The effects of the small, highly intensive Perry Preschool program continue to ripple out, .
Students who attended the Ypsilanti, Mich., preschool between 1962 and 1967 are now in their mid-50s, and they continue to be healthier, more socially adept, and earn higher incomes than their peers who did not attend the program, according to two new studies released this morning. Moreover, University of Chicago researchers James Heckman and Ganesh Karapakula find the several hundred children born to those students鈥攁nd particularly the boys鈥攁lso grew up to have higher education and employment, and lower rates of displine in school or criminal behavior out of school.
鈥淔or the first time we have experimental evidence about how the case for early-childhood education propagates across generations,鈥� Heckman said.
Those findings come as the federal government rolls out , from Head Start to home visits. And at a time of increasing academic focus in preschool, the new studies also highlight the importance of non-academic school connections to children鈥檚 longterm success.
Critical Family Supports
After controlling for the loss of some of the original 123 study members (mostly through death), the researchers鈥� most conservative analysis still found significant differences in outcomes between the children of Perry students and those of their peers:
This second generation did not participate in the Perry program, and attended preschools at about the same rates as their peers. Moreover, the families did not move to higher-income neighborhoods鈥攊n fact, Heckman said they were as likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than their counterparts who had not participated in the preschool, but both the first- and second-generation Perry alumni still had better outcomes than their peers.
Why? Heckman attributes some of these intergenerational benefits to building better social skills and executive function in the preschool students. Men who participated in the preschool as young children had lower crime rates and higher rates of stable marriage. That made a big difference during the late 1980s and early 1990s when the War on Drugs led to mass incarceration of black fathers. Children of Perry alumni were three times more likely have been raised by two stable married parents than their peers鈥攁nd boys whose fathers attended Perry were 15 times more likely to have had both their married father and mother raising them than boys in the control group.
That 鈥渢ranslates into an environment for their children which, in many ways, is more healthy than is the case for other families where the father may go to prison, a single parent mother may be working, facing high child-care costs. ...,鈥� Heckman said. 鈥淭his led to improved environments for the children of the original participants and the children themselves.鈥�
Beyond IQ
The Perry project launched three years before the advent of Head Start, and the beginning of the fierce and ongoing debate into whether early education could help put children in poverty on a more even academic playing field with their wealthier peers. The 3- and 4-year-olds randomly tapped for the program were all poor (most living in nearby subsidized housing projects), black, and considered to have low IQ. The participating children were assigned to an intensive combination of center-based preschool and home visits, with the goal of finding out whether early-childhood education could boost their IQ.
In that, the project failed; follow-up studies from the HighScope research group and the ones Heckman released today found no sustained gain in the IQ measure. But as the Nobel Award-winning economist Heckman, a co-author of the studies, noted, the 鈥渟implistic measures of cognitive achievement prove to be poor indicators of success,鈥� and tracking the participants for more than a half-century has allowed 鈥渟leeper benefits鈥� like lower crime rates and higher incomes to come to light.
Yet Heckman also cautioned that the results of Perry鈥檚 high-intensity preschool model don鈥檛 translate to most programs. 鈥淭he evidence from this study and from other studies like it show that targeting disadvantaged children and families is a very effective strategy,鈥� he said. 鈥淭here is no evidence whatsoever in this paper about universal pre-K, and many people have distorted what the studies (of Perry Preschool) have actually been saying.鈥�
In an interview last year, W. Steven Barnett, the senior co-director of the at Rutgers University, that states interested in promoting early-childhood education often 鈥渄on鈥檛 really understand the intensity, duration, and quality that鈥檚 necessary to produce the promised results. They go from Perry Preschool and Abecedarian or even to programs that don鈥檛 look anything like those and aren鈥檛 supported.鈥�
For example, a separate team of researchers found on boys in a recent longitudinal study of children in the Canadian province of Quebec who participated in universal access to preschool in the late 1990s. Economists who have tracked the students over time found that those who started preschool through the program had higher parent-reported rates of aggression and illness compared to peers; and as teenagers, those students showed no better academic performance, but worse health, and higher crime rates than their peers who did not participate. A separate study of a universal-preschool program in Tennessee when participating students showed worse outcomes than their peers.
Deeper 鈥楶artnerships鈥�
When the Perry project started, Louise Derman-Sparks, today a professor emeritus at Pacific Oaks College, was a young teacher in her 20s, and that while the official focus of the project was to teach low-income parents to have more middle-class parenting approaches, most of the original teachers focused on connecting and welcoming parents in weekly home visits over the course of each year.
鈥淲hen Perry Preschool existed, it was very early days in many ways in terms of understanding what it meant to work with kids who were living in poverty,鈥� Derman-Sparks said. 鈥淣ow, it鈥檚 very hard to know ... would we have had the same outcomes that the research has found if we didn鈥檛 have home visiting?鈥�
She noted that the parents of Perry students lived in poverty and many had had bad experiences in school themselves and for the students鈥� older siblings.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 think they had very many hopes of what the education system could do for them, even though they did see education as mattering,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 think that the fact that we came every week to work with the child and with them said that we thought the kids were important. ... It may partly account for the positive results that the families were strengthened鈥攏ot necessarily because we did puzzles or taught kids colors鈥攂ut that we came, that we treated them as partners, that we felt their kids were really important, really intelligent, and that there were things they could do to negotiate their children鈥檚 experience at school.鈥�
While preschool programs have had better and worse ability to repeat Perry Preschool鈥檚 model, the need to build a partnership with parents has long since become part of the canon of preschool education.
Photo: Louise Derman-Sparks, one of the original Perry Preschool teachers. Source: Louise Derman-Sparks
Chart Source: James Heckman
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Do you have a question about education research, or just want to know what the evidence says about that pesky instructional problem? Let me know! Drop me a line at ssparks@epe.org, or