ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: TELLING THE WHOLE STORY: A MIXED METHODS PROCESS EVALUATION OF MIDDLE SCHOOL GENERAL MUSIC CURRICULUM REFORM Bri’Ann Fallon Wright, Doctor of Philosophy, 2023 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Stephanie Prichard, School of Music This study is a mixed methods process evaluation of a middle school music curriculum reform in a large, Mid-Atlantic school district. The purpose of this study was to explore East Highland Public School District’s (a pseudonym), reform and implementation process of their seventh and eighth grade general music curricula. I constructed an understanding of the nature of the curricular reform, including structural circumstances that led to the change, the writing process and pilot phase, and enactment across the district. Further, I sought to investigate teacher perceptions of agency and conceptions of their teaching alignment with the new curriculum documents. Research questions guiding the study addressed the nature of the EHPSD curriculum reform, enactment process, and teacher perceptions. I framed this study through the theory of ecological teacher agency, which views agency as action with intention and emergent within the unique structures surrounding the individual. Data sources included old and new curricular documents, interviews with the EHPSD music supervisor and several teachers who were central to the writing process, and a questionnaire—Music Teacher Professional Agency Survey (MTPAS)—administered to all middle school general music teachers in the district. I approached data analysis using a multifaceted approach informed by scholarly recommendations for mixed methods process evaluation. First, I completed a thorough document analysis of the new general music curriculum—General Music I and General Music II (GMI and GMII). Next, I conducted interviews with the EHPSD music supervisor and three of the main curriculum writers. Finally, the quantitative strand of the study, included administering and analyzing data from the MTPAS where I sought to understand teachers’ perceptions of agency and conceptions of their teaching alignment with the written curriculum. I then formulated a theory of action, based mostly from the interview data with the music supervisor, to “test” the efficacy of the implementation process and uncover the underlying assumptions inherent in the enactment process. I mixed my qualitative and quantitative data strands by creating a data convergence matrix. Results indicated that based on the theory of action, the reform of EHPSD’s new middle school general music curriculum was carried out with relative fidelity. Instigated by a board- approved visual arts schedule change and overseen by EHPSD’s music supervisor, the reform process included curriculum design and writing time, a pilot program, and full implementation for both GMI and GMII. Through document analysis and exploration of interview data, I identified that the contents and processes included in GMI and GMII reflected progressive middle school general music values and curricula design. Survey results indicated positive perceptions of teacher agency and positive conceptions of pedagogical alignment with the document. In mixed methods analysis, several themes overlapped between interviews and survey responses. Findings from this study point toward the need for localized reform efforts that leverage teachers as instigators of reform design and enactment, in both program design and also in program and policy evaluation. Additionally, process and full impact evaluation work is important to music education to uncover curricular instruction, content, and teaching strategies that work in the pk-12 and higher education music classrooms. TELLING THE WHOLE STORY: A MIXED METHODS PROCESS EVALUATION OF A MIDDLE SCHOOL GENERAL MUSIC CURRICULUM REFORM by Bri’Ann Fallon Wright Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2023 Advisory Committee: Dr. Stephanie Prichard Dr. Kenneth Elpus Dr. Robin Giebelhausen Dr. Patricia Alexander Dr. Campbell Scribner Dr. Tara Brown, Dean’s Representative Copyright Ó 2023 by Bri’Ann Fallon Wright All rights reserved ii Dedication For Betty Lou Malen (1946-2023) I dedicate this work to you. While the roots of my inclinations toward policy are a result of my teaching experiences, you are the one who calcified my belief in the work and helped me uncover a pathway through it. Your unwaveringly high expectations of my thinking and writing process pushed me to a place I hadn’t been able to previously imagine for myself. For this, I give you an eternal thank you. Your teaching mantra the worth of the work never exceeds the worth of the person was such an important sentiment to hear in higher education and it is embedded in my own teaching now. Your voice will forever ring in my ear “Awk! Convert to active voice. Wish I could convince you to write in active voice.” I have worked my damnedest to convert this dissertation to active voice. iii Acknowledgments For Peter: As unromantic as this may sound, this document feels like a love letter between you and me. You are the number one reason I was able to complete this document, without you it would not have happened. Your tremendous selflessness and support are truly inspiring and I only hope I can somehow begin to return the generosity. I love you from the very depths of my heart. For Magnus Bear and Georgie Jude: You two are my sun and my moon. Mag: little did you know, our Iceland trip was a bribe for all the time I spent away from you to complete this project. G: you came into this world during this degree, the essence of this chapter of my life is baked into your being for better and for worse. I love you both so tremendously, more than words can describe—[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] (Cummings, 1952). While no feat I have ever or will ever accomplish will be as challenging, rewarding, inspiring, and love-filled as raising you two, this project is maybe as close as it gets (so far). I promise to always do my best to make you proud, to be the best boss of the house that I can. For my mom and dad, Jude and Rand: Thank you for instilling in me that education was a non-negotiable and for standing by my side for each degree and every challenge and success that went along with them. I am in awe of your unwavering support and I hope to give my kiddos the same that you both have given Becca and me. I love you both so much and thank you for your continued investment in our education and well-being. You two are the reasons I was able to dream my dreams in the first place. For Becca: Every damn project I start, which you have lovingly pointed out typically includes far more than a few at once, usually results in me needing to call you for help. You really are the only one that knows how to truly step up to the challenges I create for myself and I thank you for that. Your selflessness, graciousness, and understanding have continued to sustain me and support me. You are my best friend always and forever. Thanks Sis! For Stephanie: But seriously, you are the world’s best advisor. You are the only teacher, mentor, or professor ever that could have steered me through this research and you did so with iv grace and aplomb. Thank you for showing me how creative this process can actually be. Thank you for pushing my thinking about methodology. Thank you for pushing my writing. Thank you for being a partner in subversiveness. Thank you for normalizing having a family in higher education. Thank you for making clear that we never betray the sisterhood. All these traits I hope to exemplify for my future students. While some things in research are emergent, your teaching, research, and advising skills certainly are not. For Ken: During most of the last four years, I have looked forward to our hallway banter and zoom digressions and will absolutely miss them as I move on from this program. You have used the art of argument to push my thinking and my writing—a teaching and mentoring trait I will definitely take with me. From your specific positionality, thank you also for normalizing having a family in higher education. I promise I have read most of your research, but certainly all of your abstracts. I have learned so much from you and I am truly grateful for your mentorship. Thank you. (Also, thanks to Becca Elpus for all the loving text messages and support!) For Robin: You are truly a masterclass in believing in the whole student and understanding that when we come into your classroom, we are more than just our musical output. You embody what it means to believe all students can succeed. Thank you for the compassion you have shown me and the belief you have in me. You are a tremendous teacher and advocate. Thank you! For Tara: While my writing has improved due to many of the folks mentioned here, you may be the one most responsible for the amount of improvement to my writing I made during my degree. The five-page literature review that I handed in, my first assignment in your class, came back with over 200 edits. While that definitely says something about the state of my writing, I think it speaks far higher of your care and generosity as an educator. Thank you so much for your patience and expertise! For Pat: If others pushed my writing, you pushed my thinking. You helped me to clarify how I think about learning and therefore teaching. You are an educational force that I am so grateful to have shared a classroom and now dissertation with. The journal correspondence that we had in your v Learning Theories class was the most unique trust building activity I have experienced as a student. Thank you for your advisement on the framework within this document and for your continued effort to push my thinking! For Cam: Thank you for showing me that history is not black and white, that even where in history we decide to focus our discussion is meaningful. Thank you for being provocative and pushing how I think about the world and education policy. For Allison: Having you by my side—particularly the last four years while we navigated this degree, a pandemic, and having babies—has been indispensable to me. What would we have done without each other? Our text messages alone could replace the word counts throughout the pages of both our dissertations. We will take this world by storm. I love you and thank you for all your support, love, and especially humor! For my colleagues in our music education department: Thank you for writing with me, thinking with me, arguing with me, pushing me, and laughing with me. Allison, David, Josanne, Justin, Christian, Amy, and Darren, it has been a serious honor this past year, completing this paper and working alongside you all. I am so proud to have been a part of this department and work alongside such brilliant scholars, teachers, and music makers. For myself— Last but least, I wanna thank me. I wanna thank me for believing in me. I wanna thank me for doing all this hard work. I wanna thank me for having no days off. I wanna thank me for never quittin’…I wanna thank me for trying to do more right than wrong. I wanna thank me for just being me at all times (Snoop Dogg, 2019). vi Table of Contents DEDICATION ............................................................................................................................... II ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .............................................................................................................. III TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................. VI LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................................ IX LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... X CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 Organization of Document .............................................................................................................. 3 Need for the Study .......................................................................................................................... 5 Music Education in K-12 Schools: A Brief History .......................................................................... 8 Design and Theoretical Framework .............................................................................................. 13 Theoretical Framework: Agency & Structure ................................................................................ 17 Positionality Statement ................................................................................................................. 25 Purpose and Research Questions ................................................................................................ 26 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE ...................................................................................................... 27 Historical Context of Standards Reform ........................................................................................ 29 Curriculum Implementation & Evaluation ...................................................................................... 34 Music Education Curriculum & Policy Position Papers ................................................................. 44 Teacher Agency Research ........................................................................................................... 47 Exemplar Mixed Methods Studies ................................................................................................ 51 Literature Conclusion and Implications ......................................................................................... 55 CHAPTER 3: METHOD .............................................................................................................. 57 Purpose and Research Questions ................................................................................................ 57 vii Mixed Methods Research ............................................................................................................. 57 Setting ........................................................................................................................................... 65 Qualitative Data Collection ............................................................................................................ 72 Quantitative Data Collection ......................................................................................................... 76 Combined Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 77 Chapter Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 78 CHAPTER 4: RESULTS ............................................................................................................ 79 Curriculum Reform Timeline (RQ1) .............................................................................................. 80 Theory of Action (RQ 1) ................................................................................................................ 85 Content Analysis of General Music I and General Music II (RQ 1) ............................................... 88 Enactment and Implementation of General Music Curriculum (RQ 2) .......................................... 96 Teachers’ Perceptions of Agency Implementing a General Music Curriculum (RQ 3) ............... 120 Teachers’ Conceptions of the Alignment Between Curriculum and Practice (RQ 4) .................. 123 Mixed Methods Analysis ............................................................................................................. 126 Chapter Conclusions ................................................................................................................... 130 CHAPTER 5: DISCUSSION ..................................................................................................... 132 Overview of Findings .................................................................................................................. 133 Curriculum Design Process ........................................................................................................ 135 Ecological Agency and Structural Constraints ............................................................................ 145 Process Evaluations ................................................................................................................... 147 Future Research ......................................................................................................................... 157 Final Thoughts ............................................................................................................................ 161 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................................ 164 APPENDIX B ............................................................................................................................ 167 APPENDIX C ............................................................................................................................ 168 viii APPENDIX D ............................................................................................................................ 170 APPENDIX E ............................................................................................................................ 173 REFERENCES ......................................................................................................................... 174 ix List of Tables 3.1 Pseudonyms of the Interview Participants and the Schools Where They Teach 69 3.2 Teacher Demographics & Teaching Characteristics 72 3.3 Keywords Used in the Text Search of Each of the A Priori Codes 75 3.4 Sample Agency Items from the MTPAS 77 4.1 Teachers’ Perceptions of Communication from Leadership & Professional Development Support in Preparation for and Following the Middle School General Music Curriculum Change 120 4.2 Teachers’ Self-Report Perceptions of Agency Across Three Dimensions 122 4.3 Comparison of Teacher Perceptions Across Years of Experience and Preferred Content Area 125 x List of Figures 3.1 Mixed Method Design Display 63 3.2 Race/Ethnicity Data for Student Enrollment in EHPSD 66 3.3 Blazar’s (2022) Model for Constructing a Theory of Action for Program Evaluation 76 4.1 Basic Overview of the Curriculum Design Timeline 85 4.2 EHPSD Curriculum Reform Theory of Action 86 4.3 Overview of the Units from General Music I 91 4.4 Overview of the Units from General Music II 94 4.5 Music Supervisor and Curriculum Writer’s Within-case and Across-case Theme Presentation 119 4.6 Mixed Methods Data Convergence Matrix (Fitzpatrick, 2016) 129 1 Chapter 1: Introduction Trevor’s Story Yamini’s Story The musical finale of Hair plays quietly in the background while Trevor transforms his choral classroom to accommodate his general music first period class. He moves the chairs from the risers and positions them around the floor in a semi-circle figure. Trevor places his seat and music stand in the midst of the semi-circle. This year, Trevor teaches one seventh grade general music class and three choral sections. He has worked hard to build his choral program, completing hours of professional development on adolescent voice change and vocal pedagogy, and thoughtfully structuring his choirs’ many performances through the year. In his teaching, Trevor carefully centers his students and their needs. Trevor is currently working hard to get ready for his spring choir concert which features musical theater songs. His immediate focus this morning is on his general music class, where he's working on a ukulele unit. Making use of his choral strengths, Trevor is teaching uke accompaniment techniques by using the song Age of Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In, from the musical “Hair.” Students are singing the song while accompanying themselves on ukuleles, tambourines and egg shakers. The spring choir concert is Trevor’s biggest annual performance and this year, for the first time, his general music class will be performing their ukulele arrangement for it. Yamini rushes through her classroom door at 6:45am, plugs her laptop into her smart board and hits shuffle on her Middle School Music playlist. Mos Def’s “Let the Sunshine In” begins to play. As Yamini grooves to the song, she works quickly to set up the first of three general music sections she will see today. Her eighth grade classes are starting a new unit today and she wants everything just right for when the 8:05 bell rings. She begins by setting up five groups of five chairs each, placed in circles, and evenly spaced around her room. In preparation for this new unit, Yamini put her students into groups of five and challenged each group with agreeing on and selecting a song they would need to learn together. They picked songs ranging from Taylor Swift to Elton John to Mos Def, which Yamini spent the weekend transcribing to tab notation. Using their voices, ukuleles, and auxiliary percussion each group has been tasked with learning the chorus or a section of their song and creating an original arrangement during their next three class periods. They will then record their arrangements into Soundtrap and learn the basics of sound mixing. Some of Yamini’s students have shown early excitement in this project and are already talking about hosting an open mic performance during their lunch hour to showcase their song segments. 2 The two vignettes that opened this chapter illustrate two divergent, but ultimately related functions of the general music classroom, reflected in the teachers’ varying uses of the song Let the Sunshine In. The values and circumstances presented in these teachers’ classrooms are just two possibilities among many. Trevor is a teacher who uses vocal music instruction to enrich his students’ worldviews and capacity for intercultural connection. Trevor’s classroom is far more typical of a traditional middle school music program, implying that his music education experience and his position were rooted in a more traditional view of music education. Teachers like Trevor work hard to develop large ensemble programs that may match their background experience while also securing their position with student enrollment. Such ensemble courses serve large populations, though arguably a select group (Elpus & Abril, 2019; Grisé, 2019). Yamini, on the other hand, identifies less with the structure of a traditional large ensemble, prioritizing instead some of the broader or more democratic content easily accessible to a general music classroom. She has shaped her general music classroom around creativity and technology while still including musicianship elements learned in more traditional large ensemble classrooms. To secure enrollment, she makes an effort to incorporate students’ musical interests with the goal of meeting her students at their level and guiding them through their own process of music making and learning. These two teachers, both of whom value student growth and development, but with seemingly different ideas and values of music teaching and learning, are results of the amalgamation of their professional and personal musical experiences and the structural constraints of their specific teaching institutions. How might a music teacher plan and teach a unit that includes the song Let the Sunshine In? Possibly as originally intended when written for the musical Hair, as a pop song from the billboard top hits, or deconstructed as a sample embedded within a hip hop anthem that emphasizes community? In considering this singular song, these two possibilities are among many of the ways teachers can provoke high quality teaching and learning. 3 This study is a mixed methods process evaluation of a middle school music curriculum reform in the East Highland Public School District (EHPSD) of an east coast state. Leading up to the 2021-2022 school year, a new middle school general music curriculum was designed and piloted to be fully implemented in the fall of 2021. As of the writing of this study, the new curriculum has been fully enacted for one full school year and the current 2022-23 school year. The purpose of this study was to conduct a process evaluation of the curriculum reform and implementation to understand effects on teacher experience and professional agency in the classroom. Through analyses of the old and new curricular documents, informed by interviews with the East Highland district music supervisor, I constructed a richly descriptive account of this policy reform. Further, I sought to understand teachers’ perceptions of the curricular change as related to their self-reports of professional agency. Organization of Document The first chapter of this document functions as a description and overview of each chapter and schema in this paper. It presents a case for why this investigation is important to the field of music education, a contextual overview of standards based reform in U.S. education and music education, an understanding of how I evaluated my data, a brief explanation of the basic design elements of the study, and a framing of my personal positionality as a researcher. The design section of chapter one includes a description of my theoretical framework—a culmination of various philosophical and theoretical strands that focus primarily on an ecological approach to teacher agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015), and a social perspective on development and education (Dewey, 1938; Vygotsky, 2012). The second chapter serves as a review of the literature that supports this study. Because music education has only scant program evaluation research, I have bounded my review with curriculum evaluation studies in general education that consider teachers perspectives and experiences as outcome variables. I do not include studies that consider 4 student achievement as outcome variables. I also include studies from the international music education community on curriculum and standards evaluation. Then, I review the most recent literature on the role of the music supervisor in public school music programs. Because researchers in the music education field have written many position papers that theoretically and anecdotally explore the intersections of policy, curriculum, and teacher agency, I also include that work in this chapter as well. Finally, I review teacher agency research in general education when the theoretical framework is congruent with that of this study as well as the few studies that investigate music teacher agency in the music education field. The third chapter outlines my mixed methods research design. I begin by stating the purpose of the study and research questions. Then, I give an overview of mixed method design which includes the philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the methodology. In the next section, I outline the design of this study by explaining process evaluation and its use in this study. I give an overview of the participants, data sources, and data collection procedures. The final section of chapter three outlines my data analysis procedures. In chapter four, I give a presentation of results, which is organized by the research questions and begins with an overview of the reform that includes the reform timeline, the reform’s theory of action, and a description of the curriculum documents. This is followed by the explanatory sequential mixed methods findings which include an explanation of the themes I determined from my interviews, and the results from the teacher survey. I end this chapter by combining the analysis of the results section to answer my final two research questions. Finally, chapter 5 includes a thorough discussion of mixed methods results and implications for practice at district, classroom, and preservice levels. Findings are examined through the lens of my theoretical framework. 5 Need for the Study Program evaluation with a focus on student outcomes is nearly unheard of in music education scholarship, owing largely to the fact that music is not a “tested subject,” and the field therefore lacks reliable and valid assessment data. Process evaluation—or the systematic effort to understand if a given program or reform works as intended and if the target population is being served (Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.; Reichardt & Cook, 1979)—is also noticeably absent from the music education literature, despite numerous and routine standards initiatives and curricular changes throughout the history of the field. The result is a distinct lack of empirical understanding regarding policy change in music education. Although full scale program evaluation is a worthy long-term goal for those interested in advancing scholarly knowledge of music education policy, process evaluation is a more apt starting point for understanding the development and implementation of district level curricular change. Systematic exploration of the conditions precipitating a curricular change, the role of a music supervisor and teacher leadership in writing and implementing a new curricular framework, and teachers’ experiences enacting a new curriculum are all necessary to understand policy change in music education more thoroughly. Understanding the need for the EHPSD’s curriculum reform and describing the process the stakeholders navigated to enact the change is important to properly evaluate the reform. Education policy decisions and shifts are made and implemented frequently from the local to federal level. Oftentimes it can seem as though such changes are made simply to show that policy actors have accomplished something during their tenure, whether necessitated or not (Polikoff, 2021). Education policy researchers frequently find fatal flaws in the design, theory of action, or implementation of new policy initiatives (Heissel & Ladd, 2018; Malen et al., 2002; Polikoff & Porter, 2014). Rather than policy change for the purpose of optics, it is important that those in power make developmentally and contextually informed decisions that can be meaningfully enacted by professional educators and ultimately benefit student learning. 6 Furthermore, inciting local school and district level officials to assess a community’s unique needs could help them design and tailor necessary interventions to effectively serve their student populations. To this end, why and how did EHPSD officials decide to make changes to the middle school general music curriculum? Evidence of effective localized interventions exists in Galindo and colleagues’ (2017) case study of one community school that sought to enhance school capital by providing students with over 20 school specific wrap-around services. While intervention challenges still occurred, the services the school and community were able to provide allowed students’ baseline needs to be met so they could focus on school tasks (Galindo et al., 2017). Examining the dynamics of how and why school district leaders make particular policy decisions and how those policy decisions ultimately affect the teaching staff required to implement them has important implications for future school reform efforts. Since the early 1980s, education reforms have largely pertained to the establishment and implementation of academic standards. Standards, most simply, are discipline-based statements of what students should know and be able to do, and state and federal policy makers often focus on creating standards-based curriculum documents for districts and schools. Proponents of standards-based curriculum claim that this approach can help ensure that all students receive the same quality education (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2022; Department of Education, 2002; Polikoff, 2021). This argument seems reasonable on the surface as it purports to adhere to values of equity and equality for all students but in reality, equity and equality arguments drive the design and implementation of uniform federal and state standards and curricula that belie conformity and sameness (Emdin, 2021). However, in even a generous read of federal and state standard mandates, one can see how they often conflict with myriad practical factors, such as varying student needs, teachers’ agency and subject expertise, school size, available resources, and neighborhood characteristics. For these reasons, creating curricular benchmarks that must be met and 7 assessed becomes complicated quickly and can easily yield epiphenomenal byproducts or what Rothstein (2008) quotes of Kerr (1975) “the folly of rewarding A and hoping for B” (p. 80). For example, setting standards benchmarks that all students need to meet and then testing those benchmarks through large scale assessment efforts focuses on student testing outcomes rather than ensuring high-quality instruction (Koretz, 2017; Rothstein, 2008). Such bungled reform efforts are evidence that stakeholders ought to consider localized initiatives specific to school and district needs and conduct rigorous pilot testing and cautious evaluation prior to implementing new education initiatives en masse, particularly regarding policies intended to influence teaching and learning directly. Once fully implemented, education policy researchers and other stakeholders conduct process and impact evaluations to test the outcomes or theories of action. For example, much research has been done on the effectiveness of reconstitution efforts (Malen et al., 2002; Strunk et al., 2016), turnaround strategies (Heissel & Ladd, 2018; Zimmer et al., 2017), performance- based pay incentives (Rice & Malen, 2017), and textbook and curriculum alignment (Blazar et al., 2020; Polikoff, 2015). However, arts and music education research tends to lag behind education policy research in both quantity and quality. Music education researchers tend to be fluent in understanding the social and political climate of our field (Hess, 2019; Koza, 2008; Talbot, 2018), music education philosophy (Allsup, 2016; Elliott & Silverman, 2015; Reimer, 2003), music teacher pathway (Jones & Parkes, 2010; Thornton & Bergee, 2008), and the demographic profiles of our teachers and public-school music students (Elpus, 2015, 2022; Elpus & Abril, 2019; Grisé, 2019). In comparison, hardly any scholarly energy has been devoted to understanding local-level policy change impacting music teaching and learning in K-12 schools. 8 Music Education in K-12 Schools: A Brief History Understanding the history of K-12 curricular music offerings in the United States is important to the contextual framing of this study. The earliest instances of systematic, group music teaching and learning were associated not with public schools, but with the Protestant church, for the purpose of developing a congregation capable of participating in the musical aspects of worship. Singing schools, headed by singing “masters” were prominent in New England during the 18th century and, by the early part of the 19th century, had become commonplace in other east coast locations. One such singing school master, Lowell Mason, began lobbying the Boston School Committee to include music as a curricular subject. In 1838, Mason and colleagues were successful, and music was acknowledged as a curricular subject on the basis of its moral, physical, and intellectual nature (Mark & Gary, 2007). The first school music curriculum was, therefore, Lowell Mason’s Manual of the Boston Academy of Music, written for use in Mason’s work as a singing school master, and adopted by the Boston School Committee as the basis for vocal music instruction in public schools (Mark & Gary, 2007). In the late 19th and early 20th centuries as schools began offering music for high school credit, the role of music supervisor became more commonplace. Around the same time, string orchestra and wind band programs began appearing in schools across the Midwest and Northeast. In contrast to vocal music, which originated in the Protestant church, instrumental music originated in large part from community and military band tradition (Mark & Gary, 2007). The Music Supervisors National Conference (MSNC), established in 1907, was a professional organization with aims to maintain and increase working relationships with teachers and to organize activities that affected music teaching, music courses for school credit, and school music curricula (Lee, 2007). Frances Elliott Clark, a founding member of MSNC, was responsible both for the suggestion of a permanent professional organization and for the broadening and eventual rebranding to Music Educators National Conference (MENC) in the 1920s (Lee, 2007). During this formative period for music education in the United States, the 9 increasing number of school district music supervisors along with the establishment of a national professional organization laid a foundation for the lasting notion of music supervisor as local policy leader. Understanding the context of music education within the United States education landscape helps to uncover the structures at play for music educators. The following section includes a brief summary of how national standards movements have influenced both music education standards and music teaching and learning followed by a general overview of the orientation of the music education field today to give context to the EHPSD’s middle school general music. Standards Reform and Music Education The 1957 launch of Sputnik sparked public and legislative frenzy about the demise of the American education system. What followed included efforts to develop hands-on curricula in math and science as well as increased rigor both in and out of the classroom. In 1958, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, funneling more than $1 billion into developing high quality teaching and learning in science, math, and world languages. In 1965, Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as a part of his Great Society initiative (McLaughlin, 1975). ESEA funded primary and secondary education with mandates for instructional materials, professional development, various resources, and the promotion of parental involvement in education (Jeffrey, 1978). A second wave of education reform began in the early 1980s under the Reagan administration with a report entitled A Nation at Risk that included Cold War rhetoric surrounding a lack of rigor in K-12 schooling and a need for more highly qualified educators (Park, 2004). Goals 2000 in the 1990s was the Clinton administration legislation that set forth goals for standards-based education reform. Along with Goals 2000 came the birth of the National Standards for Arts Education, which included standards for music, dance, theatre, and visual 10 arts (Branscome, 2012). In 2001, No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed into law bringing with it severe reform to teacher accountability, standardized learning, and testing. The Race to the Top initiative and the subsequent Common Core State Standards perpetuated similar accountability measures to NCLB. During this latest era of reform, the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS) were designed by a consortium of professional arts organizations, resulting in a revised set of standards for music, visual arts, media arts, dance, and theater (National Core Arts Standards, 2014). While these standards are the most commonly used among arts subjects in the public schools and adherence is often encouraged at state or district levels, the NCAS remain voluntary; a set of standards intended to guide planning, teaching and assessing student learning in the arts. However, to date, the NCAS are the music education field’s most prominent policy document. Middle School General Music United States music instruction has been taught in public schools for 185 years over the course of which the profession has traversed extensive terrain, with modest beginnings as solely vocal instruction for the main purpose of hymn singing (Mark & Gary, 2007), through a vast landscape of varied values, reforms, social and political movements, and technologies, among other influences. Public school music has grown tremendously from its inception to current day as music advocates and stakeholders have helped maintain its place as a required subject in elementary schooling and expanded the music courses offered. Although most often compulsory for elementary grades, once students enter secondary school music education becomes an elective subject offered in addition to other fine arts courses. Most common among secondary music course offerings are large ensemble courses including band, choir, and orchestra. General music is commonly used as a blanket term in music education to signify any type of k-12 public school music class that is not a large ensemble band, choir, or orchestra class—most often described through what it is not, rather 11 than what it is (Abril, 2016). Secondary general music classes have included keyboard experience (Burton, 2022a), creative percussion (G. D. Smith & Bersh, 2022), ukulele and singing (Giebelhausen, 2022), music technology (Frankel, 2022), songwriting (Adams, 2022), and learning to play in rock bands (Wright, 2021). In addition to students large ensemble coursework, Myers (1994) stresses the importance of compulsory general music through the eighth grade to create a more comprehensive music education for students. Myers (1994) defines general music principles as a) courses for all students, regardless of music background or general education achievement; b) instruction that integrates structure of music, the nature of musical learning, and developmental traits of adolescents; c) addressing the general educational welfare of all students; d) relevant to musical life outside the classroom; e) an exploratory learning approach; and f) assessment reflecting the nature of the course. Given the above information, general music in secondary education still remains elusive; a dearth of research exists on what middle school general music curricula may entail, who is responsible for teaching these courses, and what students elect to enroll. Using findings from the Arts National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), Elpus (2022) reports that when compared with band, choir, and orchestra, middle school general music has an overrepresentation of Black and Latinx students and students of lower socioeconomic means. This could point to gatekeeping and retention factors within large ensemble middle school classrooms or could be due to Burton’s (2022b) assertion that many students take secondary general music simply because it fits their schedule. This finding differs substantially from findings indicating that students enrolled in large ensemble courses are disproportionately white and from households in higher socioeconomic quintiles (Elpus & Abril, 2019). Outside of this body of demographic research, not much is known about middle school general music curricula or the students enrolled. However, Elpus (2022) reported that middle school general music students scored statistically indistinguishably on the Music NAEP from their non-music peers. While many indicators of student success exist, this measurement 12 warrants further examination into why general music students tend to score lower on the Music NAEP than large ensemble students. Given the findings about general music specifically as compared to other secondary music offerings, it is clear that knowing more about the curriculum, teachers, and student population could have important implications for the field of music education. EHPSD’s Middle School General Music Situated in a sprawling suburb between two Mid-Atlantic cities, the East Highland Public School District (EHPSD) is one of the top 100 largest school districts in the U.S. serving more than 57,000 students in pre-kindergarten through high school (East Highland Public School System, 2022).1 Roughly 63% of adult residents in the EHPSD area hold at least one college degree, and within the school district, nearly 80% of teachers hold a master’s degree or above. EHPSD ranks notably higher than the national average in per-pupil expenditures, spending roughly $16,000 per student annually. Racial and ethnic composition of the EHPSD student body is diverse, with roughly 32% white, 25% Black or African American, and 23% Asian, with Latinx and students of other or multiple racial backgrounds accounting for the remaining 20%. Students that receive free and reduced-price meals make up 23% of the district population (East Highland Public School System, 2022). Unlike many public school districts in the country, EHPSD has a district level music supervisor, and dance, theater and visual arts supervisor, evidencing that the district legitimately values arts education. Because of the supervisor role, EHPSD was able to redesign and implement a more robust approach to middle school general music. They achieved this through enacting a new middle school general music curriculum document while also establishing a greater number of middle school general music classes across the district. 1 Any citations associated with East Highland Public School System that use identifying information about the actual school district are not included in the reference list to protect district and participant anonymity. 13 Before the reform enactment, the public-facing EHPSD middle school general music curriculum was based in four larger learning concepts that included: (a) Perceiving and Responding—Aesthetic Education, (b) Historical, Cultural, and Social Content, (c) Creative Expression and Production, and (d) Aesthetics and Criticism. These four overarching learning objectives were not underpinned by any state or national standards. Each broad learning concept included general objectives listed in three varying levels, much like a rubric. Levels corresponded to each middle school grade level—6th grade, 7th grade, and 8th grade. One of the Perceiving and Responding themes included an objective dedicated to “world music,” which was structured through a Euro-western classical music lens. For instance students may have learned about “world drumming” in absence of any cultural or ethnic context, and while reading Western musical notation. The seven page public-facing general music document represented most of what middle school general music teachers were given to teach prior to the curriculum reform that is central to this study. Design and Theoretical Framework In this study, I seek to evaluate EHPSD’s effort to design and implement a unifying curriculum document for their middle school general music classes. While student learning is important to measure as one indication of potential reform success, measuring teacher-level outcomes as an initial step in an evaluation process is important to understanding the efficacy of a given reform. Oftentimes, program evaluations in education singularly focus on student achievement outcomes and when test scores are not positively affected, stakeholders are keen to discard the reform and move toward the next silver bullet reform strategy. I am compelled to understand curriculum and instructional alignment, teachers’ perceptions of their own agency within their classroom, school, and district, and their beliefs about if or how they can affect curricular change. Understanding how teachers are situated within their districts, schools, and classrooms, based on their perceptions, my observations and emergent perceptions, and 14 district-level supervisory perceptions could yield important considerations for how much change teachers can and are willing to make. These many layers and intersections within the general music public middle school classroom give a multi-faceted picture of the efficacy of this curriculum shift. Process Evaluation Within policy analysis, there are varied approaches to exploring change, implementation, and outcomes. Among such approaches are process evaluation and impact evaluation (Department of Health and Human Services, n.d.; Reichardt & Cook, 1979). Impact evaluations seek to establish causal links between interventions and their corresponding outcomes (e.g., evaluating turnaround strategies and their effect on achievement;(Zimmer et al., 2017). Differing from impact evaluation, process evaluation is defined as “describing the context and population of a study, discovering the extent to which the program has been implemented, providing immediate formative feedback…and discovering the process by which the treatment had the effect that it did” (Reichardt & Cook, 1979, p. 21). The purpose of a curriculum process evaluation is to uncover details about the curriculum and its implementation, for example, what problem does it solve, who is directly affected, who is responsible for enactment, what resources supplemented the curriculum to aid in enactment. This study includes a process evaluation of curricular change and implementation in middle school general music within a single school district. For the purposes of this study, I evaluate district and teacher level data in four overlapping ways to understand if EHPSD’s middle school general music curriculum has been implemented by the teachers as the music supervisor and other officials intended, and infer whether the initial goals of the curriculum are reflected in the documents that were designed and written. The four overlapping evaluative components include establishing a theory of action to assess the intention of curriculum design in comparison to the implementation of the curriculum, exploring the effects of teacher agency 15 and experience, investigating teachers’ instructional alignment to the curriculum, and then combining the data analyses of all these nested parts. Establish a Theory of Action. Through the document analyses and supervisor interviews, I uncovered the implicit theory of action of the reform to assist in the process evaluation. For decades, education policy evaluators have used theories of action to understand program aims, activities, and impacts and employ them as evaluation tools to determine program efficacy (Malen et al., 2002; Patton, 1990). Of particular relevance to this study is Argyris and Schon’s (1982) theory of action notion of “espoused theories” to “theories in use” which is part of the premise of a process evaluation, making defining a theory of action important. For this study, I established the theory of action by conducting interviews with the music supervisor and analyzing the new curriculum documents. These data begin to uncover answers related to the problem the curriculum reform aims to solve and details about the implementation of the new curriculum. Uncovering these answers provides insight into the intention of the curriculum reform and the music supervisors assessment of the implementation process so far, or “espoused theories” to “theories in use” (Argyris & Schön, 1982). Teacher Agency and Experience. Understanding teachers experiences and perceptions of agency as an outcome of curriculum reform has unique consequences for curriculum enactment and instructional alignment. Teacher agency has an interconnected relationship to curriculum enactment, where each can affect the other. In this study, I frame agency ecologically, as an emergent, temporal phenomenon, moving between past, present, and future, and where consciousness and development are considered to be rooted in sociality (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015). Simply put, agency is a construct that recalls past experiences, future imaginings, and the present co-construction of the two, where our past experiences and future imaginings are developed socially. An ecological view of agency is then structural and can interact or interrupt other structures (Giddens, 1984), human or institutional, 16 and the complex nature of agency when considering teachers and imposing or constraining educational structures allows for a deep understanding of curricular enactment. Investigating teachers experiences with the implementation of the curriculum reform and measuring their agency uncovers information about the overall enactment process of the curriculum. I use a survey questionnaire to identify any patterns or trends among the teacher population regarding teacher agency and then follow up with teacher interviews to further illuminate and comprehend the nature of the patterns or trends identified. Revealing teachers’ perceptions of agency elucidates whether the curriculum reform has been enacted in its original vision and helps to infer if the curriculum is being implemented with fidelity. Curriculum and Instructional Alignment. Curriculum has many different meanings to the various educational stakeholders who interact with and are affected by its implementation. Conway (2015) lays out the struggle of defining curricula in music education since it is heavily context specific and informed by teachers’ experiences and school expectations. Included in Conway’s (2015) definition of curriculum in music education is a list of the elements that are needed for high-quality music curriculum which include philosophy, beliefs, goals, benchmarks and skills, material resources, teaching and assessment strategies, and curricular resources. Even with a seemingly exhaustive list of what makes a high-quality curriculum, West (2015) further complicates an understanding of curriculum by contemplating the various meanings it holds, for example, what is taught, what is learned, instructional content, instructional delivery, music performed, benchmarks, curricular documents or standards, sequencing, and even unscripted moments between students and teachers. Given the elusive nature of curriculum, the alignment between a pre-established curriculum document and a given teacher’s instruction likely varies considerably based on teachers’ preconceived beliefs and experiences and on varying school expectations around curriculum. Evaluating and measuring how teachers perceived their instruction to align with the new EHPSD curriculum document is important to understanding how students are being served 17 by the curriculum reform. This alignment measurement also sheds light on whether the intended goals of the curriculum reform have been enacted with fidelity. Nested Culmination. The theory of action, teachers’ agency and experiences, and curriculum document and teaching alignment are then considered together, to inform each piece and culminate in the construction of a full picture of the curricular reform process at EHPSD. As part of combining the analysis of all the data strands, I consider the context, design and inputs, and the implementation to fully evaluate and describe the EHPSD process of enacting a curriculum reform. This nested approach to data analysis and interpretation informs the curriculum process evaluation and provides context about the intention of the reform, how it was enacted, and how it is being taught in the classroom. Theoretical Framework To frame this study’s design and data analysis, I draw on an ecological approach to human agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015) and a social and environmental understanding of development (Dewey, 1938; Vygotsky, 2012). The intersecting elements of my theoretical framework help to inform the study findings by looking at the intersections of teacher, classroom, school, and district, providing a robust description and understanding of the EHPSD’s curricular change. Specifically, I seek to explore the connections between the larger systemic school structures, teachers’ beliefs about their identity, and teachers’ perceptions of agency in their classrooms. Theoretical Framework: Agency & Structure I move in, and y’all must move on Let the sunshine ‘Cause I move too strong And I know what my feet move for Make it go without a brand new car Let the sunshine in I was fresh without a brand new song Don’t give a fuck what brand you are I’m concerned what type of man you are The sunshine in 18 What your principles and standards are You understand me y’all Be good to your family y’all (Mos Def, 2004) Hip hop emerged as a formation of community value and Black love; the consequence of systemic, structural dehumanization and the embodiment of artistic protest. The real estate developer and politician, Robert Moses, set the Bronx on fire when he systematically built the Cross Bronx Expressway connecting Queens to the city’s suburbs, decimating neighborhoods, ousting white families with the promise of home ownership in North Bronx and Westchester counties, while apartment buildings along the highway passed to slumlords who would eventually burn them to collect insurance money (Chang, 2005). It was this backdrop that gave birth to hip hop. Conceptually, hip hop can be considered as the musical representation of what Priestly and colleagues (2015) describe as an emergent agentic phenomenon, “as something that is achieved by individuals, through the interplay of personal capacities and the resources, affordances, and constraints of the environment by means of which individuals act” (p. 19). Hip hop artists confronted (and still confront today) the overbearing system of white supremacy by discarding the idea of blindly accepting the seemingly fixed and rigid structures of the world as truth. Instead, they used their artform to proclaim that economic and social structures were built to reinforce white supremacy and meant to oppress, create conformity, and complacency. The enduring protest of hip hop was propagated by ongoing white supremacy and systemic racism, large oppressive and forceful structures that ruined lives. Hip hop artists’ responses to the Cross Bronx Expressway was to build their own harsh and dissonantly loud freeway but instead paved by cultural and musical rejection of oppression. The establishment of education constraints and norms that often give birth to reform and program initiatives, such as the curriculum reform in EHPSD, does not resemble comparable 19 struggles felt by DJ Kool Herc and other originators of hip hop. However, understanding that outdated and even harmful long-established structures can empower leaders to instigate change is important for reflecting on the need for curriculum reform in EHPSD. DJ Kool Herc and others weaponized deep loud bass, enormous loudspeakers, and epic loud rap battles in an effort to assert agency in the face of structural oppression while reminding New York City that the Bronx still existed and the people were not going away. Even on a micro level, the development of songwriting in hip hop highlights the sheer complexity of artists asserting their own agency. In 2004, Mos Def (2004) recorded the song Sunshine (the above excerpt) which he embedded with segments of The 5th Dimension’s (1969) recording of Let the Sunshine In—a sample. Sampling is a technique in which a section of one song, whether beat, rhythm, chorus, or other, is cut and embedded into another song. The original context of Mos Def’s version of Let the Sunshine In started with Hair, a rock musical that reflected the hippie, pacifist counterculture movement of the 1960’s, which was later recorded by the group, The 5th Dimension, as an arrangement with Age of Aquarius, another hit from the musical Hair. Sampling allows artists like Mos Def to entangle meaning and past contextual significance to construct new meaning in a type of musical collage. The many meanings of Let the Sunshine In are embedded in Mos Def’s Sunshine, which consists of newly constructed meaning based on the interplay between the beat, the Let the Sunshine In sample, and his verses. Sunshine can be understood as a singular example, bounded by time, of Mos Def’s musical agency as a hip hop artist. The same way a musical artist can cut and repurpose music, teachers can assert their agency through how they use songs or present lessons. Where Mos Def uses musical techniques to create specific meanings, teachers use songs in specific ways to connect with their students and teach about musical techniques, like in the opening vignettes. Trevor used the original version of Aquarius-Let the Sunshine In to teach basic singing technique and ukulele accompaniment; whereas Yamini used Mos Def’s version of the song to teach creativity through small group arrangement—both 20 instances involve the same song remixed in different ways to teach performing and creating National Core Arts Standards. Songwriters and composers minimally navigate instrumentation, aesthetic perspective, various compositional techniques, lyrical writing, lyrical meaning, and performance practices when creating music. Depending on the message an artist may want to portray, different factors will come into play. In the case of Mos Def’s Sunshine these meanings could be to pay tribute to exceptional art and artists of the culture that have come before, to elicit meaning from past use and immerse it within current use, simply because the combining collage of sounds sound good, among other personal factors. Furthermore, a temporal element exists in this type of songwriting similar to an ecological approach to agency does. Understanding agency as evoking past meaning (sampling), imagining future meaning (new material), or combining the two to reflect a new present meaning (like Sunshine), while simultaneously acknowledging that each of these temporal agentic existences is in communication and flux with various structures, whether racism and white supremacy, federally mandated Common Core state standards or both and more. Conceptualizing teacher agency this way is rooted in Emirbayer and Mische (1998) and Priestley and colleagues (2015) ecological approach to human agency. Theory of Ecological Agency Oftentimes, agency is defined as the ability or capacity to act; however, Priestley and colleagues (2015) argue that this definition is too simplistic and that action should not be conflated with agency, but needs to account for intentionality. Therefore, they write that the most basic definition of agency “is seen as emerging from the interaction of individual ‘capacity’ with environing ‘conditions’” (p. 22), or simply, a person’s ability to act with intention in response to environmental structures. Using a more encompassing definition of agency is important for this study, in particular, because of the many factors at play in a teaching context. Furthermore, agency as emergent phenomenon (as mentioned above) is considered temporally and in 21 conjunction with the understanding that human consciousness is established through sociality (Priestley et al., 2015; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Priestley and colleagues (2015) view agency not as something that humans possess or are characterized by, but rather a construct that “sees agency as an emergent phenomenon of the ecological conditions through which it is enacted” (p. 22), where folks act “by means of their environment rather than simply in their environment” (Biesta & Tedder, 2007, p. 137). Understanding agency in this multi-faceted capacity allows for the inevitable variation from temporal and environmental structures. Priestley and colleagues (2015) embed Emirbayer and Mische’s (1998) temporal conception of agency in how they theorize ecological agency. When humans socially navigate their environments, they “assume different simultaneous agentic orientations” (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 964) relationally and temporally. Emirbayer and Mische, in their influential piece What Is Agency? frame agency through its temporal relational qualities, noting the importance… to reconceptualize human agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its habitual aspect), but also oriented toward the future (as a capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment). The agentic dimension of social action can only be captured in its full complexity, we argue, if it is analytically situated within the flow of time (p. 963). Priestley (2015), Emirbayer, and Miche (1998) conceive of agency in a way that bears relationship to other constructs, including self-efficacy beliefs and self-concept. They assert, however, that agency informed through past experiences leads to actions that are habitual, like pathways humans are familiar with and comfortable taking or reflective of the ways humans go about their daily lives. Agency informed by future expectations is evidenced through the human 22 capacity to imagine possibilities. This may lead to agency informed by the present, where past and future constructions come together to realize potentialities, regardless of actual outcomes or unanticipated consequences (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). They refer to these three dimensions as iterational (past), projective (future), and practical-evaluative (present) where all three come together separately, but not always amicably (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Priestley et al., 2015). What naturally precedes an ecological framing of human agency is that human cognitive development depends on social and environmental interactions (Vygotsky, 2012), and therefore the unique development of individuals partially informs how they chose to act. Additionally, teacher development is affected by their own experience of education (Isbell, 2008) and can be understood as the culmination of Dewey’s (1938) theory of experience, “where genuine education comes about through experience,” (p 25). What teachers’ educative experiences include inform part of the founding of what they believe about the classroom and will affect how they interact in their own teaching environment. Therefore, teachers’ professional identities and professional agency can be understood as unique, partly through the interplay of varying values, skills, and knowledge (Dewey, 1938; McClellan, 2017), but also due to their specific familial and cultural musical backgrounds (P. S. Campbell, 2010). While much is known about music teacher identity development and pathway experiences (Jones & Parkes, 2010; Thornton & Bergee, 2008), music teachers’ background experiences and professional interactions contribute to continued development particularly of constructs like agency. Few, if any, theories of agency allow for the complexity of teacher experience, development, and history (Priestley et al., 2015). Teachers’ perceptions and accounts of their own agency within the music classroom can inform and help report on the fidelity of a reform’s implementation process. As mentioned above, because an ecological conception of agency deals centrally with teachers’ self- perceptions, it has definite intersections with other latent variables. However, I chose to center ecological agency within this study because it deals specifically with teachers’ perceptions of 23 their capacity to act, which are directly related to executing components of a curricular reform. This study specifically examines how middle school general music teachers enact a policy change in the form of a new curriculum, taking into account their experiences at classroom, school, and district levels, while also gathering understandings of their perceptions of the policy change and ways in which it may have affected their sense of agency. Looking at the interplay between music teachers’ experiences and perceptions of agency and how they navigate the larger structures of EHPSD forms the basis for the design and data analysis of this study. Structural Constraints The higher education and PK-12 formal learning environments that music teachers experience are filled with social, historical, cultural, and political narratives about music, education, and music education. Understanding larger narrative structures at play could help to categorize potential beliefs and struggles teachers come up against in response to policy change, specifically curricular reform. This study considers various education metanarratives as structures that enmesh humans in the belief of an objective reality or various realities. Teachers’ beliefs about music, education, and music education give teachers meaning and even belonging. A common example of this is when students are inculcated into conservatory and pseudo-conservatory higher education communities where professors, colleagues, and mentors espouse values of the preeminence of Euro-western classical music and theory giving students a sense of belonging through this unexamined sense of superiority. When music students buy into this narrative, they make choices, they act with intentionality, for example they choose classes, form attitudes toward other musics, seek specific jobs, etc. Life events and interactions unfold in part based on those beliefs, showing how narratives can breed communities based on value systems. While beliefs in these narratives are not intrinsically wrong or bad, they can create bias and unexamined ways of thinking and acting. Considering this study, when teachers are imprinted with narratives or a collection of narratives, they may 24 begin to live by those values, form specific opinions, and make choices or decisions based on those narratives, which will at least partially shape their agency and their beliefs about agency. Acknowledging these types of beliefs music teachers may hold is potentially important to how they perceive curricular reform. This unique historical moment in our education system is fraught with parents, policymakers, and administrators undermining teacher authority and expertise, a general lack of financial and material supports for teachers, consequential teacher shortages, divisive concepts laws legally implicating teachers, among other things. While these varying political and social problems are affecting teachers far differently depending on state, district, and urbanicity, the stress and local school level values can severely affect teachers and their agency. The way teachers navigate the confrontation of their internalized development structures and their external school and district structures within the implementation of a curriculum reform is important to understanding teacher agency and reform efficacy. Much like the birth of hip hop, individual teachers can assert their own agency in their environments despite forces that may be at play. While teaching a new general music curriculum may not seem monumental in the same way that the birth of a new art form does, understanding how teachers can assert their own agency within power structures has important implications for other music educators and the music education community. Given newly enacted divisive concept laws and the renewed investment in curriculum culture wars in many U.S. states and schools, the idea of teacher agency in the face of educational power structures has particular relevance. The purpose of this theoretical framework is therefore to facilitate the examination of interactions between how music teachers perceive and assert their agency within the power structures of the EHPSD. Examining teacher agency from my own researcher perspective, from the music supervisor perspective, and from the teacher perspective will result in a dynamic and rich contextual understanding of how education structures inform agency. Furthermore, if we posit 25 many artists and arts movements as being inherently counter-culture, the role of arts and music teachers, specifically, have an interesting position within this framework, making the way they assert agency potentially different from how teachers in general education assert or view agency. When considering all the subjects students study in school, the arts are typically the least standardized, particularly at the state and federal level. While music and arts education have a set of standards, music and arts subjects are not tested subjects. Therefore, with a subject matter that is inherently counter-cultural in an education system that does not (or does not know how to) require testing of the subject matter, do music teachers reflect a level of protest and confrontation as well, specifically in how they view and assert their own agency? Do they view their teaching and instruction as being heavily characterized by method first, music second (Allsup & Westerlund, 2012)? Or do they view their teacher agency in a different, more moderate way? What does teacher protest look like in a middle school general music reform? Positionality Statement Unsurprisingly, my own positionality, ontologically and epistemologically, reflects similar value structures to those outlined in my theoretical framework. Hess (2018) asks researchers to begin to decolonize their research practices by acknowledging their research position when speaking for and about others as it likely extends their own scientific and professional agenda. I conduct this research as a white, upper-middle class female, where upper-middle class refers both to the educational attainment and annual income within my immediate household. Ontologically, I take the position that humans perceive their individual reality as truth and that the collection and intersection of the many, generational human truths is what creates larger cultural and societal truths or (meta)narratives that can never be fully uncovered. Much like my theoretical framework for this study, my own understanding of human agency is ontologically rooted and dictated by my unique social development and experiences, which confront the larger cultural, social, historical, and political structures humans are subsumed within. 26 Epistemologically, I take a similar position, that knowledge construction is pluralistic and fluid over time, where meaning making evolves by adapting to new experiences and understandings. While I believe in tested scientific theories, (e.g., gravity and vaccine efficacy), I also believe these truths are evolving and can change based on humans’ understandings of their world and environments. For the sake of conducting research, knowing about a researchers understanding of reality and knowledge construction is imperative to understanding how they uncover trends and patterns among specific cultural, social, historical, and political groups; therefore, knowing about researchers’ points of view is particularly important when scrutinizing their study design and data analysis. Finally, knowing that individual reality and knowledge construction is not only individually unique but also effected temporally, means the findings from this study are bounded by time, meaningful to the people and structures in place currently, but with time, these values and points of view are sure to shift and therefore the findings of this study are only generalizable to the participants in this study. Purpose and Research Questions The purpose of this study was to conduct a process evaluation of a curriculum shift and implementation to understand its effects on teacher instruction and professional agency in the classroom. I formulated four research questions to guide this inquiry: 1) What is the nature of EHPSD’s curriculum reform in middle school general music? 2) How is EHPSD’s new middle school general music curriculum enacted? 3) How do EHPSD music teachers describe their experiences, including their sense of agency in implementing a new middle school general music curriculum? 4) How do EHPSD middle school general music teachers conceive of the alignment between the curricular documents and their classroom practice? 27 Chapter 2: Literature The purpose of this study was to conduct a process evaluation of a curriculum shift and implementation to understand effects on teacher experience and professional agency in the classroom. Research questions guiding the study included inquiry into the nature and procedures surrounding the curriculum reform as well as district processes and teacher experience with enactment of the new curriculum. Furthermore, I sought to understand teachers’ sense of agency as they enacted the new curriculum. This chapter includes a summary of related literature, including historical, contextual, empirical, and positional accounts of scholarship influencing and supporting this study. This study, with methodological ties to both policy and social science research, is situated in a unique position within music education literature. This review of literature therefore includes topics related to policy, curriculum reform, and teacher agency, including multiple components both in and outside of music education organized by topic. Due to a lack of empirical studies evaluating policy change and curriculum reform in music education, I have widened the bounds of this literature review to include relevant scholarship within a) K-12 education in the United States, b) the international music education community, and c) music education position papers that discuss policy and curriculum. While widening the scope to include curriculum reform research within the greater American education community, I have chosen to limit that literature to studies that look at teacher instructional alignment and teacher agency as outcome variables, as those are most salient within this study. Studies that look at student achievement through test scores are beyond the scope of this study since the outcome variables for this study were measured at the teacher level, namely professional agency and instructional alignment. The literature included on teacher perceptions of agency includes a brief overview of empirical work in K-12 American education, as well as in- depth examinations of the empirical work from the United States music education community. 28 Rooted in the purpose and research questions framing this study, I have formulated three overarching questions guiding this review: 1. What is the historical context of curricular reform in the United States? 2. What evaluations of curriculum design and implementation exist in music education and/or general education? 3. How have established curricular guidelines affected music teachers’ perceptions of agency? This literature review is organized into three main sections. The first section follows the question about curricular reform in American school systems, documenting the historical context of curriculum reform in the United States with special attention paid to standards reform in music education. Within this section I included a subheading pertaining to the role of a music supervisor. The second section follows the second question, pertaining to evaluations of curriculum design and implementation. Within this section, I have documented curriculum alignment models used for evaluation and reviewed the existing curricular design and implementation evaluation literature from both international and American music education communities as well as from general education within the United States. In addressing the third question above, pertaining to music teachers’ perceptions of agency, I organized the literature into three small subsections. First, I reviewed position papers written in music education that look specifically at curriculum policy shifts and teacher agency. Next, I explored studies on teacher perceptions on agency within the United States music education and general education communities and focused on how teacher agency is asserted in curriculum reform. I, then, explained my theoretical framing of teacher agency within this study by examining the intersections of teacher agency with overarching educational structures and how those interact to explain how music teachers assert agency in their classrooms and schools. The theoretical framework for this study incorporates tenets of sociocultural theory, pragmatism, and ecological teacher agency (Dewey, 1938; Emirbayer & Mische, 1998; Mead, 1932; Priestley et al., 2015; 29 Vygotsky, 2012). The final section of this chapter reviews exemplar studies in mixed methods research. The concluding section of this chapter focuses on existing gaps in the literature specific to music education with a focus on the importance of this study as situated at the intersection of curriculum implementation and teacher agency in the implementation process. Historical Context of Standards Reform Although a systematic review of research involving national standards in music education is not particularly relevant to the framing of this study, it is important to understand a basic history of the existing standards documents in music education, what many teachers in our field use as their curricular document. This section gives a brief overview of United States standards reform and how music education standards have followed these larger political and social trends. An overview of United States standards movements is followed by a look at how the music education community answered these mainstream movements with the adoption of the 1994 National Standards for Arts Education (NSAE) and then again in 2014 with the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). Finally, this section ends by explaining the general standards based reform theory of action. US Standards Reform and Music Education Response Outcome driven educational reform has been around since the frenzy stirred by United States government officials in response to Sputnik and the Russian space race of 1957. While standards looked far different at that point, they were focused primarily on student outcomes and sought to improve those outcomes as a necessary step to stay competitive with international adversaries. Curricular and standards reform, as is known today, is relatively new for the United States, even though the reasons behind them resemble ideology akin to that of the Sputnik scare during the Eisenhower administration. A Nation at Risk was the next government document meant to shake up the education community and place blame for social, economic, 30 and political upheaval on the US education system (Cuban, 1990). A Nation at Risk accused the U.S. educational system of being mediocre and while much of the document was exaggerated (Park, 2004) some scholars suggested that student achievement was mediocre (Polikoff, 2021; M. S. Smith & O’Day, 1990). This document seemed to spawn a new era of standards reform which has been the norm for almost 40 years and have typically been redesigned, or reformed, every seven to ten years (Cuban, 1990; Polikoff, 2021). During the George HW Bush administration into the Clinton administration, the Goals 2000 Act was established which sought to improve kindergarten readiness, high school graduation rates, math, science, and literacy skills, and the elimination of drug abuse and violence in schools (Stedman et al., 1993). The enactment of Goals 2000 was important for music and arts subjects, as they were recognized as compulsory school subjects for the first time. Additionally, Goals 2000 sought to unite curricula across all schools in the nation by requiring subject-specific standards to be set. Music standards were one of two subjects that completed a set of standards for their respective field. In his book on standards-based reform, Polikoff (2021) explained that in the early days of standards design, experts wrote standards in grade spans rather than by grade and this was the case with the Goals 2000 Act. Not until the writing of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, did standards get written for each specific grade level. Testing and assessment followed the same trajectory. Our current national standards come out of the Obama era reauthorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act also known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The response from the music education community to the Goals 2000 Act, through MENC, was formidable and required a considerable effort of advocacy and organization, which produced the National Standards for Arts Education (NSAE) (Branscome, 2012; P. R. Lehman, 1994; Mark, 2021). This type of effort happened again in 2014, in response to the CCSS, the music education field, through the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards, wrote the National 31 Core Arts Standards (NCAS) (Shuler et al., 2014). Below is a brief overview of some of the scholarship documenting the advent of these two standards documents. The first acknowledgement of arts as a core, compulsory subject was an important political moment for arts, particularly music, subjects and was four decades in the making (Mark, 2021). Advocates of music standards wanted music to be considered a subject of sequential study and not just an activity (P. R. Lehman, 1993). The Consortium of National Arts Education, which included MENC, was tasked with writing the NSAE curricular document, a document that many teachers were skeptical of in the beginning (P. R. Lehman, 1993). Articles abounded in the Music Educators Journal that were poised as standards advocacy papers tasked with convincing teachers they were worthwhile (P. R. Lehman, 1994 & 1993). Oftentimes, teachers can be skeptical of reform and therefore professional development, and other supplemental documents can help convince teachers of a reform’s efficacy or help teachers understand how to implement standards into their existing curriculum and align that curriculum with their instruction. In 2014, a consortium of national arts organizations joined forces and put forth a considerable effort to write a new set of standards for arts education, the National Core Arts Standards. In many ways mirroring the Music Educators Journal rollout in 1994, Shuler and colleagues (2014) and others took to the pages of practitioner journals to promote and explain the standards. Shuler (2014) wrote that if teachers had focused primarily on technical and notation driven curriculum, transitioning to the new NCAS may present some challenges; whereas teachers who had focused their curriculum on creating musically independent students would likely transition easily to the new standards. The NCAS are more creative in nature, making creating, i.e., composing, improvisation, arranging, etc., an equal quarter of the four main sections within the new standards, alongside performing, responding, and connecting (National Core Arts Standards, 2014; Shuler et al., 2014). 32 Standards Reform Theory of Action The theory of action of standards-based reform, on the surface, uses expert written standards to increase student-level achievement through five overarching levers. Polikoff (2021) lays out a five-step trajectory of how standards are supposed to fix education. Experts come together to decide what students ought to know upon graduating and then work backwards from that point, deciding what they should know at the end of each grade or grade span, which is how content standards get written. States then need to support districts and schools to adopt the standards by providing resources for curriculum materials that have been verified and approved as high quality and aligned with the standards document. States would theoretically rollout a reform effort aimed at teacher professional development, while also partnering with preservice teaching institutions to help align future educator training. Teachers trained to teach the standards and subsequent curriculum would then have their students assessed to track progress of the content benchmarks. The final piece of the theory of action called for restructuring among the various education levels to help ensure all the various levels and needs of the standards reform are met. One assumption that Polikoff (2021) made in his presentation of standards reform is that states ought to adopt and provide curricular materials to support schools and districts. In their literature review, Gouëdard and colleagues (2020) nod toward local stakeholder importance regarding communication strategies and agency with curriculum reform. They provide international examples of successful curriculum reform strategies that leverage local stakeholder engagement to bolster curriculum reform efficacy. Content-specific standards are often created by various experts in the field; however, the decisions to include specific curricular documents or textbooks can sometimes be chosen at the district level. The scholarly literature in general education and music education does not have many examples of localized curriculum reform evaluation; however, there is evidence to suggest that large-scale adoption of standards, in a top-down fashion, like NCLB, do not work (Rothstein et al., 2008). Furthermore, even with 33 the CCSS bipartisan support and the design and implementation overhaul differing greatly from NCLB (McDonnell & Weatherford, 2013), national curriculum and standards reform may not adjust for the unique localized needs of schools and districts, forcing specific curricula has historically not worked (Zimmerman, 2009). With this in mind, further challenges arise when considering standards reform as Polikoff (2021) presents it. Polikoff (2021) does lay out many existing assumptions that belie the efficacy of the theory of action. One important assumption is that teachers will be invested in teaching the content standards and will accept the assessment and accountability measures that accompany the reform. This assumption is considerable and does not account for teacher agency and autonomy, which could significantly disrupt this link in the chain. Despite research that evidences a severed theory of action, at least during the NCLB era (Dee & Jacob, 2011; Jennings & Lauen, 2016), research that looks at curricular alignment and teacher level characteristics is important to uncover other disruptions to or strengths of the theory of action. The Music Supervisor Role Although not well-documented in the research literature, the music supervisor role is of historical significance within the music education profession. Of the literature that does exist, most was written prior to the year 2000. I have reviewed a few studies between the years 1994 and 2010 to frame the role of the music supervisor as it pertains to this study, with a district level supervisor participant. Two dissertations were published in 1994, the same year that the national arts education standards were established, that sought to understand the role of the music supervisor and the perceptions of the music supervisor regarding multi-cultural music education (Norman, 1994; B. E. E. Porter, 1994). While Norman’s (1994) dissertation investigations of music supervisors falls outside the bounds for this study, one part of her findings suggest that the music supervisors she interviewed disregarded their place of power and authority. While generally supporting 34 multicultural music, the supervisors shirked any responsibility for having the ability to initiate multicultural music education initiatives in their school music programs. Barbara Porter’s dissertation (1994) used a mixed methods design to understand music supervisor tasks and how they relate to the needs of the students and student learning and found that both students and teachers felt supported through the accomplished tasks of the supervisors. This line of reasoning is echoed in Gardner’s (2010) paper that sought to investigate, as a means to predict, retention, turnover, and attrition of k-12 music teachers in the United States when he found that the role of a music supervisor is a positive supporting factor of teachers and could potentially improve retention rates. Contrarily, Pierce (2005) found that of the school districts in Northern New Jersey, 29% had music supervisor roles, and they typically existed in larger, urban school districts. Pierce’s (2005) findings indicated that music teachers and other administrators were often informally accomplishing tasks assigned typically to the role of music supervisors, and that in a decentralized model where the music supervisor role does not exist, special attention needed to be paid to organization and accountability factors typically undertaken by the supervisor. Curriculum Implementation & Evaluation For many public-school teachers, state and national standards reform comes with development of new curricular materials, alternative instructional approaches, and can at times culminate in textbooks, websites, workshops, and professional development opportunities. How teachers embed curriculum in their instruction, and how students’ learning is or is not affected is important for understanding how efficacious curriculum and standards-based reform can be. Oftentimes, the efficacy of standards-based reform is measured with student test scores. Some research, however, focuses on how standards and curriculum affect teacher instruction at the classroom level. Researchers have chosen to look at curriculum alignment models (Colwell & Beall, 1985; Polikoff et al., 2020; Polikoff & Porter, 2014; Reichardt & Cook, 1979) to better 35 understand the effects of curriculum reform, while others have evaluated curriculum and instructional alignment through the comparison of math and ELA textbooks to curriculum documents (Blazar et al., 2020; Polikoff, 2015), evaluating whether textbooks could be a silver bullet intervention for increased achievement. However, to avoid the inevitable folly (Kerr, 1975; Rothstein, 2008) that comes from evaluating music goals, specifically related to music curricular reform in this case, with non-music outcomes, i.e., math and reading test scores, this literature review avoids studies with outcome measures that do not match my own. To this end, I report on the principles underlying the CIPP model, the Surveys of Enacted Curriculum (SEC), mixed methods literature, and the use of a theory of action to assess curricular alignment models. Established Curriculum Alignment Models A dearth of research has been done on program evaluation specific to curriculum reform in music education to date. Ferguson (2007) and Colwell (1985) describe the various evaluation models that have been used to complete program evaluations in music education. Of the models reviewed, some deal partly and directly with curriculum, which I include here. Conceived by Stufflebeam (2000), the CIPP evaluation model was developed in the 1960’s to help U.S. schools improve their teaching and learning. The name for the CIPP model comes from the core concepts it embodies: context, input, process, and product evaluation. While the CIPP model is not a curriculum specific evaluation tool, it can easily include curriculum reform evaluations. This model was used by Grimmett and colleagues (2010) in Australia to conduct an impact evaluation of the implementation of a large-scale music program into a set of primary schools, by Vassiliou (2013) to evaluate an early childhood music and literature program in Cyprus, and by Wing (1978) to evaluate a secondary general music classroom (see below for a detailed summary) among few others. Polikoff (2015) uses Porter’s (2002) understanding of alignment between curriculum and instruction, and defines it as the “agreement on both topic and cognitive demand” (Polikoff, 36 2015, p 1186). To test alignment, Polikoff (2012, 2015; 2020) us