Early Lessons
An article about the famous Perry Preschool Project, which was the basis for Head Start, with some fascinating findings. I wonder if the long-term research on charter schools and, for example, the Milwaukee voucher program (per my recent email), will mirror this: test scores or IQ won't be meaningfully different, but life outcomes will be MUCH better?
The initial gains the Perry children made also faded out. By the late 1960s, the high hopes that preschool could really change things for poor, black children seemed like a misguided dream from another era.
But the Perry researchers kept their study going as the children moved through elementary school. And they started to notice something interesting. The preschool children were doing better in school. They were still no "smarter" than their peers as measured on IQ tests, but they were less likely to be assigned to special education, and less likely to have behavior problems.
And the surprises kept coming. In high school, the students who had gone to preschool got better grades, they spent more time on their homework, they scored slightly higher on achievement tests, and they were more likely to say school was important to them. There were still no differences between them and the students who had not gone to preschool when it came to IQ, but in all kinds of other measurable ways, the students who had gone to preschool were doing better.
Researchers didn't know exactly why the preschool students were doing better, but it appeared they were more motivated - they wanted to do well. For example, one reason they did better on achievement tests is because they were more likely to finish the tests. The students who had not gone to preschool left more questions blank. They didn't even try.
"Now you're getting into something really deep," says economist James Heckman. "How is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation?"
Heckman is a Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of Chicago. Preschool was not among his interests until he came across the Perry Study several years ago. What caught his attention is the apparent paradox at its core: The people who went to preschool were not "smarter" than their peers, but they did better.
"It's true that IQ wasn't raised by the study," Heckman says. "But it is true that achievement was. And I thought that was amazing."
The assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that measured intelligence is the key to everything. But with the Perry Preschool children, something else made the difference. It was not IQ. Heckman is now working with psychologists to try to understand how the preschool may have affected the development of what he calls "non-cognitive" skills, things like motivation, sociability and the ability to work with others.
These are critical skills that help people succeed at school, at work - and in life.
And as it turns out, the Perry preschool children did do better in life
By the time study participants were 40 years old, the differences between the people who went to preschool and the people who didn't were startling.
The people who'd gone to preschool were more likely to be employed; they made more money. They were more likely to own homes and cars, to have savings accounts. They were more than twice as likely to say they had positive relationships with their families. The men who'd gone to preschool were more involved in raising their children. And the biggest difference of all had to do with crime.
The people who had gone to preschool had far fewer problems with the law. They were half as likely to be arrested. In other words, preschool cut the crime rate in half.
By cutting crime and sending fewer children to special education, the preschool saved society a lot of money. That got economists and business people interested in the Perry Preschool. They like Perry because it makes economic sense. Investing in preschool pays off.
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Early Lessons
By Emily Hanford
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/preschool/
posted by Whitney Tilson at 9:29 PM
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