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Strategies for Minority Recruitment

While there are good reasons for recruiting minorities into the music teacher profession, increasing the number of minority music teachers will not be easy. There are many social and school factors that contribute to making the pool of minority college students and music education graduates small. Thus longer-term strategies must be implemented to help resolve larger issues such as institutional racism. While short-term things can be done to improve minority teacher representation, unless the larger more culturally based issues are addressed, little progress will be made.

Areas on which the music education profession can focus to begin to initiate change include:

• simplifying certification requirements

• avoiding the development of new barriers

• early recruitment of minority teachers

• providing support in undergraduate programs

• mentoring during the first years of teaching

Simplifying certification requirements.

State music education certification requirements are based on the model of a four-or-more-year educational experience. For minority musicians with undergraduate degrees and an interest in teaching, a traditional route to certification typically would include a year or more of study, including student teaching. For experienced adults, these traditional paths to certification can constitute a difficult hurdle, having a negative impact on families and limiting financial resources.

Innovative certification routes, which require some additional study, possibly over a summer with immediate entry into a teaching position in the fall, with close supervision and mentoring may help limit the expense and disruption to families that such a transition into teaching might cause. In some states where the bar to provisional certification has been lowered, the requirements for permanent certification have been raised; thus the combination of coursework and teaching experience required for permanent certification has not changed dramatically. Alternative certification requirements that insure quality should be vigorously pursued.

Avoiding the development of new barriers.

One new barrier some states have initiated is the expectation that prospective music teachers will have a five-year college experience (awarding both a bachelor's and master's degree) prior to entry into the profession. Five years of study does not necessarily make better music teachers, and it places additional burdens on minority candidates for music teaching as it requires an additional year of financial expenditure before income can be realized. While the profession should continue to advocate additional professional study culminating in a master's degree, an approach that integrates teaching experience with graduate study can be more beneficial to the development of the music teacher, allowing the teacher to mature and integrate the knowledge and skills from courses with the experience of the classroom.

Another new barrier many states are placing in the paths of prospective teachers is competency testing. Fraser states, "There is virtually no correlation between success in tests and success in the classroom.''13 In addition, he states that it is a "clearly documented fact that any test available today has considerable race, class, and gender bias in it,''14 thus making such testing inappropriate and contributing to the difficulty in finding minority teachers. While it is important to advocate for high standards, the challenge is to produce enough minority candidates who can meet high standards that meaningfully measure a prospective music teacher's fitness for the job.

Early recruitment of minority teachers.

Rather than placing barriers, the music education profession must seek innovative ways of attracting minorities to music teaching. One approach may be to identify and recruit prospective music teachers at an early age. This might be as early as middle or high school. By identifying minority students with potential at that age and providing support and mentoring, one may begin to limit the dramatic dropout rates that plague the high schools with large enrollments of students, consequently limiting the pool of potential minority applicants for undergraduate programs. Such efforts have been undertaken in Boston by the teacher's union, which has proposed a program in which area colleges, in cooperation with public school teachers, would work with middle school students to help them complete high school, find college placement and scholarship support, and ultimately find jobs as teachers in the Boston Public Schools. New York City is also supporting this notion with the establishment of a High School for Teaching, which gives its students early experiences in tutoring younger students.

Providing support in undergraduate programs.

Undergraduate music teacher programs are often organized with a series of "hurdles" instituted with the notion of insuring the quality of graduates. The first clearly identifiable hurdle is the admissions process. Many undergraduate music programs look for prospective students in traditional sites and with traditional backgrounds (e.g., played in the high school concert band). If undergraduate programs are gomg to increase the presence of minority students, they need to institute affirmative action programs that pursue prospective minority musicians in nontraditional venues. Some potential minority students may have extensive music backgrounds comprising primarily informal music experiences, such as playing in a "rock band." While these atypical experiences may not provide prospective music teachers with the skills and understanding, such as reading music, that undergraduate music programs often expect of their entering students, they may still provide the students opportunities to develop very high levels of musicianship.

In addition to the admissions process, music teacher education programs often include other hurdles, such as a second admissions process into a specific education major at the end of the sophomore year. For a music education program, this screening may require a particular grade-point average, an audition, an interview, and additional recommendations. Faculty must monitor such hurdles to make sure they do not constitute a special barrier to minority students. Other affirmative actions can be taken to help students succeed in preservice music education programs. These include the presence of minority faculty in music teacher education programs and the mentoring of younger minority undergraduates by more senior minority teacher education students.

Mentoring during the first years of teaching.

As many educators involved in teacher education realize, the development of career professional music educators does not end with undergraduate education. The first several years of teaching are often difficult and may be especially challenging for some teachers, particularly if they find themselves isolated within teaching environments that do not include models with whom they can identify. Several strategies can be employed to help the novice minority music teacher.

College teacher education programs can provide support and mentoring for their graduates, efforts that include both on-site visits to new teachers and on-campus seminars to help minority teachers with the transition to the professional world. Teachers' unions and professional groups such as the National Association for the Study and Performance of African American Music (NASPAAM) can also provide support for new teachers. School systems should also make efforts to hire a core of minority teachers so that isolation will be less of a problem.

Conclusions.

Music teacher education programs in colleges and universities must provide a well-structured and culturally inclusive core-curriculum representative of (a) traditional areas of music study that have undergirded the competencies and standards required to complete high-quality degree programs, and (b) ethnomusicological perspectives and competencies in order to prepare well-trained graduates for the teaching profession. If music education is to survive and progress in the future, these two components must work in close partnership with one another. The significant rise in the minority population indicates a marked transformation of the workforce, with women showing the greatest increase by 2005. Institutions that begin to plan now for this growing social diversity will tap the largest talent pool and enjoy a competitive advantage throughout the next century.

Music education needs the best and brightest as much as any other profession. That must be one of our priority efforts beginning now. Music occupies a very important place in the cultural lives of most minorities outside of the school setting. Our challenge is to capitalize on that inherent interest as a conduit into the serious pursuit of musicianship and skills requisite to entry into higher education music programs. That effort will call for support systems that assure that all students will receive unbiased instruction, sincere counseling, and role model mentors, as well as cultural representation included within the teaching materials.

Transforming the classroom environment to develop the potential of all students, regardless of their ethnicity, will require music teachers with highly developed crosscultural sensitivities and social skills. Music teachers should realize that the social needs and concerns of minorities are often not the same as those of majority students. For example, the competitive mode of the teaching/ learning environment so favored in our American style of instruction does not receive positive responses from minority students who react more favorably to a cooperative mode.15 Hispanics tend to be more concerned with the quality of relationships over time, rather than with simply getting the job done. They have a strong sense of family loyalties. They tend to maintain closer physical contact in their personal space than many nonHispanics.16 Asian students value education and have a high regard for teachers and their role in the instructional process. They have been reared by their parents to show obedience and respect in the school setting. Their studiousness and strong work ethic often translates into high academic accomplishment. However, lack of communication skills may sometimes pose a language barrier that will be a challenge to overcome for both students and teachers. Communication skills are also a problem for Hispanic students. As for the new Asian students, each is striving to balance two cultures; the culture of their homelands and that of mainstream American societies.17 Argyle suggests the presence of seven skills for engaging in social transactions such as those of instruction: perceptive skills, expressive skills, conversational skills, assertiveness, emotional expression, anxiety management, and affiliative skills.18

Effective music teachers will have to devise appropriate classroom strategies for defusing tensions that normally arise from social differences. Teachers will have to work harder at treating all students equally and respectfully, bearing in mind the vital importance of consistent verbal and nonverbal behaviors in the acculturation process. Moreover, before academic behaviors can be effective, these social behaviors must be firmly established.19 Research in classroom discipline and subject-matter presentation, as well as in establishing music behavior within applied settings, offers music educators, regardless of specialty, a wealth of data addressing the teacher-training process for future music educators.20 The issues involved in improving undergraduates' skills are of vital interest to all music educators throughout the profession. Madsen wrote: "Besides the obvious role of college professors, most music teachers who have even a few years of experience serve as models for observations, supervisors of student teachers, and members of peer-review committees. Just as we care deeply about teaching children music, we are all concerned with teaching those who will themselves teach children."21

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