Areas of Unrest

1 December 2007 - Music Education

I decided that it makes more sense to do Holidailies from here, versus from my livejournal site, though I will link from there back to here.

There's a weekly local newspaper I get called the Sun Gazette. Mostly it's local news for its catchment area (McLean, Oakton, Vienna, and Great Falls) with stuff about high school plays and real estate ads and so on. This week's issue, however, had an item about music education that I thought was worth some reflection, as it's a good example of the misuse of statistics.

Basically, the Harris poll found that people with college and advanced degrees were significantly more likely to have had music education than people with less other education. And they found a correlation between people's salaries and whether or not they'd had music education.

That's all fine data. But then the executive director of the National Association for Music Education is quoted as saying, "To summarize the poll very simply, if you want to be a CEO or a college president or a Wall Street broker, take music education."

No, it doesn't. Correlation does not imply causation. I do believe that people who have had some music education probably do get higher SAT scores and end up being more likely to get advanced degrees and make higher salaries. However, if A is correlated with B, any of three things are possible: A causes B, B causes A, or some other factor, C, causes both A and B. In this case, let A be music education and B be those conventional measures of success. Hmm, could C possibly be higher socio-economic status?

Music lessons cost money. People from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to have had the opportunity to take music lessons for that reason. And it isn't exactly news that people from wealthier backgrounds are more likely to do well in school and careers. I do think that having music (and art) classes in schools is a good idea, but this poll isn't a convincing argument.

I'll add that it's ironic to have this story in a newspaper that serves an affluent region like the one I live in. Fairfax County is the wealthiest county in the U.S. (according the the Census bureau American Community Survey) with a median income of $100,318 in 2006. And you can look for yourself to see what houses in, say, Great Falls sell for. So it isn't like the poor children of northern Virginia aren't being shunted off to Suzuki violin classes from the time they're old enough to hold a bow.

To summarize, sadly you can still become an executive director without understanding basic things about mathematics.