Take notes, kids
Tops in English, math – and song
They’re hitting an academic high note.
Students at a Manhattan public school spend as much time practicing their piano and cello as they do studying from their textbooks — and still manage to drown out the competition in math and English.
The Special Music School at the Kaufman Music Center, which includes kindergarten through 12th grade, is the only city campus that makes music a core part of its curriculum. And its teachers credit the melodymaking for their students’ charttopping test scores.
Out of the 32 schools in its Upper West Side district, SMS’s fourth- and seventh-graders posted the highest proficiency rates on recent state math exams and were second in English.
The impressive numbers come a year after the school earned top ranking in the entire city in both categories, according to SMS officials.
With many city public-school kids getting little to no formal musical instruction, SMS boosters say administrators should take a look at their success story — and stop viewing the subject as an extracurricular afterthought.
“Music is discipline,” said SMS senior Johanna Nelson, a pianist. “It teaches you how to focus, how to work with others. It’s a basis for learning that can be applied to everything.”
The competition to get into the school is fierce — its admissions office gets roughly 650 applications for a mere 15 kindergarten spots each year, staffers said.
Student turnover is minuscule. SMS added its high-school wing in 2013, and demand has already skyrocketed.
Applicants’ auditions are one factor in acceptance, according to SMS teacher Vasu Panicker.
The diverse school is currently 45 percent white, 19 percent black, 17 percent Asian and 9 percent Latino.
Panicker, a veteran musician and instructor, said students immersed in pop music need more formal musical education if they plan to go any further in the field.
“There is a big difference between technical, theoretical understanding versus just improvising,” he said.
Still, in a sign of the times, SMS offers a class on social-media self-promotion through sites such as Twitter and Snapchat.
“There’s no getting around it: You have to sell yourself,” Panicker said.
But SMS teachers emphasize to their kids that musical stardom is an unlikely outcome and stress the need for fallback options.
“We would like to set it up so the kids can have their main career while also being able to play music on a professional level,’’ Panicker said.
Nelson, for instance, plans on becoming a computer scientist while still rustling up piano gigs.
City Education Department spokesman Michael Aciman said, “We’ve invested an additional $23 million annually in the arts.”