“We favor the inclusion of music in the curriculum on an equality with other basic subjects. We believe that with the growing complexity of civilization, more attention must be given to the arts, and that music offers possibilities as yet but partially realized for developing an appreciation of the finer things of life.”
—First Resolution of the Dallas Meeting of The Department of Superintendence, 1927
Public music education has seen better days.
—First Resolution of the Dallas Meeting of The Department of Superintendence, 1927
Public music education has seen better days.
In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act identified music as a ‘core subject’—just not one worthy of testing. This meant that schools struggling to improve math and reading scores in order to retain funding found that their arts programs were the easiest ones to divert resources from, or to cut altogether.
A 2012 report from the U.S Department of Education optimistically declared that “In the 2009-10 school year, music education was almost universally available in the nation’s public elementary schools”. But buried in that DOE
report were huge differences in the availability of music education between large and small schools, as well as significant percentages of teachers who rated their time and resources as either “not at all adequate” or “minimally adequate”.
Lara Pellegrinelli of NPR writes of the report: “Even if one simply uses the DOE’s enrollment numbers to calculate
the number of students in schools without music instruction at all, that’s over 2.1 million children across the country — likely a conservative
estimate.”
This alone is enough to make most music lovers shake their heads, but there
remains a central question that is often ignored in these stories and studies:
“Why?” As in: “Why do we need music education anyway?”
There are some organizations that try to answer this. One video produced by
VH1′s Save the Music Foundation features adults
speaking about music education in grand and sentimental terms. But blink and
you’ll miss the children providing concrete reasons why music improves their
lives:
“Music is challenging.”
“With an instrument, you have to be very focused, and that’s the same with
schoolwork.”
“Drums just make me concentrate.”
There is science to support what these kids are saying, but that’s not
usually the story we lead with in our crusades to save public music
education.
Words like “passion” and “soul” may make for more fun and satisfying copy,
but if lawmakers and educators are looking for facts and figures, perhaps we
should just tell them the truth:
That in order to improve the reading, science, and math skills of American
children, and to improve their overall chances in life, we should be providing
them with more music education, not less of it.
Trust Him, He’s a (actual) Scientist
Thomas Südhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine.
To earn the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, you have got to have
some great teachers along the way. In an interview with The
Lancet, 2010 co-recipient of the award, Thomas Südhof, named his
most influential teacher:
“My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to
do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and
hours, and hours.”
Südhof later elaborated in an interview for The International Double Reed
Society’s own quarterly magazine:
“[I learned ] the value of disciplined study, or repetitive learning, for
creativity. You cannot be creative on a bassoon if you don’t know it inside out,
and you cannot be creative in science if you don’t have a deep knowledge of the
details… I learned to value traditions as a musician, but at the
same time the importance of trying to transcend tradition. The tradition is the
basis that allows you to progress, the starting point, but it cannot become a
limitation, because then both in music and in science creativity and progress
end.”
So what’s the science behind the scientist’s claims?
“A number of studies support the contention that students who
participate in formal music education have higher academic achievement scores
than students who do not participate in formal music education.”
This quote comes from a paper titled The Impact of Music Education on
Academic Achievement by Donald A. Hodges and Debra S. O’Connell
of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In it, Hodges and O’Connell
reference no fewer than 14 supporting studies before they delve more deeply into
some individual examples. Such as:
“A two-year study by Gardiner et al. (1996) investigated the effects of a
music and visual-arts curriculum on the academic achievement of first-graders.
Students who participated in the arts curriculum had test scores below those of
the non-arts curriculum students at the beginning of the school year; however,
after seven months the arts curriculum students had higher scores on mathematics
achievement. After a second year of treatment, the arts-curriculum students
continued to have higher mathematics achievement scores.”
And:
“Whitehead (2001) examined the effect of music instruction…on math scores
of middle and high school students. Subjects were randomly placed into three
groups: full treatment (which received music instruction for 50 minutes five
times per week), limited treatment (which received 50 minutes of instruction
once a week), and no treatment (which received no music instruction). After
twenty weeks, the full treatment group showed a higher level of significant gain
in mathematics than the other two groups. The limited treatment group showed
limited mathematics improvement and the no treatment group had the lowest gain
in mathematics improvement.”
Yamanashi Gakuin Elementary School in
Japan
In a 1999 bulletin for the National
Association of Secondary School Principals, James R.
Ponter makes the same connection.
Citing a 1988 study of 17 countries for the International Association for the
Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Ponter singles out the 3 best-performing
nations—Japan, The Netherlands, and Hungary—for their emphasis on musical
education. He notes that in each country, music education is not only offered at
an early age, it is mandated by the state.
With this in mind, it’s ironic that so many American school administrators
see music programs as dead weight that divert from their focus on raising test
scores, when increasing their emphasis on music education might have led
to the desired result instead.
We could debate the value of narrow, standards-based education until the fat
lady sings, but what if it turned out that learning music actually makes
students better at passing math and reading tests?
Music Study Improves General Cognition
Research suggests that music training exercises so many different functions
within the brain, that it’s kind of hard to engage with it fully and stay dumb
for very long.
When a musician first learns to read music, she develops a process of
recognizing and decoding a complex system of symbols. The musician then
translates those symbols into appropriate motor actions that use both hands, and
confirms the accuracy of her actions through multisensory feedback (both sight
and sound). In addition, musicians practice motor skills in the pursuit of
metric precision, they exercise memory functions in the absence of written
music, and create new combinations on the fly through improvisation.
To its credit, The VH1 Save the Music Foundation website does contain several pages of
citations of academic papers, articles on current research, and quotes from
medical professionals that suggest music improves brain function and cognition
(Don’t bury the lead, people!)
A sample quote from John J. Ratey, MD’s A User’s Guide to the
Brain:
“The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone, style,
rhythm, phrasing, and feeling – training the brain to become incredibly good at
organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated practice of
this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attention skills,
intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge and expression.”
Music education seems to benefit children across the board. And it turns out
that the least privileged among them may be the ones who benefit from it the
most.
Arts Education in General Significantly Benefits Disadvantaged
Youth
In 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four
Longitudinal Studies. It made the case for arts and music
education, using more than twenty years’ worth of academic results.
Focusing specifically on children from lower socioeconomic status or
“low-SES” backgrounds, the researchers found that the more arts education these
children received, the better their life prospects seemed to get:
“According to the data, 71 percent of low-SES students with arts-rich
experiences attended some sort of college after high school. Only 48 percent of
the low-arts, low-SES group attended any sort of college. And more than twice as
many high-arts students from the low-SES group, compared with low-arts students
in that group, attended a four-year college (39 percent versus 17 percent).
Figures from the National Endowment for The Arts
study “The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four
Longitudinal Studies”
This also translated to degree attainment: 24% of children from a high-arts,
low-SES background were able to attain associate’s degrees, versus 10% of
low-arts low-SES children. 18% of high-arts low-SES children attained bachelor’s
degrees versus 6% of low-arts low-SES children. The NEA report also cites higher
rates of volunteerism and general civic engagement in both high- and low-SES
children.
Unfortunately, these studies mostly stop following the students’ progress by
the time they reach their early to mid-20s, providing little information on
long-term career prospects. Given the links between college education and
employment/earnings however, it seems reasonable to ask if arts
education in general should now be a part of the larger conversation about
income equality.
If You Practice Regularly and Often, You WILL Get Really Good At
It
A recent nationwide survey of 5,000 musicians by Peter C. Dicola of Northwestern
University School of Law offered a glimpse into the different
revenue streams of musicians in the United States. The top four reported earning
categories in his survey were: Touring/shows/live performances/fees (28%),
teaching (22%), salary as an employee of a symphony, band or ensemble (19%) and
session musician earnings (10%). No other category eclipsed 7%.
It seems that if you are ever really going to try and make a go of it in the
music business, it helps to be very good much more than it helps to have a
distinctive style or cool-looking t-shirts. When it comes to playing in a
symphony, doing session work, or teaching others the language of music, there
simply aren’t many places to hide a deficiency in musical knowledge or
ability.
Being incredibly good at something is a pretty valuable trait, almost
regardless of the context. And if you want to be very good at
something, the earlier you start, the
better.
Words of Caution (and all that touchy-feely stuff, too)
To be fair, both the UNC Greensboro paper and the National Endowment for the
Arts report stop just shy of claiming a direct causal relationship
between music education and smarter, more successful students; each claims that
more research is still needed.
This sort of scientific hedging is appropriate when we’re dealing with such
broad, varied, and incomplete sets of data. We can prove that musically educated
students generally do better in school, but we can’t prove that a semester of
bassoon classes will turn your B in calculus into an A.
It’s at this point that we can finally feel free to fall back on all our
choir-preaching and arguments for the intangible benefits of music, and its
ability to enrich our lives beyond the confines of a test.
As a musician myself, I’m certainly not immune to this language. At its best,
music is a sort of alchemy—a translation of abstract thought and emotion
into something concrete that people outside your own head can consume,
understand, and enjoy.
But by that same token, musicians, educators, and concerned parents must
learn to translate their abstract feelings and emotions about music into
something more than just glib bumper sticker sales pitches. Instead of trying to
appeal to risk-averse lawmakers, bean counters, and even wealthy benefactors
with Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-style stories of personal fulfillment through
music, we could give them hard facts and good evidence to digest:
You want higher test scores in math and science? Music education will
help. You want children with higher mental faculty? Music education will
help. You want to keep kids out of trouble and on-track towards college and
future employment? Music education will help.
There isn’t nearly as much scientific evidence showing that assigning The
Great Gatsby or Beowulf will help with any of these goals, yet a
debate over the general merits of teaching those books or the funding of those
classes isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Public music education is ready to earn back its place at the table. Even if
you don’t end up a musician, an early and intense study of music could lead to
you becoming an award-winning scientist, an educator with a sustainable career,
or even Chairman of the Federal
Reserve. At worst, you could end up a pretty decent
bassoonist.
Blake Madden is a writer and musician who lives in
Seattle.
A 2012 report from the U.S Department of Education optimistically declared that “In the 2009-10 school year, music education was almost universally available in the nation’s public elementary schools”. But buried in that DOE
report were huge differences in the availability of music education between large and small schools, as well as significant percentages of teachers who rated their time and resources as either “not at all adequate” or “minimally adequate”.
Lara Pellegrinelli of NPR writes of the report: “Even if one simply uses the DOE’s enrollment numbers to calculate
the number of students in schools without music instruction at all, that’s over 2.1 million children across the country — likely a conservative
estimate.”
This alone is enough to make most music lovers shake their heads, but there
remains a central question that is often ignored in these stories and studies:
“Why?” As in: “Why do we need music education anyway?”
There are some organizations that try to answer this. One video produced by
VH1′s Save the Music Foundation features adults
speaking about music education in grand and sentimental terms. But blink and
you’ll miss the children providing concrete reasons why music improves their
lives:
“Music is challenging.”
“With an instrument, you have to be very focused, and that’s the same with
schoolwork.”
“Drums just make me concentrate.”
There is science to support what these kids are saying, but that’s not
usually the story we lead with in our crusades to save public music
education.
Words like “passion” and “soul” may make for more fun and satisfying copy,
but if lawmakers and educators are looking for facts and figures, perhaps we
should just tell them the truth:
That in order to improve the reading, science, and math skills of American
children, and to improve their overall chances in life, we should be providing
them with more music education, not less of it.
Trust Him, He’s a (actual) Scientist
Thomas Südhof won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology
or Medicine.
To earn the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, you have got to have
some great teachers along the way. In an interview with The
Lancet, 2010 co-recipient of the award, Thomas Südhof, named his
most influential teacher:
“My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to
do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and
hours, and hours.”
Südhof later elaborated in an interview for The International Double Reed
Society’s own quarterly magazine:
“[I learned ] the value of disciplined study, or repetitive learning, for
creativity. You cannot be creative on a bassoon if you don’t know it inside out,
and you cannot be creative in science if you don’t have a deep knowledge of the
details… I learned to value traditions as a musician, but at the
same time the importance of trying to transcend tradition. The tradition is the
basis that allows you to progress, the starting point, but it cannot become a
limitation, because then both in music and in science creativity and progress
end.”
So what’s the science behind the scientist’s claims?
“A number of studies support the contention that students who
participate in formal music education have higher academic achievement scores
than students who do not participate in formal music education.”
This quote comes from a paper titled The Impact of Music Education on
Academic Achievement by Donald A. Hodges and Debra S. O’Connell
of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In it, Hodges and O’Connell
reference no fewer than 14 supporting studies before they delve more deeply into
some individual examples. Such as:
“A two-year study by Gardiner et al. (1996) investigated the effects of a
music and visual-arts curriculum on the academic achievement of first-graders.
Students who participated in the arts curriculum had test scores below those of
the non-arts curriculum students at the beginning of the school year; however,
after seven months the arts curriculum students had higher scores on mathematics
achievement. After a second year of treatment, the arts-curriculum students
continued to have higher mathematics achievement scores.”
And:
“Whitehead (2001) examined the effect of music instruction…on math scores
of middle and high school students. Subjects were randomly placed into three
groups: full treatment (which received music instruction for 50 minutes five
times per week), limited treatment (which received 50 minutes of instruction
once a week), and no treatment (which received no music instruction). After
twenty weeks, the full treatment group showed a higher level of significant gain
in mathematics than the other two groups. The limited treatment group showed
limited mathematics improvement and the no treatment group had the lowest gain
in mathematics improvement.”
Yamanashi Gakuin Elementary School in
Japan
In a 1999 bulletin for the National
Association of Secondary School Principals, James R.
Ponter makes the same connection.
Citing a 1988 study of 17 countries for the International Association for the
Evaluation of Educational Achievement, Ponter singles out the 3 best-performing
nations—Japan, The Netherlands, and Hungary—for their emphasis on musical
education. He notes that in each country, music education is not only offered at
an early age, it is mandated by the state.
With this in mind, it’s ironic that so many American school administrators
see music programs as dead weight that divert from their focus on raising test
scores, when increasing their emphasis on music education might have led
to the desired result instead.
We could debate the value of narrow, standards-based education until the fat
lady sings, but what if it turned out that learning music actually makes
students better at passing math and reading tests?
Music Study Improves General Cognition
Research suggests that music training exercises so many different functions
within the brain, that it’s kind of hard to engage with it fully and stay dumb
for very long.
When a musician first learns to read music, she develops a process of
recognizing and decoding a complex system of symbols. The musician then
translates those symbols into appropriate motor actions that use both hands, and
confirms the accuracy of her actions through multisensory feedback (both sight
and sound). In addition, musicians practice motor skills in the pursuit of
metric precision, they exercise memory functions in the absence of written
music, and create new combinations on the fly through improvisation.
To its credit, The VH1 Save the Music Foundation website does contain several pages of
citations of academic papers, articles on current research, and quotes from
medical professionals that suggest music improves brain function and cognition
(Don’t bury the lead, people!)
A sample quote from John J. Ratey, MD’s A User’s Guide to the
Brain:
“The musician is constantly adjusting decisions on tempo, tone, style,
rhythm, phrasing, and feeling – training the brain to become incredibly good at
organizing and conducting numerous activities at once. Dedicated practice of
this orchestration can have a great payoff for lifelong attention skills,
intelligence, and an ability for self-knowledge and expression.”
Music education seems to benefit children across the board. And it turns out
that the least privileged among them may be the ones who benefit from it the
most.
Arts Education in General Significantly Benefits Disadvantaged
Youth
In 2012, the National Endowment for the Arts released a report titled The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four
Longitudinal Studies. It made the case for arts and music
education, using more than twenty years’ worth of academic results.
Focusing specifically on children from lower socioeconomic status or
“low-SES” backgrounds, the researchers found that the more arts education these
children received, the better their life prospects seemed to get:
“According to the data, 71 percent of low-SES students with arts-rich
experiences attended some sort of college after high school. Only 48 percent of
the low-arts, low-SES group attended any sort of college. And more than twice as
many high-arts students from the low-SES group, compared with low-arts students
in that group, attended a four-year college (39 percent versus 17 percent).
Figures from the National Endowment for The Arts
study “The Arts and Achievement in At-Risk Youth: Findings From Four
Longitudinal Studies”
This also translated to degree attainment: 24% of children from a high-arts,
low-SES background were able to attain associate’s degrees, versus 10% of
low-arts low-SES children. 18% of high-arts low-SES children attained bachelor’s
degrees versus 6% of low-arts low-SES children. The NEA report also cites higher
rates of volunteerism and general civic engagement in both high- and low-SES
children.
Unfortunately, these studies mostly stop following the students’ progress by
the time they reach their early to mid-20s, providing little information on
long-term career prospects. Given the links between college education and
employment/earnings however, it seems reasonable to ask if arts
education in general should now be a part of the larger conversation about
income equality.
If You Practice Regularly and Often, You WILL Get Really Good At
It
A recent nationwide survey of 5,000 musicians by Peter C. Dicola of Northwestern
University School of Law offered a glimpse into the different
revenue streams of musicians in the United States. The top four reported earning
categories in his survey were: Touring/shows/live performances/fees (28%),
teaching (22%), salary as an employee of a symphony, band or ensemble (19%) and
session musician earnings (10%). No other category eclipsed 7%.
It seems that if you are ever really going to try and make a go of it in the
music business, it helps to be very good much more than it helps to have a
distinctive style or cool-looking t-shirts. When it comes to playing in a
symphony, doing session work, or teaching others the language of music, there
simply aren’t many places to hide a deficiency in musical knowledge or
ability.
Being incredibly good at something is a pretty valuable trait, almost
regardless of the context. And if you want to be very good at
something, the earlier you start, the
better.
Words of Caution (and all that touchy-feely stuff, too)
To be fair, both the UNC Greensboro paper and the National Endowment for the
Arts report stop just shy of claiming a direct causal relationship
between music education and smarter, more successful students; each claims that
more research is still needed.
This sort of scientific hedging is appropriate when we’re dealing with such
broad, varied, and incomplete sets of data. We can prove that musically educated
students generally do better in school, but we can’t prove that a semester of
bassoon classes will turn your B in calculus into an A.
It’s at this point that we can finally feel free to fall back on all our
choir-preaching and arguments for the intangible benefits of music, and its
ability to enrich our lives beyond the confines of a test.
As a musician myself, I’m certainly not immune to this language. At its best,
music is a sort of alchemy—a translation of abstract thought and emotion
into something concrete that people outside your own head can consume,
understand, and enjoy.
But by that same token, musicians, educators, and concerned parents must
learn to translate their abstract feelings and emotions about music into
something more than just glib bumper sticker sales pitches. Instead of trying to
appeal to risk-averse lawmakers, bean counters, and even wealthy benefactors
with Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul-style stories of personal fulfillment through
music, we could give them hard facts and good evidence to digest:
You want higher test scores in math and science? Music education will
help. You want children with higher mental faculty? Music education will
help. You want to keep kids out of trouble and on-track towards college and
future employment? Music education will help.
There isn’t nearly as much scientific evidence showing that assigning The
Great Gatsby or Beowulf will help with any of these goals, yet a
debate over the general merits of teaching those books or the funding of those
classes isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Public music education is ready to earn back its place at the table. Even if
you don’t end up a musician, an early and intense study of music could lead to
you becoming an award-winning scientist, an educator with a sustainable career,
or even Chairman of the Federal
Reserve. At worst, you could end up a pretty decent
bassoonist.
Blake Madden is a writer and musician who lives in
Seattle.
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