Life Way After Head Start - Innovative PreSchool Programs Have Decades Long Effects for Low Income and Minority Children

Madison's preschool leaders are advocating for an innovative K-4 program that involves a public/private partnership with the Madison Metropolitan School District, City of Madison and Madison preschools. There are proposed options that will build upon current preschool programs and entry into public school.

As the article below states, innovative pre-school programs can have decades long positive effects on children who participate in them as they grow into adults.

David L. Kirp, writing in the Sunday New York Times Magazine (November 21, 2004:

"The power of education to level the playing field has long
been an American article of faith. Education is the
''balance wheel of the social machinery,'' argued Horace
Mann, the first great advocate of public schooling. ''It
prevents being poor.'' But that belief has been undermined
by research findings -- seized on ever since by skeptics --
that federal programs like Head Start, designed to benefit
poor children, actually have little long-term impact.

Now evidence from an experiment that has lasted nearly four
decades may revive Horace Mann's faith. ''Lifetime Effects:
The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40,'' was
released earlier this week. It shows that an innovative
early education program can make a marked difference in the
lives of poor minority youngsters -- not just while they
are in school but for decades afterward. "

The complete article follows:

Idea Lab: Life Way After Head Start

November 21, 2004
By DAVID L. KIRP

The power of education to level the playing field has long
been an American article of faith. Education is the
''balance wheel of the social machinery,'' argued Horace
Mann, the first great advocate of public schooling. ''It
prevents being poor.'' But that belief has been undermined
by research findings -- seized on ever since by skeptics --
that federal programs like Head Start, designed to benefit
poor children, actually have little long-term impact.

Now evidence from an experiment that has lasted nearly four
decades may revive Horace Mann's faith. ''Lifetime Effects:
The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40,'' was
released earlier this week. It shows that an innovative
early education program can make a marked difference in the
lives of poor minority youngsters -- not just while they
are in school but for decades afterward. The 123
participants in this experiment, says David Ellwood, dean
of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and an
architect of the Clinton administration's original welfare
reform plan, ''may be the most powerfully influential group
in the recent history of social science.''

The life stories of the Perry students have been tracked
since they left preschool in the 1960's. Like so much in
education research, the findings have been known mainly in
professional circles. But this latest dispatch from the
field, confirming the remarkable and enduring impact of a
long-ago experience, should alter the way we understand
preschool and, maybe, the way society invests in the
future.

The study began without fanfare in the fall of 1962,
several years before Head Start was conceived. In the
mostly blue-collar town Ypsilanti, Mich., 21 3- and
4-year-old children started preschool. All of them, as well
as 37 more youngsters who enrolled over the next three
years, were black. They came from poor families, and the
South Side neighborhood, with its rundown public housing
and high crime rates, was a rough place to grow up.

Based on past experience, it was a near certainty that most
of these kids would fail in school. During the previous
decade, not a single class in the Perry elementary school
had ever scored above the 10th percentile on national
achievement tests, while across town, in the school that
served the children of well-off professionals, no class had
ever scored below the 90th percentile.

The reformers who developed the High/Scope Perry model
hoped that exposure at an early age to a program
emphasizing cognitive development could rewrite this
script. Most children attended Perry for two years, three
hours a day, five days a week. The curriculum emphasized
problem-solving rather than unstructured play or ''repeat
after me'' drills. The children were viewed as active
learners, not sponges; a major part of their daily routine
involved planning, carrying out and reviewing what they
were learning. Teachers were well trained and decently
paid, and there was a teacher for every five youngsters.
They made weekly home visits to parents, helping them teach
their own children. ''The message was, 'Read to your
child,' '' one woman, whose daughter went to Perry in 1962,
remembered. ''If you read the newspaper, put your child on
your lap, read out loud and ask her, 'What did I just
read?' When you take her to the grocery store, have her
count the change.''

Even though prosperous children had thrived in similar
settings for well over a century, 3-year-olds from poverty
backgrounds had never had the same chance. Leading
developmental psychologists cautioned against the idea.
Such an intellectually rigorous regime, they argued, could
actually harm such children by asking too much of them.

David Weikart, the moving force behind Perry Preschool, was
not convinced. The experts had a theory but no evidence,
and Weikart decided to conduct an experiment. From a group
of 123 South Side neighborhood children, 58 were randomly
assigned to the Perry program, while the rest, identical in
virtually all respects, didn't attend preschool. Random
assignment is the research gold standard because the
''treatment'' -- in this case, preschool -- best explains
any subsequent differences between the two groups.

Early results were discouraging. In reading and arithmetic,
the preschoolers' achievement scores at 7 and 8 weren't
much better than the control group's, and while the
preschoolers' IQ scores spiked, that difference soon
disappeared. Those results were consistent with the
dispiriting conclusion of a 1969 nationwide evaluation of
Head Start. That study's key finding -- that the boost in
test scores recorded by Head Start children faded by second
grade -- was widely interpreted to mean that Head Start
and, by implication, most other early childhood education
programs for poor kids, were a waste of time.

But in Ypsilanti the researchers didn't give up. They
collected data every year from age 3 through 11, then at
ages 14, 15, 19, 27 and now 40 -- an astonishingly long
time span in the research annals. Just as astonishingly,
they have kept track of 97 percent of the surviving group.
''I've found people on the streets, gone to crack houses
where there were AK-47's,'' said Van Loggins, a gym teacher
who coached many of the participants when they were
teenagers and who has been interviewing them for 25 years.
''I'm bilingual -- ghetto and English.''

Not only has the Perry study set records for longevity, but
it also asks the truly pertinent question: what is the
impact of preschool, not on the test scores of 7-year-olds
but on their life chances? The answer is positive -- a
well-designed program really works.

As they progressed through school, the Perry children were
less likely to be assigned to a special education class for
the mentally retarded. Their attitude toward school was
also better, and their parents were more enthusiastic about
their youngsters' schooling. Their high-school grade point
average was higher. By age 19, two-thirds had graduated
from high school, compared with 45 percent of those who
didn't attend preschool.

Most remarkably, the impact of those preschool years still
persists. By almost any measure we might care about --
education, income, crime, family stability -- the contrast
with those who didn't attend Perry is striking. When they
were 27, the preschool group scored higher on tests of
literacy. Now they are in their 40's, many with children
and even grandchildren of their own. Nearly twice as many
have earned college degrees (one has a Ph.D.). More of them
have jobs: 76 percent versus 62 percent. They are more
likely to own their home, own a car and have a savings
account. They are less likely to have been on welfare. They
earn considerably more -- $20,800 versus $15,300 -- and
that difference pushes them well above the poverty line.

The crime statistics reveal similarly significant
differences. Compared with the control group, fewer
preschoolers have gone on to be arrested for violent
crimes, drug-related crimes or property crimes. Only about
half as many (28 percent versus 52 percent) have been
sentenced to prison or jail. Preschool also seems to have
affected their decisions about family life. More of the
males in the Perry contingent have been married (68 percent
versus 51 percent, though they are also more likely than
those who didn't attend Perry to have been married more
than once) and almost twice as many have raised their own
children (57 percent versus 30 percent). These men report
fewer serious complaints about their health and are less
likely to use drugs.

The newest report attaches a dollar-and-cents figure to
this good news. Economists estimate that the return to
society is more than $250,000 (calculated in 2000 dollars)
on an investment of just $15,166 -- that's 17 dollars for
every dollar invested.

There are no miracles here. Not everyone who attended Perry
became a model citizen -- the crime figures alone make that
plain -- and some of those who didn't attend preschool have
fared well. But because their opportunities are so
constricted, the odds are stacked against kids who grow up
in neighborhoods like Ypsilanti's South Side. Bluntly put,
these are the children of whom we expect the least -- and
overall, the life histories of the control group confirm
those expectations.

By contrast, many of those who went to Perry found their
way to more stable lives. One graduate, a sales manager,
has moved back to the South Side neighborhood, where he
devotes much of his time to his church group, ''giving
back'' to the community. ''I'm still using the discipline
of school,'' he said. ''The harder you work in school or in
life, the more you get out of it.'' One Perry alum said
that when she was in her mid-20's, living on welfare and
''borrowing'' from her mother, she ''woke up one day to
decide that was just wrong. I apologized to my mother and
went to work in the factory. When I had the money, I bought
Mom all new living-room furniture. I stopped dating the
wrong kind of guys, and eventually I got married.'' Now
she's a union leader, and when she had children of her own,
there was no doubt they'd go to preschool.

Why did Perry have such an impact? Though the data can't
provide a definitive answer, a plausible interpretation is
that the experience proved to be a timely intervention,
altering the arc of these children's lives. Preschool gave
them the intellectual tools to do better in school. When
they succeeded academically, they became more committed to
education, and so they stayed on. Then, because a diploma
opened up new economic opportunities, crime proved a less
appealing alternative.

The strategy first developed at Perry is now packaged as
the High/Scope curriculum and is widely used across the
nation. Other well-conceived preschool initiatives have
also generated impressive long-term results, including the
Chicago school district's Child-Parent Center Program,
which brings mothers and relatives into the schools, and
the Carolina Abecedarian Project, in which intervention
begins during the very first weeks of an infant's life and
carries on until kindergarten.

These successes have given ammunition to those who champion
expanded preschool opportunities -- not just for poor
children but for all children. Oklahoma and Georgia have
been leaders in the movement for universal prekindergarten,
and two years ago, Florida became the first state to pass a
constitutional amendment requiring ''high quality''
preschool for all 4-year-olds. ''I testified in Florida,''
said Evelyn Moore, one of the original teachers at Perry
Preschool, who is now president of the National Black Child
Development Institute. ''The research has been vital in
getting people to understand why early childhood education
matters.'' Give us the child to age 7, the Jesuits say, and
we'll give you the man. Give us the child at age 3, these
findings suggest, and with quality preschool it's possible
to work wonders.

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and the author of
''Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing
of Higher Education.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21IDEA.html?ex=1102147786&ei=1&en=d2b29de68db7dcc5

Posted by at November 22, 2004 12:30 PM
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