Music in America at Oberlin

The Music in America at Oberlin (MIAO) program seeks to establish and recognize bold and successful music programs in urban and underserved communities throughout the United States with a specific focus on transforming education. It will also introduce, nationally, the broader agenda of using music to bind students to academic programs, thus creating a positive framework for success, achieving strong academic results, cultivating critical life skills, and increasing both retention and college‐bound rates. The program also seeks to aggressively monitor the efficacy of these programs through implementing assessment strategies.

Selected faculty who are currently achieving these goals in K‐12 schools will be named as Music in America Fellows and be invited to the Oberlin campus each year to work directly with our students and, most importantly, to document their strategies so that they can be integrated into a broader curriculum. The Music in America Fellows will form a network that provides a support system for individual fellows and their ideas. The program will also provide a forum for discussion and a clearinghouse for new strategies, with the hope of influencing other training programs in music education beyond our own.

Oberlin will seek to support the Music in America Fellows by building financial resources that support scholarships, in addition to soliciting the donation of instruments, creating a website for free music that meets the needs of varying talent and instrumentation, and by providing stipends when possible to assist fellows to support their programs. These fellows will also become scouts for potential music educators who emerge from these communities, as there is no doubt that individuals who have personally engaged the specific culture of a given community have a significant advantage when returning to teach there. Oberlin will continue to aggressively build scholarship resources to serve music education students and funds to support music education faculty and fellows in the program.

The ultimate goal is to develop a model that becomes a national beacon for tackling problems in education and that broadly influences the agenda for preparing and supporting all our children for the economy and world of the future.

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Two Music in America Schools

The Camden City Creative Arts High School in Camden, New Jersey, seeks to provide compelling experiences and opportunities for the diverse Camden City Public Schools student population. The goal of the Creative Arts High School (CAHS) is to empower students so that they can achieve academic excellence through the arts. The school’s award-winning ensembles, both vocal and instrumental, are the hallmarks of the school. In a public school system with a 56 percent high school graduation rate, CAHS not only graduates 100 percent of its students, but most also attend college. Creative Arts High School was selected by U.S. News & World Report as a Bronze Medal school winner in its ranking of "Best High Schools 2008."

Foundation Academy Charter School is an independent, "No Excuses" college preparatory middle school in Trenton, New Jersey. Opened in August 2007, the school currently serves more than 200 students in grades 5-8 and plans to expand to grades K-12 over the next decade. Its mission is to ensure that all students secure the academic knowledge and skills to prepare them for the nation’s finest colleges, and to instill in them the core values of caring, respect, responsibility, and honesty. Foundation Academy requires that every student play a string instrument; consequently, the academy has an extremely strong music program that the entire community values.

Music in America Conference:
July 8-10, 2011

See the schedule of the inaugural Music in America conference »

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For more information about Music In America at Oberlin, send e-mail to Marci Alegant, executive director, at marci.alegant@oberlin.edu.

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