History Of Music Assessment In Music Education

Assessment in Music Education has been a hot topic for some time now. Questions have arisen about what to assess, how to assess and even questioning whether to assess at all. Pinpointing the issues at hand is the first task in answering these questions but of course, there are different opinions on where the issues start in Music education. Since the early 2000’s, the education system has adopted standards on the federal, state and local levels in an effort to help ensure a standard proficiency. From No Child Left Behind to most recently the CCS (Common Core Standards) has been introduced to states to ensure every student in the USA gets the same education and assessment from Washington to Florida. Due to the stress on assessment, music has been minimized in schools to help maximize the efforts to passing these high stakes assessments. All forms of assessing music in this time span have also been deemed either too easy or unrealistic for ALL students to master. Before deciding an effective way to assess Music Education we must first understand and clearly define where it has come from, what has worked and what hasn’t over the years.

History of Music Assessment:

According to the National Association for Music Educators “The push for national standards began in January 1992, when the National Council on Education Standards and Testing (NCEST) called for a system of voluntary national standards and assessments in the "core" subjects of math, English, science, history, and geography, "with other subjects to follow." The arts were the first of the "other subjects" to receive federal funding. With the passage of Goals 2000: Educate America Act, the national education reform legislation that includes development of world-class s...

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...guidelines to basic understanding instead of defining basic understanding, we can start moving forward from the box that it creates around us. Also in order to move forward, Americans are going to have to recreate the “richness of human capacity.” We have to learn that assessments can be useful as well but should not determine the intelligence of a student, or the effectiveness of a teacher. As for the stress on assessing music students, I think that there should be a continual assessment. A one-time assessment may not be indicative of what the ensemble is really capable of and the only way to develop a fair assessment is to closely monitor student progress on a consistent basis. So ultimate question is not should we assess, but what can policy makers do to implement standards without placing such demand on assessment over the knowledge students should obtain?