Can Music Bridge The Economic Gap Education - 1231 Words

Can Music Bridge the Economic Gap in Education? Schools are supposed to be places where all who have the capacity and the willingness to succeed are able to; places where people learn and develop enough to one day go out into the world and contribute to society. Unfortunately this is not always the case. Children who attend public schools in lower income areas are at a comparative disadvantage than their higher income counter parts: due to familial issues, lack of opportunity, and schools being underfunded, statistics have shown that children within lower income families have a harder time succeeding in school. According to a statistical analysis conducted by Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski, it was found that children from lower†¦show more content†¦Through their study, they found that â€Å"after one year, children who received music training retained their age-normed level of reading performance while a matched control group’s performance deteriorated.† (201 4, 1) In a similar study conducted over nine months, it was concluded that musical training even for as short a period as nine months can improve cognitive function and speech comprehension (Moreno, Marques, Santos A., Santos M., Castro, Besson, 2009, 1). These and other studies support the notion of brain plasticity, or the ability of the brain to change over time, especially in one’s youth. Music has often been a good case for this. The act of a child being able to pick up an instrument can be a â€Å"†¦highly complex task that involves the interaction of several modalities and higher-order cognitive functions† says Sibylle Herholz and Robert Zatorre (2009, 1) Even in ages as early as four to five years old it appears that music perception has the power to positively effect a child’s future reading ability through training similar auditory mechanisms. (Anvari, Trainor, Woodside, Levy, 2002, 1) According to this study, there is evidence supporting the noti on that speech perception and reading are connected. â€Å"†¦children who develop the ability to hear the individual sound categories within a word are able to associate these phonemes with their written letter representations.† (Anvari et al., 2002, 1-2) This causal