February 7, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Photograph by Chris Marolf
It sounds almost like the story of the Pied Piper: A charity swoops into failing schools, leads them into music education, and soon enough, students are marching toward higher achievement in math and reading.
Yet that is what Education Through Music does. The New York charity seeks out needy schools that have no formal music classes, then provides them the curriculum, oversight, and teacher training they need to start offering music education.
Once a program has been established, Education Through Music helps the schools hire full-time music teachers and sustain the classes on their own, although the group continues to offer support as needed.
The group strives not just to teach music, but also to push students’ overall academic achievement. Twice-yearly assessments of students’ math and reading skills, conducted by LS Associates, in St. Louis, has shown that they consistently score higher on those objectives than children without music education.
The program, which costs about $150 per student, operates in nine public and eight parochial schools in New York, and in four schools in East Los Angeles. The organization is considering expansion to Oakland, Calif. It runs on a budget of $1.8-million a year, raised primarily from foundations, corporations, and government grants.
Some celebrity musicians, such as the violinist Joshua Bell, have embraced the program. Mr. Bell’s first visit to one of Education Through Music’s schools lasted five hours, as he listened to the student violinists and performed for them. He’s returned twice since.
Knowledge of classical music is rare among people at all educational levels, but, says Katherine Damkohler, the group’s executive director, “my kids come from some of the poorest Congressional districts in the country, and they would know Joshua Bell.”
Here, Shanna Lesniak, one of Education Through Music’s teachers, leads a choral warm-up at P.S. 3 in New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
