Music education in the United States has typically been one of the first thing to be cut when it comes to balancing the budget. This is a horrible shame since music is one of those things (above any of the other arts) that has a wide ranging effect on peoples intellectual achievement. One of the holy grails in education and psychology is skill transference. Imagine being able to train one ability that positively affects the performance of many many other abilities. Sounds a bit ridiculous eh?! Well, music seem to be one of the only things that can have this effect. Psychologists have termed this Far Transfer.

According to an article in Psychological Science by E. Glenn Schellenberg from the University of Toronto, students, regardless of socio-economic status, showed wide ranging improvements in all of the sub-sections of the WISC-III (Wechsler, 1991) when they were involved in a music training program. This effect was very specific to music and did not appear for the control groups who either did nothing or studied drama. Check out this graph:

You can see this effect is relatively small but the fact that music training has this type of effect at all is absolutely incredible. So how do music lessons do this?!

According to the article,

Music lessons involve long periods of focused attention, daily practice, reading musical notation,
memorization of extended musical passages, learning about a variety of musical structures (e.g., intervals, scales, chords, chord progressions), and progressive mastery of technical (i.e., fine-motor) skills and the conventions governing the expression of emotions in performance.

Music has all sorts of other documented benefits to education. To read about many many more visit the American Music Conference site.

So how can we support music education in this country? Yes I have an answer! Donors Choose! This wonderful charity,

is a simple way to provide students in need with resources that our public schools often lack. At this not-for-profit web site, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.

We have established some funds that support music and science that I think you'll be interested in. So please please help out the teachers and donate some money to one or all of the funds by clicking on the widget below!