Is it Intelligence or Assimilation?: Questioning the Perception That Participation in Music Education Has a Positive Effect on Academic Outcomes
“It’s true! Music does make students smarter and this study proves it!” reads the headline from a Classic FM post summarizing a recent article published by music education scholars Martin Bergee and Kevin Weingarten in the Journal for Research in Music Education. It sounded intriguing enough, so I took the bait and am now left wriggling on the hook of yet another response to harmful narratives that perpetuate damaging notions of white supremacy in music education. In my insatiable search for golden nuggets of enlightenment I found myself mouth agape and gasping for air in frustrated breathlessness as I was plucked from my sleepy (and sacred) Saturday morning ritual of snuggling with my spouse and kitties.
Before going any further, I would like to state that I have indeed read the entire article and examined its methods and conclusions. It is a finely crafted piece of scholarship and the statistical analysis is, admittedly, quite impressive. Having explored multilevel regression models for some of my own research I know how cumbersome they can be. To be clear, it is not my intention here to call out the quality of this article but rather, to call attention to some very real blind spots and assumptions that informed the approach of the researchers. It is moments of scientific exploration of complex human phenomena such as these that always brings me back to an article that I read for a research methods class during my first year of graduate school: Strong Inference by John R. Platt. In this article, Platt makes the case for using a problem-oriented approach to research rather than just adding “another brick to the temple of science” in our blind adherence to method (Platt, 1964, pg. 352). In short, Platt advocates for answering a simple question before setting out on one’s research journey: “But sir, what experiment could disprove your hypothesis?” (pg. 352). To be fair, in the Classic FM post Bergee stated up front that he and Weingarten both set out to disprove the widely accepted belief that participating in music makes you smarter but found at the end of the study that the evidence indicated otherwise. For many, these findings provided irrefutable evidence that this age-old question could finally be put to rest. In several online forums for music educators, posts of jubilance rejoiced that there was finally a piece of sound research that could be used as an artifact of incontestable advocacy to be leveled at obstinate administrators who “clearly hate the arts.” I, however, still had a few reservations.
As I journeyed deeper through the article and into the dark recesses of my own analytical research mind, I heard a ghostly whisper cut through the dense mist of the methods section: “white gaze.” It grew louder and more present even as I tried to ignore it….”whiiite gaaaaze.” Finally, after growing impatient and having had enough of being ignored it smacked me on the back of the head: “Hey! Beware the white gaze, stupid!” If you are unfamiliar with Toni Morrison’s concept of the white gaze, children’s author LJ Alonge offers a brief definition in an interview with NPR: “the assumption that the reader is white.” In the context of the Bergee/Weingarten study, I argue that the white gaze manifests itself in some of the methodological omissions that are rooted in what I perceive to be a limited understanding of the intersection of racial, ethnic, cultural (REC) identity development and achievement. The problem with this is that the mostly white readership of which the discipline of music education is composed (see Elpus & Abril, 2011 and Elpus, 2015) will oftentimes embrace findings without a sufficiently focused critical lens that asks “whose experience is being omitted and how?”
Understanding how individual factors such as identity influences achievement is a complex process that can not, rather, must not be simply reduced to categorical variables if a robust understanding of this phenomenon is to be obtained. The reality is that there is an infinite number of factors influencing the participants of this study who identify as 84% White, 10.5% African American, 2.3% Hispanic/Latino, and 2.1% Pacific/Pacific Rim/Asian. Moreover, each of these subgroups, and the multiple cultural disaggregations that comprises them, have all had vastly different socio-historical interactions with the education system of the United States. These interactions, in turn, have influenced each group’s relationship with learning in this particular educational ecology and, thus, their achievement trajectories. In order to provide a more nuanced picture of how the findings of the Bergee/Weingarten study might have been expanded to more accurately examine the achievement of historically marginalized groups, I would like to insert my perspective as a researcher of Mexican American music students and discuss other factors that might have accounted for the high achievement of the 2.3% Latin@s in this study but were not explored.
Social Closure and Exposure to Whitestream Success
One of the ways that Latin@ educational achievement has been examined is in terms of access to resources that help these students to navigate learning spaces. In his book The Trouble With Black Boys, Pedro Noguera discusses the notion of social closure (Coleman, 1988) as it relates to equitable educational access. In this book, Noguera describes how social closure functions with the following quote: “When schools are concerned about satisfying the needs of those they serve, they tend to pay closer attention to the qualities of services they provide” (2008, pg. 204). Furthermore, this willingness to assist and improve services is often determined by the alignment of the shared beliefs and values between parents and school sites (2008). Unfortunately, for most Latin@ families, schools have historically valued interactions that reinforce dominant perspectives (i.e., middle class white values). Educational scholars Filiberto Barajas and Ann Ishimaru examined this phenomenon and described how parents of BBIA students are often viewed as deficient and in need of remediation in order to have their contributions valued in school settings (2016). Understandably, parents who do not want to be traumatized by being made to feel inferior often refuse to participate in school decision-making. This does not mean that this group does not value education but, rather, that they refuse to subject themselves to this insidious form of racism.
Unfortunately, this places the onus on many Latin@ students to find successful strategies that allow them to navigate a path to academic success on their own. In a study that examined high achieving Latinas, educational scholars Patricia Gándara and Frances Contreras, found that participation in instrumental music is associated with the desire to pursue higher education for Latina students. In one example, a Latina professor that was interviewed for the study mentioned that participating in school music allowed them to be in a setting with high-achieving peers which then exposed her to the possibility of taking classes in the school’s college preparatory curriculum (2009). Unsurprisingly, this phenomenon also emerged during my own research interviews. So, the question here is whether it was performing music that promoted more achievement oriented attitudes as the Bergee/Weingarten study suggests, or the exposure to peers (in these examples predominantly white) that possessed knowledge of how to successfully navigate Whitestream spaces? Obviously, I argue the latter.
Countless studies have examined how culturally incongruent education spaces cause BBIA students to disengage. For those who decide to continue engaging they are often left to deal with the harmful effects that these assimilative forces in the spaces subject them to. For example, education scholars Linda Castillo, Collie Conoley, and Daniel Brossart examined Mexican American female college students’ experiences of distress caused by White attitudinal marginalization, or discomfort with White cultural values, in a university setting. The findings of this study suggests that, indeed, this phenomenon was a significant cause of perceived distress for this group. Could this distress also be in operation for the high achieving Latin@ students in the Bergee/Weingarten study? I argue that by not examining this as an important contributing factor to this group’s achievement trajectory negates the creative strategies that these particular students demonstrate on a daily basis. In this case I argue that it is not participation in music education that has more of an influence on the positive outcomes of their reading and math achievement tests, but rather the emotional intelligence and creative strategies that they had to develop while successfully navigating Whitestream spaces.
The Power of Perseverance
Another moment where I felt the white gaze glaring back at me in this article was when I finally noticed the omission of arguably the most important variable affecting Latin@ achievement: ganas (desire). Historically, the majority of Latin@ groups in the United States have been subjected to various nefarious forms of educational inequity including school segregation, deculturalization, and educational tracking. But again, even Latin@ subgroups have had different socio-historical interactions with education. Rather than presenting this group as monolithic, I am going to use the experiences of Mexican Americans to illustrate my next point. This history of Mexican American educational exclusion reaches all the way back to the origin of the modern school in the 1920s. During this period they were subjected to policies that often denied them the opportunity to pursue academic rather than vocational education. The common belief was that Mexican American students would not need to engage in academic endeavors because they would immediately go to work after the sixth grade; just like my grandfather. In one early example that illustrates this attrition, the segregated (i.e., Mexican) Tempe Eighth Street Teacher Training School in 1928 saw only 7 of 183 students matriculate to Junior High (Bulletin of the Tempe State Teacher College, 1929). Shocking as it may be, this phenomenon is not a vestige of the past, but a practice that is still fairly widespread. In a more recent example, education scholars Tara J. Yosso and Daniel G. Solórzano describe the modern educational pipeline for Chicano students where only 8% of these students graduate college, 2% pursue a graduate or professional degree, and .2% earn a PhD (2006). One component of my dissertation research focuses on the adaptational strategies that my participants have successfully utilized while navigating the often hostile Whitestream musical spaces they have occupied. For one participant, this meant enduring a 2.5 hour public transportation commute in each direction from her home to the rehearsal space of her youth orchestra every Saturday for four years. For another, this meant successfully straddling the often precarious schism between familial responsibilities at home and academic responsibilities in school. Simply relegating the achievement of the 2.3% “Latino/Hispanic” students that participated in the Bergsee/Weingarten study, solely to music participation, is at best uninformed and at worst, racist. I say racist here because attributing Latin@ educational success to participation in a predominantly white activity, such as school music, serves only to conceal and take ownership of the strength and perseverance that Latin@s have demonstrated in the face of overwhelming systemic racism for generations.
This thinking is connected to a problematic lineage stretching back to early efforts in music education that were mostly focused on using music as a tool to elevate and assimilate marginalized groups such as Native Americans (see the Carlisle Industrial School); American colonial subjects (see Otto Miessner and the American Occupation of the Philippines); and Mexican Americans (see the Neighborhood Music School founded by Progressive education advocate Pearl O’Dell). Additionally, early music education scholars involved in these efforts even used the most modern research methods of their time to examine the impact of musical interventions on Latin@ student achievement. Some of these studies included titles such as Intelligence Testing Through Art (Manuel, 1932); Effects of Music Intervention on the Music Aptitude of Over-Aged Mexican Students (Nelson, 1952); and even Musical Experiences to Aid Mexican Bilingual Children in Correcting Speech Defects (King, 1946). The shared rationale in these studies and popular practices in music education during this time was that by exposing these groups to “good” (read: white) music that they would be better prepared to be contributing members of American society. But what exactly are the implications here? As we can see, there has been a long-standing perception that non-White groups are culturally deficient and music education could offer a pathway to remediating them. So, for the Bergee/Weingarten study, I argue that viewing achievement on standardized tests as the only marker of intelligence is problematic because, as education scholars Kyung Kim and Darya Zabelina suggest, standardized tests mainly measure cultural and linguistic proficiency (2015). If this is the case, might the correlation between music achievement and standardized math/reading test achievement also mainly be an indicator of ability to demonstrate proficiency in Whitestream spaces?
What Next?
Considering the current climate of our nation, which only a mere month ago was on the brink of a complete collapse caused by whites-supremacist hordes, I feel that any study in music education needs to include a robust analysis of race. Honestly, the main reason that I have recently avoided reading articles in the Journal or Research in Music Education is that the overwhelming presence of the white gaze tends to limit the depth of conversations regarding race in this journal. Yes, I know that this was not specifically a study that examined race; however, the findings are currently being used by teachers in their effort to argue for the maintenance of their current music programs; many of which serve racialized youth. As such, we need to refine our questions and expand their scope so they challenge the status quo rather than mire us deeper in the methodological muck that will eventually make our exit impossible. Rather than building a “penny wall” made of research papers that perpetuate our tenuous understandings of linkages between identity and achievement, we need to be more intentional in the crafting of each scholarly stone we contribute to our educational edifice so that it remains strong and provides shelter to our students to protect against the winds of white supremacy.
