Current Trends in Music Education

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Derek Fleeman

November 19, 2010

Current Trends in Education

        Secondary school reform represents a vitally important topic. In the early twenty-first century, the major goal was helping all students reach high academic standards. This has yielded a number of innovative programs that attempt to balance students' personal and academic needs. Effective curricula include core learning in discrete academic subjects, increased foreign languages, interdisciplinary courses, and alternative assessment approaches. The foundational skills of reading and writing are garnering more attention at the secondary level in all content area classes.

Along with high standards, public schools must meet the needs of all students and provide an appropriate education for students with many diverse needs. Inclusion of students with disabilities requires schools to rethink the way classes are tracked and how services are provided to students who have difficulty in the school environment. Co-teaching arrangements, which allow subject area specialists to work with trained special educators in the same classroom, constitute one approach to meeting diverse needs.        Some research indicates that smaller high schools are better settings for meeting adolescent needs and helping students reach their full academic potential. In an attempt to break down large comprehensive high schools, a number of options are being tried. Small school alternatives include schools-within-schools and parallel schools sharing the same physical space with distinct missions and programs. Some large high schools separate students by grade level into separate wings.

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Along with having high standards in core subjects and other areas, the arts and aesthetic programs are either brought along with it, ignored, or stomped out. Depending on the view of the community and the school administration, the arts programs, especially music programs, can suffer from this increase in expectations. It is up to music educators of today and the future to continue to, in some area, fight tooth and nail for our subject’s justification in the school curricula. In other areas, the expectations are brought up in the music program with the other core subjects.

Flexible scheduling is used ...

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