunately, that’s always been the case,” said Moton. “It’s always been the labor of the educator to make sure that they get the supplies that they need to be able to teach, to work outside of their hours to provide the real learning that they’re trying to set out to do. And that was exacerbated. I think you see this whole match. You see this whole burnout because of that.”
Lento was set to retire from teaching during the pandemic due to major differences he had within the administration. After he had left that school, he was offered a position to teach psychology at an all girls high school, so he gave it another shot.
“I was working in a place that has a history of being difficult, not just for me, but in general, toward the community. If you’re the kind of person that fights back to support the kids, it makes it even more challenging,” he said. “Unfortunately, politics and power and stuff is involved. And in school, I don’t think it should ever come into play. I left [that school] because I couldn’t do any more than I could do.”
Moton said, though, that there has been wide coalescence in nonprofit education in the last year since returning to in person instruction.
“People came out with fresh eyes and, really, a zest to really change things,” he said. “And we’re seeing these really genuine conversations happening within the nonprofit space about one of the things that we can do is refocus.”
He said they are no longer protesting like they once were. Instead, he believes that the 90s millennials entering the workforce look more towards disrupting spaces to make sure justice happens within them.
After the Education Wars by Andrea Gabor explores the kind of bottom up movements in education that Moton is looking to see. Gabor writes about the radical reform stories in schools from all over the country throughout the years, emphasizing the efforts and successes of schools where teachers gained power over the system to improve the quality of education and their jobs.
Gabor looks at the story of education reform largely as a business story. She talks about the work of W. Edwards Deming–whose bottom up method of company management saved Japanese companies following WWII–and how this business model inspired school systems as Deming made his way through consulting US companies out of disaster in the 70s.
Gabor writes in the introduction, “they were resisting the mandates, the punitive teacher evaluations, and, in some cases, even the standardized tests and were searching for–and finding–an alternative path.”
A chapter details the fiscal crisis of 1975 pushed inner-city schools to the edge, much like the pandemic has done in recent years. 6,000 teachers lost their jobs, class sizes increased dramatically, poverty soared and maintenance of schools came to a halt.
Amidst the chaos, a school movement took root to create freedom schools that offered black students quality education they were not offered at traditional public schools. They took root in New York City, Boston, and Chicago as a protest against de facto segregation. This movement would become integral to small schools that flourished in the 70s in New York.
Though Moton, Mothersil and the other teachers featured aren’t focused on making widespread revolutions in the education system, they are looking to provide quality music education despite their budget often being overlooked in the grand scheme of things and emphasizing kids’ needs above all.
“How are we going to really fix it right now and every decision that I make in every meeting, how do I show up for my students in every conversation?” said Moton of how he operates in his role now. “How do I show up in every email? In every lesson plan? How am I thinking, thinking intentionally about my participants, their experience and this experience of their parents?”
