Music Education as Your Child’s Career: What to Look For — and What Most Families Don’t Know to Ask
- Jeremy Earnhart
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 9 minutes ago
Editors note: I am a fourth-generation public school educator, and our family is grateful that our daughter has chosen to pursue a career in music education. In a previous essay, A Pragmatic Case for Becoming — and Staying — a Music Educator, I outlined the financial and structural case for the profession. This article addresses the preparation required to get there.
Jeremy L. Earnhart, Ed.D.
If your child is considering a career in music education, two relationships will shape their formation more than any syllabus, conference presentation, or departmental brochure:
The ensemble director.
The applied lesson teacher.
Everything else is tributary.
Formation Is Apprenticeship
Music education remains an apprenticeship profession.
Future music educators — whether leading band, choir, orchestra, mariachi, or elementary general music — are formed primarily through proximity to practitioners.
Secondary majors internalize ensemble systems: rehearsal pacing, recruitment strategy, culture-building, credit-bearing program design, and large-scale logistics.
Elementary majors internalize classroom sequencing, literacy instruction, developmental pacing, and performance production within tight scheduling constraints.
Mariachi, particularly living structurally alongside band, choir, and orchestra, demonstrates that cultural responsiveness and sequential ensemble infrastructure are not opposites. When built intentionally, it functions as a credit-bearing, multi-year, performance-based program with real enrollment and staffing implications.
In all cases, students absorb what “normal” looks like by watching someone operate inside a real school environment.
Pedagogy courses support formation. They do not replace apprenticeship.
Applied study functions similarly.
A music education major does not need to become a touring soloist — but they must develop enough authority on their instrument to lead with credibility and confidence.
Applied instruction shapes:
Technical command
Work ethic
Discipline
Studio culture
Professional identity
For music education majors, ensemble + applied = formation.
Everything else supports that core.
The Tier I Reality
In research-oriented universities, faculty evaluation is often tied to publication, presentation, and scholarly output. Those contributions matter within the academy.
Public school music programs, however, are shaped by enrollment numbers, funding formulas, master schedules, booster culture, and community expectation.
Preparation authority often rests with individuals who are no longer daily practitioners in public school systems operating under contemporary pressures.
Their scholarship and experience matter. But absence from daily operational responsibility changes the nature of feedback and urgency. Over time, distance from consequence narrows feedback loops.
Writing about teachers and the systems in which they operate can begin to substitute for sustained engagement in those systems beyond the credentialing period required for doctoral study.
This is not about motive. It is about structure.
Families should also understand that in large research institutions:
Applied lesson credit weight may differ by major classification.
Graduate assistants or teaching fellows may teach a significant portion of undergraduate lessons, especially in early years.
Scholarship allocation can affect studio placement and tuition classification in ways that materially alter trajectory.
These are structural realities, not accusations.
But structure shapes experience.
Not All Music Programs Operate Under the Same Conditions
Music education degrees today prepare graduates for a wide range of roles. Many will teach guitar, music technology, commercial music, modern band, or other course-based offerings. In some states and districts, grant-supported programs have been essential in rebuilding access where traditional pipelines were weakened or where certain student populations were not meaningfully served during the middle years.
These models can be meaningful and responsive.
However, they operate under different structural conditions than large, sequential ensemble programs. Non-sequential courses often do not depend on multi-year recruitment pipelines, feeder alignment, or credit-bearing performance systems. They may be more flexible in enrollment and less vulnerable to the cascading effects of early attrition.
Large, sequential programs — band, choir, orchestra, and mariachi programs — require sustained enrollment, long-term retention, and operational scale. Their durability depends heavily on leadership prepared to manage infrastructure, not just instruction.
Both models require skilled educators. But they require different kinds of preparation.
Preparation programs should be clear about which realities they are preparing graduates to navigate.
Incentives Shape Emphasis
None of these dynamics are inherently malicious. They are products of institutional design.
In many schools of music, performance majors enroll in more applied credit hours per semester than music education majors — even when lesson contact time is identical.
When faculty workload and institutional accounting are tied to credit hours rather than instructional minutes, asymmetries can emerge in how majors are valued within studios.
The socialization literature establishes that studio teachers exert more influence over music education majors' career decisions than any other institutional actor (Isbell, 2008; Austin et al., 2012). In some instrumental areas, faculty career trajectories may not have included sustained experience in American public school systems, which can shape how career pathways are framed.
In some programs, faculty have structural incentives to counsel music education majors toward performance tracks — because performance credit hours carry more institutional weight. Students are rarely aware of how departmental accounting structures can shape advising emphasis.
Similarly, institutional reward systems often prioritize scholarship and conference presentation over longitudinal tracking of graduate outcomes.
When incentives emphasize academic production more than field durability, preparation priorities can drift — even without anyone intending harm.
Incentive design shapes emphasis. Emphasis shapes formation. Formation shapes durability.
Placement Is Not Persistence
Music education programs often advertise high placement rates.
Placement matters.
But placement is not persistence.
In a profession facing fiscal compression, enrollment volatility, and structural strain, the more meaningful question is:
Are graduates still teaching five and ten years later — and are their programs healthy?
Without longitudinal retention data, placement percentages can mask churn — where new graduates backfill positions vacated by earlier cohorts who were underprepared for:
Enrollment recruitment
Credit-bearing program design
Funding leverage
Administrative negotiation
Community expectation
Large-scale program leadership
Durability is an outcome metric.
Placement is an input metric.
Professional fields measure outcomes.
Music education should too.
The Field Should Have a Voice
Student teaching is the crucible of preparation.
University supervision during this period should be substantive, timely, and developmental — not procedural.
Cooperating teachers host student teachers inside real programs with real stakes. Their evaluations should carry meaningful weight.
Preparation programs should consider publishing aggregated data on:
Five-year retention rates
Ten-year retention rates
Enrollment health under alumni leadership
Cooperating teacher assessments of readiness
Graduate feedback on preparedness for fiscal and administrative realities
If preparation claims authority, it should accept feedback from the field it serves.
What Families Should Ask
If your child is considering music education, ask:
Who directs the ensembles my child will participate in — and what is their recent experience building and sustaining public school programs?
Who will teach applied lessons each year — senior faculty, graduate assistants, or a combination?
How are applied lesson credits weighted for music education majors compared to performance majors?
What scholarship thresholds affect tuition classification, and how are scholarships distributed across majors?
What percentage of graduates are still teaching in public schools five and ten years after graduation?
How does the program prepare students for enrollment recruitment, funding leverage, and administrative negotiation?
How are cooperating teachers’ evaluations incorporated into program assessment?
These are not adversarial questions.
They are formation questions.
The Point
Large, sequential ensemble programs remain the backbone of public school music education in many regions. Elementary programs provide the developmental foundation upon which those systems depend. Mariachi and other culturally responsive ensemble models demonstrate that infrastructure and inclusion can coexist.
In an era of funding compression and weighted funding formulas — such as those tied to Career and Technical Education (CTE) — durability matters more than ever. If we care about sustaining strong public school music programs, preparation must align with operational reality.
For music education majors, the most formative influences will always be:
The ensemble director who models scale and culture.
The applied teacher who shapes musicianship and discipline.
Music education is not simply a degree path.
It is apprenticeship for stewardship — preparation to inherit, sustain, and strengthen programs that serve real communities under real constraints.
And stewardship is measured not by placement, but by what endures.
I welcome thoughtful responses from colleagues across K–12 and higher education as we continue this conversation. Jeremy@SchoolMusicConsulting.com
∗ ∗ ∗
Jeremy Earnhart, Ed.D. is the author of The Cost of Not Playing — A widely circulated white paper (2026) examining how music participation shapes the financial health of school districts (45K+ reads).
His doctoral research centered around the competencies of the central office music administrator:
Earnhart, J. L. (2017). Competencies of the public school music administrator: Texas music administrator perspectives. Journal for K-12 Educational Leadership, 1(1), 55–63. Dallas Baptist University.
∗ ∗ ∗
This essay reflects field experience. Readers interested in the academic research surrounding music teacher identity, preparation, and professional socialization may consult the following works.
Suggested Professional Literature
Austin, J. R., Isbell, D. S., & Russell, J. A. (2012). A multi-institution exploration of secondary socialization and occupational identity among undergraduate music majors. Psychology of Music, 40(1), 66–83.
Bennett, D. (2016). Developing employability in higher education music. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 15(3–4), 386–395.
Conway, C. M. (2001). The experiences of first-year music teachers: A qualitative study. Journal of Research in Music Education, 49(3), 235–249.
Freer, P. K., & Bennett, D. (2012). Developing musical and educational identities in university music students. Music Education Research, 14(3), 265–275.
Isbell, D. S. (2008). Musicians and teachers: The socialization and occupational identity of preservice music teachers. Journal of Research in Music Education, 56(2), 162–178.
Roberts, B. A. (2004). Who’s in the mirror? Issues surrounding the identity construction of music educators. Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 3(2).