Ask a hundred Americans whether they believe music is an important part of a child’s education, and nearly all of them will say yes. Chances are, you don’t even need to read the plethora of stats and studies to get them to agree. Music is good for us. We enjoy it at all ages, and our world would be far less joyful without it.
So why, then, is it still challenging to fund and mandate music education in schools? It’s a mystery that troubles Anthony Mazzocchi, a Grammy-nominated musician and the executive director of Kaufman Music Center in New York. Kaufman’s Special Music School is the only public school in the nation offering a music-focused education for students in kindergarten through 12th grade without financial barriers, combining academic rigor with daily music lessons.
“I’ve never met anybody that’s like, ‘Yeah, music’s not important,’” Mazzocchi says. “But when we talk about educating children…, they don’t believe it at the end of the day, in legislation, in budget, in practice, in everything else.”
How Music Education Builds Better Leaders
Numerous studies have linked music education and increased performance in many areas of life. To name just a few of the oft-cited benefits, children who play instruments have better memory and attention, better motor coordination, better reading and listening comprehension skills and even more adept emotional intelligence.
Being a strong leader is as much about creativity and empathy as it is about intellect, and the nation’s creative future could be at risk, Mazzocchi says. Teaching music in schools—and not just half an hour per week, but a lesson every day—could be the antidote we sorely need as we continue to outsource more of our thinking to machines.
“I actually believe in my soul that everyone is born creative and we’ve actually been teaching it out of them through the school system by de-emphasizing it,” Mazzocchi says.
Just ask a class of kindergarteners how many of them are artists, he says, and you’ll see far more hands than if you ask the same group five or six years later.
“Music, especially at the youngest ages, is analog, and it requires your entire humanness in order to engage in it,” Mazzocchi says. “Looking at people eye to eye, being able to collaboratively work in an ensemble where you have to step back and take the lead and perform in front of others, and develop… these human capacities.”
What Students Lose Without Music Education
One of the biggest challenges in getting stakeholders and legislators to take urgent action is a lack of clear and present danger. Sufficient music education could improve almost everything about our entire society, if you ask Mazzocchi, but there’s no specific great and terrible thing that will happen tomorrow if we fail to act today.
Perhaps now more than ever, however, predictions about a future built upon the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence paint a starker image of something we stand to lose. As we rely more heavily on machines, there’s concern that we’ll pay for that decision with our own humanity.
Mazzocchi sees music as a direct, immediate fix, the salve that will enable us to hold on to our creativity and empathy. And what else would we do with all the extra free time the AI companies keep promising us?
If we immediately started offering children 30 minutes of music instruction per day, Mazzocchi says the effects would be “profound.”
“We would have a far more empathetic society,” he adds. “There is nothing more powerful than group singing and group playing, and I would argue we need to be able to see across our differences now more than ever. I don’t think there’s anything else besides the arts that can actually celebrate a shared humanity with our youngest citizens more than that, every day.”
And then there are the more “tangible” academic benefits that are already well-supported by research. Attendance rates would rise, and academic achievement would go up across the board. The achievement gap between socioeconomic classes would also narrow, Mazzocchi predicts.
“I think we would see, in 12 years, a profound success rate in 21st-century workforce development and students who are able to enter the workforce and see things with more flexibility and creativity,” he says.
How Schools Can Add Daily Music With Existing Budgets
Here’s the simple truth Mazzocchi says everyone—especially school administrators—is missing: Getting more music into schools is as simple as making the choice to do it. It doesn’t have to require years of planning or expensive new infrastructure. You just have to reprioritize and shift resources as necessary.
He tells the story of a principal who agreed to give it a try and has finagled her budget to add daily music instruction to the curriculum.
“It’s a mindset,” he says. “She has the power as a principal—every principal in the nation does. She can change the schedule immediately, and she did.”
By reallocating existing funds, she was able to find a nearly cost-neutral way to fund new musical instruments and private instruction for the youngest kids. It wasn’t necessarily easy, Mazzocchi says, but it was doable without years of haggling with higher-ups.
“So many people could do this tomorrow, and that’s why I’m so optimistic,” Mazzocchi says. “If anybody does [even] 30% of what we do, they’ll have a transformed school.”
The Real Demand for Music Education
Kaufman’s Special Music School is small, with capacity for fewer than 400 students across grades K-12. The high school classes are larger, about 50 students each, but the lower grades can only take 15 students per year, chosen from a pool of 600 applicants, Mazzocchi says.
Often, people focus on that small handful of students who make it in, seeing the opportunity as a rare chance for an elite few, rather than something every student could benefit from. But they’re looking at the wrong number, Mazzocchi says. They’re looking at the supply, not the demand.
“About 600 students can’t come here and wanted this,” he says, “and go somewhere they’ll never have music again. Let’s focus on them. We need more.”
This article was first published in the November/December 2026 issue of SUCCESS® magazine. Get your copy here.
Photo by Philip Friedman / Courtesy of Anthony Mazzocchi
