As I look at research regarding recruiting and retention of music students, I am somewhat amazed by the limited amount of articles on this topic. I am also amazed by the wealth of articles on music teacher recruiting and retention. Here are some fascinating stats from an article I am reading tonight:
classroom discipline is listed over and over again as the biggest issue for beginning elementary and secondary students (Madsen & Madesn, 1998)
how interesting is it then, that we don’t offer any kind of classroom discipline/management courses in most music ed curricula?!?!
Average per year need for music teachers is: 11,000
Average per year influx of new music teachers: 5,500 (Hill, 2003)
Every year, we are short by HALF of our national need for music teachers!
And we always seem to complain that there aren’t enough quality music programs/support. Perhaps we really don’t have enough quality music teachers
Females were found to be significantly more likely to leave the field of music education (Killian & Baker, 2006)
The most cited reason for leaving the field of music education included a lack of perceived support from administration & dissatisfaction with STUDENT BEHAVIOR
Can we say CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT?!?!
There were no other significant differences regarding age, years of experience, background, race
So, basically… We need to have CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT training for our music ed majors and we need to better educate our administrators on how to treat music teachers (this is somewhat out of our control… But we can hope!)
Killian, J. N., & Baker, V. D. (2006). The Effect of Personal and Situational Factors in the Attrition and Retention of Texas Music Educators. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 16(1), 41–54.
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