LAUSR

While driving home from work at the beginning of the school year, I heard a piece on National Public Radio. The guest was updating listeners on the All of Us research program sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. The goal of this $200 million program is to build a national cohort of 1 million or more U.S. participants for a very large-scale study of biological/genetic, environmental, and behavioral/lifestyle factors that may influence disease acquisition, treatment, and prevention (National Institutes of Health, 2017). In the beta testing phase alone, there is a goal of 10,000 participants. This is an unprecedented example of big data, network theory, and computational analysis all being leveraged to accelerate health research, promote medical breakthroughs, and deliver high-precision, individualized medical care. While I certainly was interested in the specifics of this important program from a health care consumer perspective, my curiosity was piqued most by the aspirational audacity and systemic support required to access a research sample of this size. You see, earlier that week, two of my colleagues and I had lamented the fact that it was becoming increasingly onerous to place studies in real-world school contexts. A common refrain communicated by research and evaluation staff employed by a school district close to our campus is that they cannot support research conducted by graduate students enrolled in one of our master’sor doctoral-level research methods courses because the district already entertains a large number of requests from faculty and dissertation students to conduct research in their schools. There seems to be little willingness to consider how much of this research actually involves or affects music teachers and their students. Even when faculty and dissertation students submit requests to conduct research on music education topics that could potentially make a major contribution to the profession with little or no direct impact on classroom routines (e.g., a multiple case study of the endangered species known as fine arts supervisors), they are commonly denied