EDITORIAL
Musical Benchmarks Build Equity
I recently spoke with a young musician who grew up in the region where I now work. He was in his school’s band program from fourth through twelfth grade. He described it as “a home away from home,” a place full of friends, safety, and joy. Music mattered deeply to him, and by the time he graduated high school, he knew he wanted to pursue it seriously.
But when he auditioned for college music programs, he was not accepted to a single one.
He enrolled in community college instead, where he quickly realized that he was far behind. None of his high school music teachers had ever told him what was actually expected in college music programs: which scales mattered, what standard repertoire he should know, how auditions worked, or what level of technique was assumed. He spent his entire collegiate experience playing catch-up to peers.
What struck me most was that this came as a surprise to him. He had done everything asked of him. He worked hard. He practiced hard. What failed him was not a lack of effort or talent. What failed him was his education.
Over the past decade, our field has worked tirelessly to ensure that music education is holistic, addresses socio-emotional learning, and is culturally relevant to our students. These are incredibly important objectives that will help us ensure that well-adjusted, diverse people shape the future of our society and music industry.
But to diversify that industry, they have to be able to enter it.
There is a hard reality that music education often sidesteps: youth music programs do not get to set the standards that govern access to the classical music world. Conservatories, festivals, and professional employers do.
Those institutions are gate-kept. We, in youth music programs, do not get to design the lock. But we know exactly what the keys are. They are written on the repertoire lists. They are in the scales, the etudes, and the method books. They are in the arcane behavior norms expected in rehearsals and auditions.
When we don’t give students these keys in the name of reducing pressure or focusing on holistic outcomes, we are not serving them. We are locking them out. If we want our students to have the opportunity to become change agents who transform our world’s broken systems from within, we must first equip them to get in the door.
As I prepared to write this, I looked for research on long-term musical learning outcomes in youth music programs. I wanted to find data that tracked what students could actually do musically after years of instruction. I found very little.
What I found instead was a mountain of data on everything adjacent to the music. We measure attendance. We measure retention rates. We measure correlations with standardized test scores in math and English. We measure self-reported social-emotional outcomes.
These metrics do matter: they tell us that a program is safe, welcoming, and supportive (they also tend to tell us that our students are wicked smart). But they do not tell us whether a student is actually learning music. Those outcomes need measuring as well.
This work can be difficult, particularly for programs like ours who are in a constant struggle to secure resources for our students. At the Riverside Arts Academy, we have begun taking manageable steps to implement structured performance assessments—juries—to tell us the truth about where our students stand.
Juries are low-stakes opportunities for students to prepare and perform specific material for a small faculty committee. Nothing punitive happens if a student struggles; the goal is simply clarity for the student, the parent, and the teacher. It prevents the kind of surprise that devastated the young musician I spoke with. And it allows the student to experience audition discomfort in a safe way, surrounded by educators and peers who respect and cheer them on.
Crucially, we do not select jury repertoire based on what feels easy or what will yield a “successful” data point for a grant report. We are challenging our team to look outward. We analyze the repertoire lists of high-level regional youth orchestras. We review the entry requirements for festivals, summer institutes, and university programs. We identify the technical and musical demands our students will face in the real world—the keys to the gate—and we are working to design our instruction to put those keys in their hands.
The initial results have been challenging, even sobering for both our faculty and leadership. But they have also helped us name and clarify the gaps in our instruction.
Speaking with colleagues from around the country who have implemented similar initiatives, they reported encountering pushback when trying to benchmark against the collegiate music world. They heard that their standards are too high.
But we protect our students by preparing them to thrive.
True equity is about empowering students to have agency and choices over their own future. Their education must support them as whole individuals, including the educational competencies that will determine which rooms they can access as adults.
We need our students to take the incredible socio-emotional skills they develop in our programs, their unique cultural perspectives, and their individual voices into the highest levels of the music world. We need them to be the change agents who diversify the industry. But they cannot change the room if they cannot win the audition to get inside it.
Access without quality is not equity.
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