Elementary students at 15 schools in Richmond, San Pablo and Oakland are reaping benefits because of ZSharp, a nonprofit supported by corporate and foundation grants and individual donors which works in partnership with schools to bring in music instruction.Īccording to the California Department of Education, reading and math scores double over the first five years zSharp is at a given school. Younger kids also respond to music training. Over those same two school years, McClymond’s dropout rate dropped almost in half, from 35.3 percent to 18.8 percent.Įven more telling, no such head-turning changes were seen at similar schools in Oakland Unified that did not receive music training. Other schools that 51Oakland visited saw their graduation rates rise, in McClymond’s case an even more impressive 15 percentage points from 2011-12 to 2013-14. In those same two years, Castlemont’s dropout rate fell nearly 10 percentage points.Īlthough it’s impossible to tease out exactly how many of those changes can be directly attributed to the influence of one program, a look at similar schools in the district helps. According to the state Department of Education, in just the two years 51Oakland had been at Castlemont, its graduation rate had risen to 63.9 percent for LeRoy’s class, the class of 2013-14. The teacher told Hofmann about the young talent.Īnd, perhaps even more applause-worthy, in a school where graduation rates had been languishing around 52.9 percent the school year that 51Oakland arrived on the scene, LeRoy graduated. LeRoy stuck with it, and soon he got noticed. “I started going to my music teacher’s really early, before school, to get on the drums, play my music,” LeRoy says. Then he discovered 51Oakland music classes and his place at a drum set. Hofmann talks of a Castlemont student, LeRoy Crosby, who had lost both of his parents and was at a crossroads: Stay in school or on the streets. These include McClymonds High School, which hadn’t offered music in 12 years, and Castlemont High, once home to the world-renowned Castleers choir that had played from South Africa to the White House lawn. One of those groups is 51Oakland, cofounded by Jason Hofmann and jazz club maven Yoshi Akiba in 2011, which brings music training into Oakland Unified School District’s poorest-performing schools. In the Bay Area, similar nonprofit organizations funded by grants and donations also are bringing teachers and instruments into classrooms, from Mountain View to Oakland to Richmond, and with them equally impressive upticks in attendance and graduation rates. Its success has convinced school administrators and parents alike that music training may hold a key to closing the achievement gap that persists between underserved and prosperous schoolkids in the United States. Harmony, the program at the heart of the study, serves poor communities in Los Angeles. From time immemorial, parents have been happy when children’s music lessons yielded piano keys plunked in some semblance of “Greensleeves.” So news last year of research showing that schools with graduation rates hovering around 50 percent raised those rates to 93 percent with something so simple as music lessons was just more music to their ears.
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