WSJ.com - Research shows that music training boosts IQ, focus and persistence
Music is no cure-all, nor is it likely to turn your child into a Nobel Prize winner. But there is compelling evidence that it can boost children’s academic performance and help fix some of our schools’ most intractable problems.
Music raises your IQ.
Music training can reduce the academic gap between rich and poor districts.
Music training does more than sports, theater or dance to improve key academic skills.
Music can be an inexpensive early screening tool for reading disabilities.
Music literally expands your brain.
Yet music programs continue to be viewed as expendable. A 2011 analysis in the Journal of Economic Finance calculated that a K-12 school music program in a large suburban district cost $187 per student a year, or just 1.6% of the total education budget. That seems a reasonable price to pay for fixing some of the thorniest and most expensive problems facing American education. Music programs shouldn’t have to sing for their supper.
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