"There have been studies that clearly state that children who are exposed to arts education at a young age will in fact do markedly better in their SAT tests"
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Marvin Hamlisch, a composer who bridged Broadway and Hollywood, frames arts education in the pragmatic language of outcomes. By pointing to SAT performance, he appeals to an era obsessed with measurable achievement, where funding and curriculum time often hinge on test scores. The argument is strategic: if the arts help with the very benchmarks policymakers value, they should not be sidelined as extras but treated as core to schooling.
There is research that supports the thrust of his claim. The College Board has repeatedly reported that students with sustained arts coursework tend to score higher on the SAT, and long-running reviews have linked arts participation with gains in reading, vocabulary, spatial reasoning, and executive function. Music training, for instance, exercises working memory, pattern recognition, and temporal precision, all of which translate to better handling of complex text and multi-step math problems. Theater and dance demand attentional control, empathy, and embodied understanding, building the kind of cognitive flexibility standardized tests indirectly reward. Beyond skills, the habits formed through practice, ensemble work, and performance — persistence, delayed gratification, coordination with others — are the same habits that support academic resilience.
At the same time, the strongest studies emphasize correlation more than causation. Students who have access to early arts education often attend better-resourced schools or come from families with time and money for enrichment. That said, when schools integrate the arts across diverse populations, gains in attendance, motivation, and literacy frequently follow, suggesting that access itself matters.
Hamlisch’s point reaches past statistics. He insists that the arts cultivate capacities — curiosity, discipline, interpretive subtlety — that the SAT tries to quantify in narrow ways. By reframing the arts as engines of academic success rather than ornamental frills, he pushes back against a zero-sum view of the school day and argues for a richer vision of what it means to educate a child.
There is research that supports the thrust of his claim. The College Board has repeatedly reported that students with sustained arts coursework tend to score higher on the SAT, and long-running reviews have linked arts participation with gains in reading, vocabulary, spatial reasoning, and executive function. Music training, for instance, exercises working memory, pattern recognition, and temporal precision, all of which translate to better handling of complex text and multi-step math problems. Theater and dance demand attentional control, empathy, and embodied understanding, building the kind of cognitive flexibility standardized tests indirectly reward. Beyond skills, the habits formed through practice, ensemble work, and performance — persistence, delayed gratification, coordination with others — are the same habits that support academic resilience.
At the same time, the strongest studies emphasize correlation more than causation. Students who have access to early arts education often attend better-resourced schools or come from families with time and money for enrichment. That said, when schools integrate the arts across diverse populations, gains in attendance, motivation, and literacy frequently follow, suggesting that access itself matters.
Hamlisch’s point reaches past statistics. He insists that the arts cultivate capacities — curiosity, discipline, interpretive subtlety — that the SAT tries to quantify in narrow ways. By reframing the arts as engines of academic success rather than ornamental frills, he pushes back against a zero-sum view of the school day and argues for a richer vision of what it means to educate a child.
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| Topic | Learning |
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