During the period when the total California public school student population increased by 5.8%, the percentage of all California public school students involved in music education courses declined by 50%. This decline is the largest of any academic subject area.

Actual student participation in music declined by 46.5% representing a loss 512,366 students. This decline is the largest of any academic subject area by a factor of four. (Physical Education is second with a decline of 125,000 students representing a drop of5.2% of the total PE enrollment)

The number of music teachers declined by 26.7%. This represents an actual loss of 1,053 teachers.

Participation in General Music courses (those courses designed to bring basic music knowledge and skills to young students) declined by 85.8% with the loss of 264,821 students. This represents over half of the total decline of participation in all Music Courses. This is followed by declines in Other Music Courses (- 48.5%, -103,783 students), Chorus (36.1%, -57,905 students), Band (-20.5%, -44,509 students), and
Instrumental Lessons (-41.4%, -39,792 students).

When student participation declines are compared to other academic subjects, Music tops the list. The decline in music participation (-46.5%, -512,388 students) leads all other areas including Physical Education (-5.24%, -125,156), Health (-12%, -31,660), Humanities (-37.5%, -25,622), Safety (-9.13%, -6,983), and Computer Education (- 0.7%, -1,866). Art, Drama, Dance, Foreign Languages, Social Sciences, Science, Math and English all posted gains during the period.

The implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, in particular the act’s emphasis on testing the limited areas of reading, math, and (soon) science, has led to the decline in music programs. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) as implemented has indeed been widely blamed for lessening of support for a variety of valuable school programs. Disturbed by this, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige has recently been moved to exhort school superintendents that “NCLB included the arts as a core academic subject because of their importance to a child’s education". I Based on the fact that the Secretary himself has observed problems with state and local implementation of the act, it is plausible to trace part of the erosion in California’s school music programs to the process of implementation. The entire observed effect, however, cannot be traced to the NCLB. First, the idea of systematic student assessment did not arrive in California with the 2001 passage NCLB, but was implemented as a result of the California Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999 (based on an “Academic Performance Index,” and not specifically centered on status targets in a few subjects). Second, one would expect the effect of NCLB-mandated testing on the breadth of offerings in a school system to apply equally to all subjects not among the few chosen for testing. This is clearly not the case, as the data show that music programs have been limited in a manner vastly disproportionate to other curricula. At a minimum, therefore, other forces must be at work.

The well-documented budget crisis in California has led to the decline in music programs. The allocation of resources is certainly the central issue here, and “resources” in the context of education always includes the element of money (the other critical resource being time). Following logic similar to that applied to the effect of the No Child Left Behind Act, however, it is difficult to attribute the entire observed effect to budgetary woes. Nevertheless, it can be argued that many music programs in the state, most notably at the elementary level, were never reinstated to the vigor they enjoyed prior to the passage of Proposition 13 in 1979.

The situation has been compounded by the elimination of the position of Fine Arts Coordinator in many school districts which means there is no one to keep music “on the table” when budget constraints are discussed at the administrative/district level. Again, simple monetary shortfalls alone cannot account for the disproportionate effect on music programs.

These possible explanations are just that: possibilities. More work must be done to identify with more certainty the causes that underlie these declines. It is this need for additional exploration and examination of this issue that has led us to our first recommendation.