Nearly 60 years ago, a handful of 3- and 4-year-old black children living in a small city outside of Detroit attended a preschool program known as the Perry Preschool Project. The children were part of an experiment to see if a high-quality educational experience in a child’s early years could raise IQ scores.
Kids’ IQ scores went up initially, but soon evened out with those of their peers. The same thing has happened more recently with the standardized test scores of children who attend preschool: They got a boost in kindergarten and then saw that boost fade as they grew older.
But the Perry research didn’t stop when the initial academic benefit seemed to dissipate, nor was IQ the only thing the researchers tracked. Led for the last decade by Nobel Laureate James Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, the Perry researchers have also looked at school success in terms of persistence to graduation, work success in terms of job retention and life success in terms of physical health and healthy relationships. Perry Preschool children did better on all of these measures than a randomly selected group of their peers who did not attend the preschool.
[To read more, please click here.]
Comments (0)