In early April, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) study, Arts Education in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools 1999-2000 and 2009-10.
The data clearly shows inequities in access to music education between low-poverty and high-poverty schools, and it also reports that, generally speaking, the percentage of schools and students receiving music education more than once per week is still as low as it was in 1999.
The Music Education Policy Roundtable (MEPR) estimates that only about 45–50% of all students in K–12 public schools receive a credible sequential music education. “Credible” means that there are sufficient resources available for music education (mostly sufficient time) so that one can credibly believe that students might get a high-quality education.
See the complete statement issued by the MEPR, which includes the National Association for Music Education (NAfME).
NOTE: NAfME urges the research community to partake of the available NCES training to delve into the arts report. The public-use data files are available in SAS and ASCII (flat file) format and are available at http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/downloads.asp. Restricted-use files, including the ability to search the data in more complex and comprehensive ways, are also available for anyone with a restricted-use license. In order to gain this license, NCES encourages researchers interested in the arts data to participate in NCES data trainings, which are held periodically. Please see http://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/conferences/, or contact Jared Coopersmith, Ph.D., Jared.Coopersmith@ed.gov, phone (202)219-7106.
Questions? Contact advocacy@nafme.org
