Hoping to Turn The Beat Around

Dawson and another veteran music teacher, Wendy Pierce, took part in a summer guitar seminar to learn to play. "Guitar: A Course for All Reasons" was co-sponsored by the National Association for Music Education and other music organizations.

Metz got 20 guitars and a board to hang them on the wall, transformed a health room into a music classroom and gave students a new option beyond the traditional offerings of orchestra, band and chorus.

About 50 students signed up.

"It's so cool," said Corey Cook, 12, who was in chorus last year but had trouble with the different pitches.

Jessica Dodson used to play the flute in her school orchestra but found the guitar far more enticing. "This is more fun," she said. "We play songs I know."

In one of Dawson's classes last week, students practiced songs by the Beatles ("Eleanor Rigby") and Beethoven ("Au Clair de la Lune"). This year, they have learned "Hound Dog," "This Land Is Your Land," "Rock Around the Clock" and "Ode to Joy."

Dawson stood in front of the class, teaching music theory as students struggled to stop strumming their guitars.

"Let's work on the C chord," she said. "Fifth string, third fret. Fourth string, second fret. Open third string. Second string, first fret. Open first string. Let's hear it one string at a time. That's five strings. . . . I'm hearing some of you playing six."

At the start of the year, the students offered names of great guitarists. Teachers chose from their suggestions and named the instruments for guitarists that span the world of music. Each student then selected a guitar and wrote an essay about whom he or she liked and why.

An essay by Steven Alvarez, 13, posted on the wall, reads: "Elvis Presley is my favorite guitarist. Mainly because he is one of the few that I know." He wound up, though, with the Bob Dylan guitar: "I think I've heard one of his songs."

Michael Monte, 13, picked the Jimi Hendrix guitar "because he rocks my socks."

But even in such an encouraging environment, school officials must meet the goals of No Child Left Behind. Dawson said Metz administrators changed the school schedule to provide more instructional time for math and language arts in an effort to raise standardized test scores. That means students no longer have music class every day; they have it two days and then skip a day.

"We've made everything in education instrumental to economic issues," said Houston, as he argued why cutting music is not the way schools should be moving. "And the truth is, we can't win if we want to do this by competing with numbers. China and India have more people.

"But we can be the most creative. You can always win that battle. Look at American music forms: jazz, bluegrass, rock-and-roll, rhythm and blues, hip-hop, gospel," he said. Those music forms were created by the underclass, the same folks, Houston said, "we are testing to death."