MEMBER PROFILE
Patrick K. Freer
- Candidate for 2026–2028 NAfME National President-Elect
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Patrick K. Freer’s Curriculum Vitae
Patrick K. Freer’s Remarks (video) (transcript)
Notes:
• I interpret the wording in NAfME policy I.J.001.3.e.d.i to require that the total word count of these three responses not exceed 1000 words.
• I write as a private individual expressing my own thoughts. I do not write as an employee representing views of the State of Georgia or of Georgia State University.
What do you see as the major challenges music education will face during your term and in what ways can you transform these into opportunities during your presidency?
The major short-term challenge for American music education is its sustainability in small and medium-sized schools during turbulent times at national and state levels. I anticipate that I will draw inspiration from Marguerite V. Hood, MENC’s President from 1950 to 1952. Hood was focused on the needs of rural and small schools, seeing them as essential to the realization of music education’s goal of becoming a fixture of American schooling. During her term, Hood warned MENC’s membership against complacency. Hood wrote, “the real danger to music education comes . . . from within ourselves. Unless we look out, that very concentrated interest and whole-hearted love of our work which has made us progress with such remarkable speed as a profession will be our undoing.”
The challenges we will face in 2028-2030 are not easily predictable. Will a new federal administration continue pressing the changes in policy begun in 2025, or will those future political leaders seek a pathway toward restoration of the norms we experienced in the early 2020s? Will smaller music education programs have been disrupted to the extent that they negatively affect larger, more well-established programs elsewhere in their communities or states? What will be the impact on the recruitment of the next generation of music educators? And, a further challenge will be the “demographic cliff” that is forecast to reduce populations of school-age and college-age students through mid-century, at least. Each of these challenges will be seen first in rural and small-program settings and in the states where they predominate. Our responses to those challenges will require a steadfastness of purpose, policy, and political acumen.
What do you see as the major challenges the association will face during your term and in what ways can you transform these into opportunities during your presidency?
NAfME leaders at the national and state levels will need to remain vigilant and responsive to policy changes impacting music education, particularly those that involve legislation and those with funding implications. The environment of early 2025 may not continue in early 2028, but recent decisions about the federal Education of Department will resonate as NAfME’s leadership treads terrain that seems newly unstable. Further, as the situation appears from this vantage point in 2025, music educators working in schools will be facing changes related to legislative implementation including, but not limited to, the General Education Provisions Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Education Amendments of 1978, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
One of NAfME’s primary responsibilities is surely to advocate for and address needed change in policy and funding. There will be moments when those efforts are proactive and/or preemptive. Once change occurs, however, NAfME’s responsibility needs to extend to music educators working in schools who may be demoralized, defunded, and sensing disenfranchisement within the enterprise of public-school education. It is at these moments that NAfME’s leadership may do the most collective good by reinforcing the community of music educators who together work for the goals we so eloquently and clearly state in documents such as our National Standards and our Strategic Plan.
A related challenge will be the recruitment and retention of future music educators. NAfME’s “Music Teacher Profession Initiative” provides a solid outline, but enactment at the state level is critically important to address the varying barriers to teacher recruitment in different regions of the country. Further, we need to refocus efforts on the identification of high-level musicians in secondary schools who might be recruited to enroll in music teacher education programs in our colleges and universities. We need to simultaneously identify those among our college students who might be inspired to become higher education’s faculty members at future points in time. In all of these we need the very best musicians to see futures for themselves as music educators. It is difficult in mid-2025 to attract rising college students to the field of publicschool education. We can counter that trend by showcasing public school music teachers who exhibit the highest levels of musical skill, pedagogical innovation, and enthusiasm for the profession.
How do you plan to advance equity/DEIA in NAfME during your term of office?
Words matter. In mid-2025, words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” have become associated with division rather than with unity. If, by 2028, the unifying message of those definitions has not been reclaimed, NAfME will need to use phraseology that unambiguously conveys the philosophical tenets of our association and its goals. We might consider “belongingness,” “authenticity,” “whole self,” “contributions,” and “connections” as starting points. We might begin, as others have stated, by asking questions such as “what is it that we are hoping or wanting to include,” and “in what ways can we bring all people into the experience of and learning about music”? Many of these questions have been posed at varying points throughout our association’s history. Related inquiries and responses were offered most clearly in the Housewright Symposium’s 1999 Vision 2020 document. I have found this to be a tremendous resource with my students as we have pondered music education’s future from the present vantage point. Reframing the policies, practices, and initiatives of our association will require us to ask difficult questions of intent, and to identify instances where we may unintentionally invite misinterpretation or simplification. Such examination may allow us to uncover even more effective wording that ultimately enhances progress toward our shared goals.
Above all, we need to assure our NAfME colleagues that they are each vital parts of our broad organization. NAfME is not an association of values, policies, traditions, or resources. Rather, NAfME is an association of people who have collectively built—and continually draw from—the values, policies, traditions, and resources made possible by our shared work.
Leadership Statement
The leadership needs of NAfME are changing, as they have at many points in our association’s 118-year history. The presidents of our association have all served during distinct moments in time, and their priorities have variously responded to those moments with differing emphases on legislative policy and its implementation, organizational structure and management, philosophy and persuasion, and the organization’s fiscal health and sustainability. The challenges facing NAfME today mandate that each of these remains a priority, with new foci resulting from the educational impact of rapidly changing emphases in the national political climate.
NAfME’s president in 2028-2030 will face challenges unknown at this moment. The leadership tasks may not be clear, but the necessary leadership qualities are already evident. Chief among these is the need for NAfME’s president to be responsive to the association’s membership. Many of our members view “NAfME” as synonymous with “music education.” I believe that future presidents need to shift that perception toward the community and collegial aspects of the association. This need to build a community among music educators has occasionally been in tension with the myriad successes of past presidents who worked to invent and establish an entirely new subject area in America’s schools. The current moment, likely lasting for years, presents opportunities to refocus on the community of music teachers as we reengage with issues related to diversity and equity that seemed settled just a few months ago. I wrote a while ago that NAfME would need to be responsive to the public as we together emerged from the COVID-19 era’s “loneliness and frustration . . . toward whatever will follow.” The “whatever will follow” has proven to be philosophically and politically different than many imagined. We must retain a nimbleness that allows us to respond to change and pivot to embrace new opportunities. This is essential on a national, association level just as it is critical for teachers in their own classroom and virtual settings. I therefore wish for my presidency to be characterized by visibility, positiveness, and a deep responsiveness to the needs of teachers. Just as I read all 664 issues of Music Educators Journal at the onset of my term as Academic Editor, I commit to spending my presidency-elect in study of our association’s past presidencies so that I may more fully contextualize challenges as they appear during my term as president.
Leaders need to begin with a disposition that people have the best intentions and capabilities, and then let those people do their jobs. I see a leader as a facilitator of good work in progress, an identifier of tasks yet to be done, and an enabler of processes through which the activities will be accomplished. Difficult moments will arise and resulting decisions will need to be made after consultation with peers, in collaboration with colleagues, and with the interests of individual music teachers at the fore. This focus on collaborative community-building may seem less substantial than more concrete leadership goals like balancing a budget or advocating for pieces of legislation. However, I feel we are on the verge of a crisis: A reduction in school music programs due to a lack of qualified music teachers. This was a potential problem before the pandemic, and those of us in higher education are seeing an exacerbation of the problem in our current enrollments. The impact of the current political conversation is further discouraging young people who once might have considered careers in education. We cannot afford teacher attrition any more than we can afford to lose future teachers from our university programs. We need to strengthen the community structures that only an organization like NAfME can provide through its national reach and hyperlocal connections. The NAfME president needs to be attuned to the local needs of teachers in order to see how these trends might indicate underlying issues requiring the attention of NAfME leadership. I aim to be a conduit between the national and local limbs of our association so that we can continuously strengthen the best of what our various constituencies have to offer—from the National Executive Board, to state and local affiliate boards, to teacher groups, and to the students they teach.
I have served in several executive administrative positions, including the highest-ranking elected faculty positions in my home institution (Georgia State University), the interim Director of our university School of Music, and General Manager of several fitness gyms. Each of these positions required fiscal oversight and a clear sense of organizational function. I viewed my role as facilitating the work of teachers (and personal trainers!) who interacted daily with students/gym-goers dependent on their guidance and expertise. It was my job to see that each was able to contribute to the greater organization comfortably and with a sense of support. This was only possible because of my insistence on privacy and confidentiality, along with my focus on hearing the voices of the underrepresented and/or those who were less powerful in a given situation. This was true in the thorniest of personnel matters I’ve confronted, and it is true of how I view the role of NAfME president.
I recognize that the NAfME president is charged with a tall task of representing the organization, its teachers, and its values to widely differing audiences. Though my words may be tailored to reach a specific listener, those words must convey a constancy of message and purpose. I have written articles about the framing of arts education ideas and policies to achieve the greatest good. As I wrote in Arts Education Policy Review, “Framing often incorporates the use of symbols and images to address a policy problem and a related set of values and preferred outcomes.” As NAfME president, I will continually draw on the expansive expertise of our national leadership network, seek to identify and develop initiatives where I can have substantive effect, and then work to frame those initiatives in ways that lead toward their successful implementation.
In short, I view the role of NAfME president as political in the best sense of the word, referencing the art of working with people to recognize and achieve shared goals. The doing of this political work requires that I be a visible, positive, and responsive leader for the music educators of our country. I look forward to working together toward our shared goals.
Equity Statement
Note: I write as a private individual expressing my own thoughts. I do not write as an employee representing views of the State of Georgia or of Georgia State University.
I was once congratulated by a school principal on the fact that my fourth-grade choir was racially and ethnically diverse. “Thank you,” I said, but I could not readily identify my students by race or ethnicity. I had no idea what the principal was talking about until I looked at a photo of the choir and saw several students with differing physical characteristics. For many years, I prided myself on not “seeing race or color.” I was raised to ignore race; my white parents adopted a Black baby girl who would become the only Black student in my entire rural county school system. I simply did not notice race. I now think differently. If I did not see race or ethnicity, then perhaps I did not see issues of race or ethnicity in my curricular, repertoire, or pedagogical choices. Perhaps I also failed to recognize students, their families, and other teachers who represented a multiplicity of backgrounds. We must see, value, and honor our students and colleagues for all the diversities they bring. And, we must see, evaluate, and act to ensure that the experiences they have with us are motivating, uplifting, and celebratory of that diversity.
I live in Atlanta, Georgia, the former center of segregation and the heart of the civil rights movement. The classrooms where I teach are part of the same block as the former Herren’s Restaurant, Atlanta’s first white restaurant to open doors to Black diners. My office is located within sight of Ebenezer Baptist Church, pastoral home of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Raphael Warnock. My university graduates more Black students than any other higher education institution in North America. And yet, the faculty of my School of Music has no more Black or Asian representation than the day I arrived on campus 20 years ago. The Atlanta protests of Summer 2020 occurred outside my office windows, with damage to our school chronicled in worldwide media. One of our music education partnership schools is located yards from the Wendy’s restaurant where Rayshard Brooks was killed.
I write these facts because they explain my sensitivity to issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). And yet, I can neither pretend that I am not a gay, white cisgender man any more than can I pretend that I know how to handle each DEI situation easily and perfectly. What I can do is continually retrain my sensitivities by listening to the stories and recommendations of my students and colleagues. I recognize that DEI encompasses a widening array of characteristics pertaining to race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexuality, age, socioeconomic class, and differing physical abilities. The key element is not difference, but how difference leads to marginalization, whether overt or subvert, conscious or subconscious. Music education has a long history of welcoming diversity, even as its organizations, schools, and supporting industries have implemented processes of continual reevaluation and response. NAfME has become a leader in these efforts, and it will continue to be so during my term as president.
I am lucky to be the father of a young man who was a student of mine when I taught a course at his college in Brazil. It’s a long story, but my husband and I later adopted him; he is now an elementary music teacher and is married to his own husband. When my son was in our home, I saw first-hand how prejudice and intolerance impacted his daily life in the months and years that followed. I hope that our experiences as a family have created DEI awareness that I might not have otherwise had.
“Everything in the United States centers on race.” That was the parting, final comment by a colleague from Austria who I had the opportunity to host during a months-long residency in 2019. I was initially surprised by that comment, but I have come to a new understanding. Some say that we need to focus on race and other diversities because of our history of oppression, marginalization, and subjugation. Others hold that we need this focus in order to prevent a repetition of this history. This is not an either/or binary. Rather, it is a both/and dualism. We need to both understand and prevent.
When consideration of these issues is uncomfortable for teachers, I have publicly suggested that they can reflect the ethics of care, specifically caring for another individual.
As I wrote, Recall the first philosophy statement you wrote about teaching and/or choral conducting. It is likely that you stated something analogous to Gerkhens’ “music for every child and every child for music” slogan. Teacher-conductors who position such democratic principles at the core of their educational philosophy can call on their unique qualifications to lead every child to musical skill and knowledge not possible without our expert guidance . . . teacher-conductors are uniquely qualified to provide musical leadership, and we are ethically required to do so in ways that affirm the musical capabilities of each young musician in our care (Choral Journal, August 2019, pp. 29-30).
Finally, I hold that we must continually assess and reassess our practices as they reflect our constantly broadening awareness of diversity and equity. I view “diversity” and “equity” as nouns, as the goals we hold preeminent. “Inclusion,” on the other hand, is best examined as a verb . . . as what we do in our pursuit of diversity and equity. It is my goal that NAfME be fully inclusive of our association’s diversity and that our organization holds equity as the expected outcome of our work.
