The Music-in-Education National Consortium (MIENC), led by the New England Conservatory of Music, combined its music education reform efforts in eight states to a) support the evolution of professionally trained musicians in public schools and b) meet the growing teaching shortages that traditional music education cannot fill. Formed as a coalition of major schools of music, schools of education, arts organizations, and public school partnerships, MIENC's Music Education Reform Project is committed to a set of principles and strategies for establishing standards for Music-in-Education (MIE) teacher preparation, professional development and action research programs. Because these programs provided a compelling, diverse range of musical, educational, and assessment practices, they attracted a wider population of music majors and community musicians into public education and. Concurrently, these programs addressed the needs of a growing number of public schools that are relying on music to improve learning across the curriculum.

Goals for MIENC's Music Education Reform Project included creating, piloting, and evaluating the following: 1) an action research network of MIE Learning Laboratory National Network of school Music-in-Education programs capable of evaluating the impact of MIE program curricula and teaching in MIENC partnership school sites;2) a professional development exchange program designed to share innovative curricula and assessment practices across MIENC partnership sites; 3) a central MIENC web communications site where faculty, college students, administrators, and researchers from higher education, arts organizations, and partnering laboratory schools can share work, data collection, and publications relevant to the Music Education Reform Project; 4) MIENC working conferences convened in MIENC communities to help sustain and create local partnerships among institutions of higher education, arts organizations and schools interested in leveraging the evolving role of music and musicians in the context of school reform and accountability; and 5) digital portfolio assessment systems for higher education guided intern programs and learning laboratory schools that was designed to organize and make accessible documentation and assessment of multiple aspects of program development as evidence of the impact of music as a central strategy for school and music education reform.

As the direct result of the project’s consortium structures, principles, materials, and strategies for partnerships, MIENC provided sustainable models for music’s essential, yet rapidly evolving role in contemporary education. The early years of the Consortium's work are now published and available online at the Journal for Music in Education's Web site [journal.music-in-education.org]. The final school reports and sample digital reports are now published in the summer of 2008 as a Web Source Book to support the initiation of scale-out dissemination programs through the Music Learning Leadership Certificate begun in July 2008 at the University Maryland and scheduled to be expanded nationally by the summer of 2010 through the FIPSE Music-in-Education Dissemination Project.

This project, which directly influenced the formation of the Center for Music-in-Education at New England Conservatory, was awarded a $140,000 planning and implementation grant from the Popplestone Foundation in Boston that enabled NEC to publish and distribute the Journal for Music-in-Education and website construction during the final years of this project.

ONLINE REFERENCES: 

The Journal for Music-in-Education (2007)
   http://www.journal.music-in-education.org  

The MIE News/blog (for MIENC pre and post professional training students)
   http://mieatnec.org  

The Music-in-Education National Consortium (MIENC) Website
   http://music-in-education.org  

Larry Scripp
Project Director

New England Conservatory
Center for Music-in-
  Education
290 Huntingdon Avenue
Boston, MA 02115
Tel: 617-585-1364
Fax: 617-585-1298

E-mail: larry.scripp@necmusic.edu
URL: http://larryscripp.net

David Dik
Project Co-Director
U.S. Partner

Metropolitan Opera Guild
65th Street
New York, NY
Tel: 212-769-7069

E-mail: ddik@operaed.org