Music education valuable asset in school curricula

Budget cuts and insufficient funds have become common reasons why schools across the country have begun to cut crucial programs out of a student’s education. Along with the increasing emphasis on rigid standardized tests as the uncontested means to evaluate performance, it seems that schools are beginning to lose the innovative, creative nature of learning.

Well here is an idea to promote educational productivity: School boards should invest in an area of study that has been proven to enhance the learning process, stimulate the brain, , substantially assist lower-socioeconomic students and, yes, increase standardized test scores.

This area is music.

Unfortunately, school administrators nationwide have not widely adopted this suggestion. In recent years, cuts toward public education in the budgets of Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett have reduced state funding by more than $1 billion. With such drastic reductions come difficult decisions that will inevitably hurt certain areas. Music, however, should not be one of these areas.

Study after study has concluded that the benefits of music education far exceed development of an individual’s musicianship, alone. Music has proven to nourish the human sensory, attention, cognitive, emotional and motor systems — all driving forces behind learning. The College Board has found that students involved in the arts scored 63 percent higher on the verbal section and 44 percent higher on the math section of the SAT than those with no arts participation.

In fall 2009, the College Board issued a report on the matter: “The economy should not dictate who receives the many benefits that the arts can provide. In order for the United States to be a competitive nation that reaches its full potential, it must not permit financial or other barriers to prevent … students from reaching their full potential.”

A year later, the College Board reported that students who took four years of arts classes scored, on average, 91 points higher on the SAT than students who didn’t.

If the company responsible for creating and administering the SAT and AP tests insists that music education plays a role in students’ academic success, school board members should be quite skeptical about quick and convenient cuts to their school’s music curriculum. School administrators must remember that cutting music education cuts a student’s potential far more than it cuts a deficit.

What is more, diversified school curricula can go a long way in bettering the lives of their community’s citizens. Schools should serve as breeding grounds for their community’s future leaders. Communities of lower socioeconomic levels are in most need of the programs so often taken away as a result of budget cuts. On average, studies show that students of lower socioeconomic backgrounds who take music lessons in grades eight through 12 have seen a significant increase in their math scores compared to non-music-taking students. Beyond improvements in math, music-taking students score 40 percent higher in reading, history and geography. Music students have also shown to hold higher GPAs than non-music students in the same school. If music education is removed from schools, ambitious, driven and intelligent students will have little incentive to give back to the community that did not give to them.

And if these students aren’t enough, there are plenty of highly successful individuals who started in their high school bands, choirs and other programs: Bill Clinton played the saxophone, Steven Spielberg played the clarinet and Tiny Fey, Terry Bradshaw and Norman Schwarzkopf all sang in their school choirs.

These individuals all have a certain trait in common that has undoubtedly helped them achieve their fame: creativity. Parag Chordia, director of the Music Intelligence Group at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, asserts that creativity is not something simply present in some and absent in others. He argues that, “Creativity is something that we all have inside of us, and what it’s all about is finding out, how do we unlock that creativity?” Music is an efficacious solution to this problem, according to Chordia, who calls it fundamental to both life and the mind.

Providing musical opportunities to students from their first to last day of school is incredibly effective in student development and should be the goal of every school district across the country. In a time when budget cuts have dramatically affected fund allocations, school administrators cannot forget that student success, with which music education is unequivocally correlated, should always be a top priority.

Failure to invest in music education is a failure to invest in students and the community. If music and the arts are cut, as Richard Dreyfuss put so poignantly in the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” students eventually “aren’t going to have anything to read or write about.”

Is this the road we, as a state and as a nation, would like to take? I certainly hope not. It is thus the responsibility of every citizen concerned with posterity to make known the importance of music education in our schools. Take time this March, which is Music in Our Schools Month, to do exactly that, not only for today’s generation, but also for all generations to come. 

Write to Matt at mrb111@pitt.edu.