Emily Clark

10/22/15
Secondary Methods
Response to A Musical Fix

Ms. Lipman, in her article A Musical Fix for American Schools addressed the
current academic crisis that our nation is facing and proposed a way to solve it
through music education. It is commonly heard on the news how American children
have been falling behind the rest of the world in education and have been for the
past couple of decades. This is an issue that has perplexed many scholars and many
expensive programs and tests have been created as an attempt to solve this
problem, yet it is still heard on the news that U.S. children are behind. Fear of other
countries rising up and becoming more powerful grips the hearts of many
Americans concerned with this issue.
Illiteracy is especially high in the country right now, and Lipman states that
one in five of our children are affected by a learning disability. From my experience
substitute teaching this past summer, I have seen a remarkable amount of children
with IEPs, and can say that Lipmans statistic on students with learning disabilities is
defiantly accurate. I dont remember there been so many kids classified as having a
learning disability when I was back in elementary school, and it does make one
wonder what has happened to make such a significant change. But that is set aside
to focus on what is truly important, what are we going to do about it? Lipmans
answer is music.
Lipman backs her argument up with evidence from various different research
tests done on the subject. All of which came back with the same result being that

music training helped to increase how well students performed in school. From
these experiments, she learned that music increased students ability to process
sounds because of what she referred to as the complicated soundscape. Because
musicians are exposed to a lot of different sounds in a small space, it can help
students to focus on a teacher in a noisy classroom. Likewise further research
indicates that music lesson increase cognitive skills more than twice. And music
literacy can actually expand your brain, making it grow larger in areas that control
fine motor skills and hearing. The corpus callosum, what connects the left and right
sides of the brain, has been proven to grow larger as well. Lipman also discussed
research done on how music can help students with reading disabilities.
From all of this information, there is no doubt that music is a very powerful
way to help children increase their academics. When then is it still being cut from
schools? Lipman even puts in the statistic that for an average school budget, it
would only cost the school approximately 1.6% of their total education budget. This
seems like such a small percentage to give to gain a lot, yet somehow schools are
still not willing to pay the price. Maybe this can be attributed to our American
culture, the focus is on materialism and athletics. Common thought is that children
actively involved in a sport perform better in school because they are more
organized and motivated to do well because of values that the sport has taught
them and motivation from teammates. However, Lipman argues that music is even
more powerful than sports, and although children involved in sports still score
higher than average, the children involved in music score even higher. But classical
music and band repertoire played in schools are not highly valued by our culture
which is strongly influenced by pop music. Classical music was pop music in the
period that it was composed in so was valued by their society, but now it is more

thought of as music from the past. Finally, the band geek stereotype turns a lot of
people away from wanting to participate in band, because it is not considered cool
by their peers.
I greatly appreciated Lipmans argument and strong evidence and I
wholeheartedly agree with her that music is the answer to educational reform. I
think the next step to making this happen, is asking ourselves, how can we make
music more appealing to students? How can we get it to grab their attention and
interest so that they think its cool. If we can get students and school administration
to value music more, than I think we would be well on the way to solving the
academic crisis.