Advocate for Music!

Across the US school budgets are tightening and music programs often the first asked to compromise in the name of a balanced budget face a seemingly grim future. Monetary restrictions combined with an increasing focus on test scores have led to heavy cuts in school music programs. In manycases communities and teachers untrained in advocacy are helpless in the face of the school board with no one willing and comfortable to speak up on their behalf. In Advocate for Music!: A Guide to User-Friendly Strategies Lynn M. Brinckmeyer respected educator and past president for theNational Association for Music Education provides a manual for music teachers motivated to advocate but lacking the experience resources or time to acquire the skills to do so effectively. It will serve as a toolkit for advocating and also for sharing resources strategies and ideas useful foreducating everyone - from community members to political representatives - about the immediate and long-term benefits of music education. In Advocate for Music! Brinckmeyer draws on a lifetime of arts advocacy to provide answers to the questions so many teachers have but are afraid - or simply too busy - to ask. A simple hands-on guidebook for becoming an effective advocate for the arts Advocate for Music! is structured around sixkey questions: what is advocacy? Why focus on it? Who should do it? How does one do it? Where should we advocate? And when should we advocate? Readers will have access to step-by-step guidelines and strategies on how to engage others and themselves in a variety of levels of advocacy activities. Inaddition to granting access to compelling research projects the book will provide models of letters webinars research findings printed documents websites and contact information useful for communicating with local state and national decision makers. Working in an informal hands-on mannerBrinckmeyer lays out advice on who to work with and what to do: providing concrete examples of advocacy tactics from ideas on how to cooperate with the gym teacher to a sample speech for the holiday concert. As she walks the reader through the a myriad of real-life examples and practical answers toher central questions Brinckmeyer shows that every educator parent family member and administrator can and should be engaged in advocating to maintain and support the right for today''s children and adolescents to have access to high quality music education.Advocate for Music! is an important book not only for all pre-service and inservice music teachers but aso for state MEA leaders and staff administrators parents community members and all those involved with arts or education associations.