Is Venezuela’s El Sistema the answer?

Right next door to Upham’s Corner Health Center, where I take care of patients, is the Conservatory Lab Charter School (CLCS). This is a K-8 school which endeavors to empower children through a unique and rigorous academic and music education. Conservatory Lab teachers believe in the power of music to transform the lives of students and families. Central to their curriculum is El Sistema, founded in in 1975 in Venezuela by José Antonio Abreu.

El Sistema has gotten a lot of publicity among advocates of school reform, but my question is if it has been rigorously evaluated? Here in Boston, it’s used at CLCS and also the Boston String Academy, but the logical setting to study it would be in Venezuela, where the program was initiated. It seemed to me that ideally we would have a randomized controlled trial of El Sistema versus a “placebo” school system, with a long duration of follow-up and appropriate primary outcome. I was curious if such a trial had been conducted. So I went to Pubmed, plugged in my search, and lo and behold, my #2 result…

This study, The Effects of Musical Training on Child Development: a Randomized Trial of El Sistema in Venezuela, was conducted in Aragua, Bolívar, the Capital District (Caracas), Lara, and Miranda, and had 1 year of follow-up. It found that the El Sistema program improved self-control and reduced behavioral difficulties, particularly among vulnerable children. The senior author of the paper, Dr. Ariel Williamson, is now on the faculty at University of Pennsylvania, and I am going to email this blog post to her. My main question for Dr. Williamson and her other co-authors is “what’s next?”

By that I mean, is El Sistema proven to “work,” based on this single randomized trial? Are additional trials needed. Would qualitative studies be helpful? Or should troubled school districts like the Boston Public Schools be implementing an El Sistema program across the district, based on the currently available evidence?

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