7/2/2009 - Secretary Duncan's Remarks at the Rally for Music Education
From the U.S. Department of Education Building, Washington, DC, June 18, 2009 -- Thank you so much! I think this is my weightlifting for the day! I’ll take them all home and surprise my wife with these boxes tonight.
I appreciate the collective leadership so much. And I really want to thank the students who are here today—it’s extraordinarily important that we continue to listen to our students, to learn from them. All of our collective jobs as adults is to give you the opportunities that you need to be successful. And as you probably know I’m traveling the country on this listening and learning tour, trying to figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how do we improve. And it’s been fascinating. I’ve been in inner city Detroit; I’ve been in rural Vermont; I’ve been in West Virginia; I was on the Indian reservation in Montana. And there’s a number of themes emerging. It’s interesting—urban, rural, suburban—the themes are very, very consistent. And the students, teachers, parents, principals—everyone seems to share the concerns that you’re expressing today. Everyone’s concerned about a narrowing of the curriculum; everyone’s concerned about a lack of access to quality arts education, quality music education; and what worries me the most is the children who need the most access are often the ones who have the least. It’s the children who don’t have access to private lessons who need it.
To me this is so important for a couple reasons. Yes, we want to have great math scores and we want to, you know, have our students be successful, but we all know the research shows exposure to music helps those math scores. These things aren’t in conflict; in fact, they actually mutually reinforce each other.
Also, it’s so important to me that we give our students a reason to be excited about coming to school every day, to be passionate. We have to dramatically drive down our dropout rates in this country. We lose 30% of our young people before they graduate from high school. They have no options in today’s economy. None. For me it was sports. For other students, it’s dance, or drama, or music, or band, or chess, or debate, or yearbook, or all those things that are seen as “extras” or extracurriculars—those are actually the heart of giving our students a reason to get up and go to school every day and to be excited.
So I pledge to you, as we go forward and think about NCLB reauthorization, and as you know, this is a big deal, this is not something we’re going to do every year. It’s something we’re going to create a new law for the country and that law’s going to be in place for five, six, seven, eight years. As we go forward, and we continue to listen and learn, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure we don’t continue to narrow the curriculum, that we broaden it out, that we give all of our young people a chance before school, during school, lunch, after school—you name it—to develop their skills, to develop their sense of self-esteem, to develop their passions. The only way that happens is if our children have exposure to a broad range of activities, and music is a huge, huge piece of that.
I’m absolutely convinced that if more students had that kind of exposure, test scores would go up, and much more importantly, graduation rates would go up, students would feel better about themselves, and long term, their success in life would be dramatically better because they had those basic opportunities.
So I thank you for your collective leadership. I thank MENC for bringing us all together. To the adults here, thank you for your passion. But again, most importantly, for our students from around the country, from Alaska and everyone else, I want you to know that we hear you loudly and clearly, and we want to work with you going forward to make sure that every child in this country has a chance to develop their skills, develop their sense of self esteem, be excited about going to school every single day, and music is a huge, huge part of that.
So thank you so much for your hard work, and I look forward to work with you together going forward. Thank you so much.