The aim of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was to improve the performance of America's primary and secondary schools by assuring that highly qualified teachers were in place to educate our nation’s children. However, music teachers are sometimes placed in job positions that run contrary to their pre-service training. Research indicates a trend of states moving to non-stratified K-12 music certifications that may be exacerbating this problem.
This study investigated the relationship of teacher role and music teachers' opinions of their ability to implement the 15 benchmarks associated with the Ohio Fine Arts Academic Content Standards in Music. Participants were a convenience sample of two groups of high school music teachers from Ohio and defined as multidiscipline (instrumental/choral) and specialist (instrumental or choral) music. The final overall response rate was 25.7% (N=147) of specialist (n1=122) and multi-discipline (n2=25) teachers. Data were derived from an online questionnaire using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. Using a repeated measures analysis of variance, between- and within-group variances were analyzed to identify differences with respect to teacher role (specialist teachers versus multi-discipline teachers) and benchmark
Findings indicated no significant difference exists between specialist and multi-discipline music teachers’ opinions of their ability to implement of the Ohio Fine Arts Academic Content Standards in Music. In addition, there was no significant interaction effect between teacher role and benchmarks. Slight differences between select benchmark means and teacher role suggested future studies could investigate benchmarks by content standard rather than collectively. Future research on the topic of specialist and multi-discipline music teachers will require better precision in sampling and improved control to better investigate distinctions between these teacher groups.