We found this excellent article by Dave Munger all about the power of music in schools and why it should not be depleted from school budgets.
school budgets are cut, programs in music and the arts are often the
first to get axed. While this makes a certain amount of sense because
music isn't always considered "essential" to education, recently in the
U.S. we're starting to see another justification for cutting music out
of schools. The No Child Left Behind Act demands that students meet a
certain basic level of academic success, or a school's budget can be
cut. "Extras" like music classes and recess only distract from the
primary goals of learning English, math, science, and history, some say.
But does music participation actually cause students to do worse in
the core academic subjects? Some studies have found the opposite, with
kids' IQ scores improving
after a year of music lessons. Other studies have found that students
who participate in music tend to have higher grades and test scores in
other subjects. This, however, is only a correlation–we don't know if
music caused the improvement. Kids in music classes might be
better in other subjects just because better students are more likely
to take music classes. Maybe these kids would do even better in school
if they weren't distracted by music.
Peter Miksza took a look at data from the 1988 National Educational
Longitudinal Study to see if he could find stronger evidence of the
impact of music on performance in school. He analyzed the records of
5,335 students who either participated in school music programs from
8th through 12th grade or did not participate at all (students who
participated only part of the time were excluded from the analysis).
Here are some of the results:
As expected, he found that math, reading, science,
and social studies test scores were significantly better for the music
participants. But he also found that socioeconomic status (SES)
correlated with academic success. Perhaps SES could explain the entire
difference in achievement between music students and non-music students.
So Miksza created several statistical models of the data that
accounted for the SES of the students. Even after accounting for SES,
in nearly every case, music students maintained their advantage over
non-music students. The one exception was a small effect on reading
scores: while music students had an advantage in reading scores, that
advantage diminished over time. This could be due to a ceiling effect:
the music students may have reached the limits of the test's ability to
discern differences between students of different abilities. In all the
other tests, the advantage of the music students was maintained from
the 8th through the 12th grade.
A couple of caveats about this study. As Miksza takes pains to point
out, it's not a controlled study; these results are only correlations,
so we can't say whether overall achievement would improve if all
students were required to participate in music, for example. Also,
while there was a gap in achievement between the music students and
non-music students, the size of this gap didn't change over the course
of the study. How can we say that music participation helps improve
academics if the music students were better in their other classes to
begin with? Perhaps earlier music study (before 8th grade) leads to
improved academic performance, while later music study only doesn't
harm it. From this study alone, we don't know the answer. However, we
do have some compelling evidence to suggest that removing music from
the curriculum won't cause students to improve. Instead, it will only
deprive those students of the many advantages they gain from having
music in their lives.
Peter
Miksza (2007). Music participation and socioeconomic status as
correlates of change: A longitudinal analysis of academic achievement. Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (172), 41-57
Suzy S.