Nancy Shankman (intro)
My name is Nancy Shankman, I’m on the faculty of the Music Education Program at the Steinhardt School of Music Education. I teach Choral Conducting, I teach Creative Performance Opportunities in Music Education, I teach Choral Materials and Methods. I am responsible for school, community and cultural outreach. That’s concerned with securing internships for our students with teaching artists from the cultural organizations of New York City and we’ve just created a master class series in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Guild and the Philharmonic to begin a series of professional development opportunities for music educators throughout the metropolitan area.
I was with the New York City Department of Education for 42 years. I started as a music teacher in the South Bronx, where I stayed for 29 years. I loved teaching there. I love taking kids who have nothing and bringing them along and changing their lives. I had many opportunities to teach more privileged kids and I just turned it down because that wasn’t what I loved. So I stayed there and then I went on to become an assistant principal. I spent my whole career in the Bronx actually. I became an assistant principal in a high school, chairman of a department. Then I became Director of the Arts for Bronx high schools; finally before I left the Department of Education in the fall of 2004, I spent the last three years as Director of Music for the New York City Department of Education. I was responsible for overseeing the publication of a new blueprint for teaching and learning in music, and responsible for helping the music teachers throughout the city. We had some rough years in the 70s when the budgets were cut. The first thing that was always cut was the Arts. Many music teachers left the system. For example, I went out on maternity leave in 1972, and I was in a middle school in the south Bronx that had a dance program, junior and senior orchestra, junior and senior band, theatre program, junior and senior chorus and a steel band. When I came back in 1977 from maternity leave, I was the only one left. The only reason I was left was that I had spent ten years there before and I had seniority. It took many years to build up what was lost. Unfortunately what happened was that so many of the people who became principals and administrators in the school system were going to the public schools at that time where there was no music and there were no Arts. So, their frame of reference had nothing to do with the Arts. So when they were asked, “why don’t you have a music program in your schools?” they just didn’t understand it. Unfortunately, the Arts, unlike math, and social studies, and English, are not mandated to the extent that those other subjects are by the state. Even though students need it, and parents want it, it’s really still up to the individual principal to have the passion to make it happen.