Statement of Joan Schmidt

Member of Board of Directors
National School Boards Association
before the
House Education Caucus
United States House of Representatives
July 14, 1999

Chairman Clement, Chairman Blunt and members of the Caucus, my name is Joan Schmidt. I serve on the school board in a farming community in rural Montana. I also serve on the Board of Directors for the National School Boards Association (NSBA) which has headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. I'm here to tell you that NSBA supports raising student achievement, and we know music can do that.

Students who participate in music earn higher grades and score better on standardized tests. And now researchers are discovering that certain kinds of music instruction actually increase the potential for understanding subjects like math, science, engineering. Researchers are telling us that music can make kids smarter.

But right now, music programs are being cut. School districts across the nation feel as if they are navigating the shoals between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one side, the schools face funding shortages that make it impossible to operate a basic educational program, and on the other side, they face political pressure to raise scores on standardized tests.

For districts lacking adequate funding, the decision to cut music or any other academic program is usually made only after the school district has already eliminated field trips, skimped on building repairs and delayed purchasing textbooks.

Even more insidious than the damage wrought by funding shortages is the damage wrought by political pressure. You see, recent public concerns about basic skills have led some school districts to narrow their curriculum, eliminating subjects like music in an effort to improve scores on standardized tests . . . even though we already know that students who participate in music score higher on the SAT.

A research project conducted by psychologist Frances Rauscher of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh and physicist Gordon Shaw of the University of California at Irvine, involved preschool children. Some received private piano keyboard lessons while others received private lessons on a computer. Two control groups received neither piano nor computer instruction. According to a report published in the February 1997 issue of Neurological Research, the children who had received piano keyboard instruction scored thirty-four percent higher than the others on tests designed to measure spatial-temporal reasoning.

So the next question raised is whether this affects children of school age. In a pilot program during the 1996-97 school year, Wisconsin's School District of Kettle Moraine conducted a similar study using kindergarten students rather than preschoolers and group piano keyboard instruction rather than private lessons. By December the piano students scored thirty-three to thirty-five percent higher than those who had received no formal music instruction, and by the end of the school year, the difference was an astonishing forty-six percent.

Researchers now are looking specifically at the impact of piano training on disadvantaged children. In March of this year, Neurological Report published the results of a study by Professor Gordon Shaw of the University of California, Irvine. This project involved second graders from one of the poorest-performing schools in Los Angeles. Students received piano lessons along with a special computer program. After four months, they were tested for their ability to analyze ratios and fractions. Guess what! These students scored twenty-seven percent higher than their counterparts from another school district who did not receive the piano instruction.

What lies ahead? Dr. Rauscher is in the middle of a project involving children from a Head Start program. Their academic achievement will be tested in 2002. We don't have the last word on the music-brain research. We know music does good things, but it will be years before we know the long-term implications. As the research unfolds, it is likely to have significant ethical implications for the public schools.

If the findings on piano keyboard instruction hold true over time, schools will have to address the learning disparity between those who have access to private lessons and those who do not. Poor children do not usually receive piano lessons. Research tells us that music lessons in the school can help narrow the gap. Music is an equalizer, and that makes it a good investment.

This kind of investment means more than sending students home with a classical CD, it means more than giving them piano training in kindergarten. It means more than teaching students about music: it means teaching students to do music. And it requires a long-term commitment to a rigorous, sequential arts curriculum based on standards which define what every student should know and be able to do.

What does this mean for us? When that little kid comes to us on the first day of kindergarten, we need to promise that every single year, there will be a full educational program. And that decisions will be based on solid research. And that the most important consideration will be what is good for kids. We have to keep the promise.