Policy Frameworks, Research, and K-12 Schooling

Abstract

Abstract Looking back over the last 100 years, one sees a clear overall advance for music in the schools. The expertise and dedication of professional music teachers have produced regular expansions of substance and scope. Policies supporting school music programs that demand the work of such professionals have been a resounding success for education, the art of music, and culture more generally. However, many other forces are at work developing ideas and values in society as a whole. All these forces are constituted and reconstituted into policy frameworks that wield powerful influences on decision making. Aspirations, content, expert and lay personnel, organizational structures, funding patterns, and many other elements combine and recombine over time. A policy framework is a constellation of such forces and resources moving together or in parallel to fulfill a common purpose. The influences of various policy frameworks are as complex as life itself, and as difficult to understand. It is easy to be blinded by simplicity, to get lost in complexity, and to be so involved in one policy framework that the others are obscure, unreal, or beyond reasonable engagement. All these positions are dangerous. Each can thwart or stop a progressing cause. Indeed, some forces and frameworks have hurt or destroyed specific music education programs, thus slowing, but not stopping, the aggregate development of the field.

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