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IT WAS 1962, AND MANY AFRICAN-AMERICAN parents in Ypsilanti, Michigan, didnt see the point of sending their 3-year-old children toa special class at the neighborhood publicschool rather than just starting them inkindergarten at age 5 or 6. David Weikart,director of special services for this segregatedschool system in a working-class communitynear Detroit, had to admit that he didnt reallyhave a convincing argument to overcometheir reticence. But he was sure there must

be a better way to help at-risk students thansimply waiting until they had fallen so far

behind their classmates that they were forcedto repeat a grade.

Bolstered by the support of a charismaticschool principal, Weikart pressed ahead.Over 5 years he enrolled 123 children inwhat became known as the HighScope/Perry Preschool Project. As researchershave followed the children into adulthood,the ndings have shown beyond a doubt that

high-quality early education pays off, bigtime. Two other groundbreaking interventionefforts over the past half-centurytheAbecedarian Project in the 1970s and theChicago Longitudinal Study in the 1980s have reinforced that message.

The payoffon everything from betterschool performance to holding a job,raising a family, staying out of jail, andcontributing to, rather than being a burdenon, societycan be as much as $16 savedfor every dollar spent. Thats an impressivereturn on investment at a time when local,state, and federal ofcials are desperatelytrying to reduce large budget decits andsqueeze out the biggest bang for their limited

bucks. But as solid as these studies are, theycant provide policymakers with everythingthey need: a prescription for the best, mostcost-effective intervention that can help thelargest number of at-risk children.

The disconnect comes because studies like

the Perry project contain too many importanvariables to measure. But all of them, fromthe quality of the teachers to the curriculum tthe intensity and duration of the interventionaffect long-term outcomes. Last yeaW. Steven Barnett, director of the NationaInstitute for Early Education Research aRutgers University in New Brunswick, NewJersey, spelled out the problem in a metaanalysis of 123 comparative studies ovethe past 50 years that have tried to enhanccognitive development. The good news ithat a host of original and synthetic studiehave found positive effects for a range ooutcomes, and this pattern is clearest fooutcomes relating to cognitive development,he wrote. The bad news is that there imuch less empirical information availablfor designing interventions at multiple levelswith multiple components. And just athe magnitude of benet remains somewhamurky, so does the cost [of intervention].

For policymakers, that imprecision ca be frustrating. As Senator Barbara Mikulsk(DMD) demanded of one Obama Administration ofcial this summer during a Senathearing she chaired on the topic: Everybodtalks about high-quality programs. Whdoesnt support a high-quality programHigh quality is a clich. We want to know

the details.The landscape of childhood poverty hachanged greatly in 50 years. Demographiand geopolitical shifts have widened the ga

between the countrys haves and have-notsMore women in the workforce has increaseddemand for child care and early education

but low-income families still have many feweoptions than their wealthier counterparts.

The federal government is struggling tkeep up with those changes. Head Start, begunin 1965, serves nearly 1 million preschoolerfrom poor families. Even so, thats only 40%of those who are eligible. This summer thWhite House launched a $500 million EarlLearning Challenge, a grants competition fostates to improve their network of services tneedy preschool children and their familie(see p. 957). But early education advocateare worried that pressure to trim spendinwill bring the budget ax down on the mosvulnerable members of society.

Despite all the nonscientic factoweighing on their decisions, governmenofcials still look to these three classistudies for important insights. What

Past Successes Shape EffortTo Expand Early InterventionThree longitudinal studies have demonstrated the lasting value of high-quality earlyeducation. So why isnt it offered to all children who need it?

N EWS

Looking ahead. The Abecedarian Project wowith children as young as 6 weeks old.

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impressive is how much they got right,says Joan Lombardi, who oversees earlychildhood development programs for the U.S.Department of Health and Human Servicesand who is the person to whom Mikulski puther question. The studies also make clearthat the real value of early education is nota higher IQ, or better test scores, but ratherthe life skills that can help lift someone outof poverty. It may be hard to project suchoutcomes onto a needy 4-year-old, Barnettsays, but they are vital goals in crafting asuccessful early education program.

The wonder yearsThe economic case for expanding preschooleducation for disadvantaged children is largely

based on evidence from the HighScope/Perry Preschool Program, says Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman of the

University of Chicago in Illinois. (Althoughthe intervention itself ended in 1967, in 1970Weikart formed the HighScope EducationalResearch Foundation, which has continuedfollow-up studies.) The project calculateda lifetime benet of $284,000 from a costof $17,600 for each child in the preschool

program. In fact, Perrys high prole hasled Heckman and colleagues at the NationalBureau of Economic Research to apply

powerful new analytic tools to the originaldata that clarify how big the long-term payoffshave been to both individuals and society.

The efcacy of intervening beforechildren have a chance to fail was anunproven hypothesis when Weikart launchedhis study. But it was in step with the growingawareness among educators and child

psychologists that early intervention was thekey to helping millions of children escape aseemingly endless cycle of poverty.

The school that Weikart chose for hisstudy was the center of the segregatedneighborhoods social and cultural lifeas well as its educational hub. It was led

by Charles Beatty Sr., the rst African-American principal in Michigan. Beatty alsolived in the neighborhood.

It was truly a community school, recallsPat Horne McGee, director of the HeadStart program for Washtenaw County, whichincludes Ypsilanti as well as Ann Arbor.McGee attended the Harriet Street School inthe 1950s (its name was later changed to thePerry School), and still lives and works in thecommunity. There were dances on Fridaynight, weddings, basketball games, summeractivities, you name it, she recalls. A lot ofthe concepts that Dave Weikart was looking

for in terms of parental and communityinvolvement were already in place.

At the time, most mothers stayed at homewith their children and didnt see the need for

preschool, McGee recalls. A lot of mothersthought, Im not sure I want my babies to gowith [Weikart]. Beatty asked his teachers to

persuade parents to participate.Eligible children had a below-average IQ

and came from a low-income family whose parents typically had not completed highschool. They were randomly as signed toeither a half-day preschool program or nointer vention. The teachers in the treatmentgroup had advanced degrees, were paid a

bonus, and worked in small classes with achild-centered, active learning curriculum.The study was small, with 58 children in

the treatment group and 65 inthe control group. The initialresults for fourth-grade stu-dents were, in a word, dis-appointing. They were notvery persuasive, to put it

bluntly. The achievementtest scores showed weak ef-fects, acknowledges LarrySchweinhart, an education

psychologist Weikart hired in1975 to help with the studyand who has since become

principal investigator. Itwasnt until the two mensaw the results from theassessment of 14-year-oldsthat they realized something

special might be happening.I had the printouts in my hand and they

were just jumping off the page. I thought,This must be a mistake. Why would we get

bigger achievement effects at age 14 thanearlier? In addition to earning higher scoresthan students in the control group, childrenfrom the treatment group required less specialeducation, showed better motivation, didmore homework, and placed a higher valueon learning. The teenagers also engaged inless delinquent behavior.

Motivation becomes a much largerfactor in middle school, Schweinhart says,along with task persistence and other

kinds of traits you would associate with being able to do something thats harder. SoI think we were tapping into that skill for

HighScope/Perry Abecedarian Chicago

THREE LONG-RUNNING STUDIES DEMONSTRATE BIG PAYOFF

A team effort. HighScopes Larry Schweinhart (center ) with EvelynMoore (left ) and Louise Derman-Sparks, two of the teachers from thePerry Preschool project.

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the rst time. And that was pretty exciting.The age-14 results were a real turnaround

for us, says Schweinhart, who succeededWeikart as president of HighScope afterWeikart died in 2003. In fact, the study hasshaped the path of his career. Now, at 64,Schweinhart is seeking federal funding tostudy the cohort at age 50, as well as theimpact of the curriculum used.

From the minds of babes No study can answer more than a handfulof questions. And for the researchers at theUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,who began enrolling disadvantagedchildren as young as 6 weeks old inan intensive intervention programcalled the Abecedarian Project, the

biggest one was: How early shouldyou start to make the biggest

difference in a childs life?Starting in 1972, 5 years after the

Perry Project ended, the Abecedarianstudy (abecedarian means onewho studies the alphabet) was alsosmall, with just 57 children in thetreatment group. But the age of thechildren and the intensity of theintervention set it apart from Perry.We dened intensity as being inan educational environment 5 days aweek, for 5 hours a day, year-round,ex plains Frances Campbell, the

studys principal investigator. Theintervention also continued until thechildren entered kindergarten. Bycomparison, the Perry pre schoolershad attended school for 2.5 hours aday, 7 months a year, for 2 years.

Unlike the Perry study, whichtook place in a neighborhood school,the preschool portion of the Abe-cedarian project was conducted ata university-based child-care fac ility.Participants came from a sprawlingrural area that extended far beyondthe campus. None of the women(three-quarters of the children came fromsingle-parent families) had cars, and publictransportation was nonexistent. Campbellrecalls using her own car to bring some ofthe children and their parents to the centerwhen the regular driver wasnt available.

That personalized attention was a keyfeature of the study itself. When the babies inthe treatment group were awake and alert, theidea was that someone was always stimulatingthem, keeping that little mind active andgrowing, Campbell says. There was a heavy

emphasis on language development, becausestudies have shown thats what predicts IQscore. So the idea was to enrich their verbalenvironment, and we tried hard to do that.

The boost in academic performance wasslightly stronger than in the Perry study.Our cognitive benets endured longerthan anybody elses, Campbell explains.And although the biggest difference occursat age 3, even at 21, the IQ scores aresignicantly different for those who attendedour preschool.

The Abecedarian study reports a muchlower overall benet-cost ratio to society,

however. That is due largely to a negligibledifference in the incidence of crime amongtreatment and control groups. By comparison,Perry showed a major disparity betweenits experimental and control groups, whichtranslates into a large societal payoff. Thatswhere Perry gets the biggest effect, andwe dont show the same effect, Campbellacknowledges. She doesnt know why that is.

Despite the studys acclaimthe rankingRepublican on the Senate panel, RichardBurr of North Carolina, gave a shout-out to

his home-state institution immediately afteMikulski cited the Perry results in opening thhearingCampbell readily admits that it stilleaves several issues unresolved. Ironicallyshe wasnt able to answer the question posed

by developmental psychologist Craig Rameywhen he launched the study: How earlshould we intervene? (Ramey is now at thVirginia Institute of Technology CarilionResearch Institute in Roanoke, the latest stopin a distinguished academic career.) Campbelsays the only way to measure that would be amassive study with interventions beginning adifferent times: 3 months, 6 months, 1 year2 years, and so on. But such a study would b

prohibitively expensive, she says.Campbell remains actively involved wit

Abecedarian, with an upcoming paper i press reporting on the age-30 cohort. Bushes not sure how much longer the study wil

continue to bear fruit, and who will harvest itIm wrestling with whether we really want tosee [the results] at 40, she says. Part of mwants to know. But Im 78, and I dont expecto live to nd out.

The active ingredientsWhen politicians think about expandinearly education, money is inevitably one otheir biggest concerns. Perry cost $17,60

per child, and Abecedarian ran four timethat amount. Although the eventual return oninvestment to society for each child enrolle

is hugely positive, most politicians arenknown for their long-term thinking.The Chicago Longitudinal Study (CLS

began in 1985, and some children receiveservices for up to 6 years. It was designed as alow-cost alternative to Perry and AbecedarianIts overall size1539 at-risk childreni

proving to be big enough to tease out whaArthur Reynolds, a community psychologisat the University of Minnesota, Twin Citiesand principal investigator for CLS, calthe active ingredients of the interventionthe components that are most important tits success. CLSs experimental populationof 989 children attended preschool at onof 20 Child Parent Education Centers,

program begun by Chicago public schools i1967 on the heels of Head Start. After eithe1 or 2 years of the intervention, a subset othe children continued to receive servicethrough grade 3 at one of several Chicag

public schools.Unlike its predecessors, CLS did no

assign children randomly to treatment ancontrol groups. Two decades of Head Starhad made the value of early intervention s

Lifelong friends. Family coordinator Carrie Bynum main-tained close ties with the children in the Abecedarian studyas they grew up.

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well-known to the public, Reynolds says,that it would have been unfeasible andunethical to do a randomized trial. Any

parent whose child would have been assignedto the control group would have bailed.Instead, the study follows what is called aquasi-experimental design, with its controlgroup consisting of children attending full-day kindergarten at ve randomly chosenschools. Most had previously been in homecare and never attended preschool, although15% had participated in Head Start. Reynoldscalls the 6-year course of treatment for theexperimental group a happy integration of

basic skills, both for language and numeracy,

as well as social-emotional skills, combinedwith an emphasis on parental involvement.

His results found cognitive benets fromthe intervention beginning at an early age.Children entering kindergarten without anearly intervention experience, for example,were well below the norm on one widely usedtest of basic skills, while those with 1 year oftreatment had average scores, and those with2 years were well above the norm. The positiveoutcomes are sustained as the children movethrough school: The treatment group is halfas likely to need special education classes,has one-third fewer juvenile arrests, andhas nearly half the rate of substance misuse.The payoff for the young adult cohort is alsoimpressive, including an 8-to-1 benet-to-cost ratio at age 27 for those who receivedthe full 6 years of treatment. That positiveratio translates into a higher socioeconomicstatus, less substance abuse, and a lower rateof incarceration.

Reynolds believes the characteristics ofCLS make it more relevant than the Perry

and Abecedarian studies. And hes not abovedispensing what passes for trash talk amongearly education researchers. CPC had already

become institutionalized within the schoolsystem. So in terms of sustainability, its amuch better model than a university-based

program like Abecedarian or something run by an outside organization, like HighScope,Reynolds asserts. Putting four teacherswith masters degrees into every classroom,as Perry did, just isnt going to happentoday, he adds. Abecedarian generatedstrong ndings, but at a huge cost per child,Reynolds says, making CLSs price tag mucheasier for politicians to swallow.

The way forwardTheres no question that the children enrolledin the Perry, Abecedarian, and CLS studies

beneted from the intervention. The evidencealso suggests that those at greatest risk forfailure in both school and life received thegreatest boost. But can similar intervention

programs have the same effect on the countryschanging population of at-risk children, in

particular a growing Latino population andEnglish-language learners?

Do we need more rigorous long-termstudies that address the current nature of

poverty? Yes, but they are horribly expensive,says Grover J. Russ Whitehurst, director ofthe Brown Center for Education Policy at theBrookings Institution in Washington, D.C.I dont see much prospect of any federalagency launching them anytime soon.

A way around this is to access dataalready collected for other purposes. Onesuch effort to use so-called administrativerecords taps into a famous study of 11,500children in 79 Tennessee elementary schools

in the late 1980s. Although Project STAR(Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) wasdesigned to measure whether students did

better in smaller classes, it found instead thatteacher quality was a more important factorthan class size. A team led by economistRaj Chetty of Harvard University decidedto track down the children as adults. Usingtax returns from the Internal RevenueService scrubbed to preserve anonymity,they obtained information such as collegeattendance, earnings, home ownership, andretirement savings.

As with Perry in particular, Chetty foundthat high-quality kindergarten has minimal

long-term impact on reading and mathscores. But it notably improves the set ofnoncognitive skillsthink of a teenager who

pays attention in class, keeps good notes, andcarefully lists his homework assignments,compared with the one with smudged

papers stuffed into his backpack, a patternof disruptive behavior, and no recollection oftomorrows Spanish testthat persists intoadulthood. These skills could explain whysome children benet more than others fromthe same intervention, as well as the efcacyof the intervention itself, says James Grifn,who heads the early learning and schoolreadiness program at the National Instituteof Child Health and Human Developmentwithin the National Institutes of Health.

Many children who havent receivedintensive, high-quality preschool are able to

pick up enough academic skills in the earlygrades to catch up to their peers, says Grifn,whose program has funded Reynoldss CLSwork. But they cant always compensate forthe intangibles. For things like better self-

A continuum of services. Existing child-parent centers at neighborhood schools served as hubs for the interventions in the Chicago Longitudinal Study.

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NEARLY 1 MILLION CHILDREN AGED 3 AND 4will attend Head Start this year. As its nameimplies, the U.S. government program ismeant to give low-income children (andthose with disabilities) a boost. In thiscase, that means helping get them readyfor kindergarten by offering the type of

educational foundation that children fromwealthier families take for granted.Of course, a good preschool education

isnt the only thing that these children may be lacking. There are many other federal programs that provide nutritional, health,and child care assistance to the mostdisadvantaged families inthe United States. Anddespite a budget this yearof $7.56 billion, HeadStart serves only 40%of the eligible children.(Early Head Start, begun in1995 for an even younger

population, serves fewerthan 5% of eligible infantsand toddlers.) Even so,many people still considerHead Start, created in1965 as part of PresidentLyndon Johnsons GreatSociety programs, to be thegovernments chief vehiclefor ensuring that thosechildren do well in school

and grow up to become productive membersof society.

Has Head Start been a success? Un-fortunately, thats not an easy question toanswer. Overly broad expectations for a

program focused on only one consequenceof poverty make it hard to evaluate its real

impact. On one hand, low-income parents haveother publicly funded educational options fortheir children, notably state prekindergarten

programs and subsidized child care, so theexistence of good alternatives may narrowthe gap in any comparison study with HeadStart. On the other hand, any positive effects

from Head Start could be suppressed by otheaspects of childhood poverty or erased blow-quality education once they enter school

Nevertheless, even its supporters agre

that Head Start is not as good as it coul be. The salaries of Head Start teachers armuch lower than those offered at regula

public schools, for example, and historicallythe quality of instruction has received muchless attention. It also typically runs onlduring the school year, and few childrespend 2 years in the program (4-year-oldreceive preference because of the limitenumber of slots). As a result, Head Stahas never racked up anything like the longterm payoffs to individuals and societdocumented in the Perry, Abecedarian, and

Chicago Longitudinal studies that providehigh-quality, intensive early education (semain text).

The latest evidence of what somconsider Head Starts disappointing tracrecord came last year in a congressionallmandated evaluation of 4667 children a383 Head Start centers across the countryThe rst round of results from the so-calleImpacts study, issued in 2005, found thathe children enrolled in Head Start at eitheage 3 or 4 in 200203 were better preparefor kindergarten than a control group fromsimilarly disadvantaged backgrounds who

by and large, did not attend Head Start beforentering kindergarten. But the second rounfound essentially no difference in academi

performance between the two groups ochildren at the end of rst grade. The resultof the Impacts study replicated the so-callefade-out effect reported in previous, smallestudies of children in Head Start.

But those results arent a surprise, say th programs supporters, nor do they mean thaHead Start is a failure. Edward Zigler, aeminent child psychologist at Yale University

regulation, delayed gratication, the abilityto concentrate, motivation, and developing alove of learning, Grifn says, we want togure out the best way to teach those skills.

Still a special placeThe wing of the Harriet Street Schoolthat housed the Perry study is no more:It was torn down several years back toaccommodate a new school, now called thePerry Child Development Center. Duringa recent visit, McGee recalled that appletrees once encircled the building. And sherealizes how much time has passed when

Sharine Buddin, the principal, walks herdown the hall of the old portion of theschool that didnt exist when McGee was astudent there.

But local educators havent forgotten theseminal role of the Harriet Street Schoolin demonstrating that high-quality earlyeducation works. Although the world haschanged a lot in 50 years, they still try tohonor its memory.

When Ypsilanti, with a shrinking school-age population, decided 6 years ago toconsolidate all its early education classesinto one building, it chose Perry. Buddin,

who had been principal of a grade 1 throug5 school that was closed, assumed she would

be going to another grade 1 through 5 schoolSo she asked the school superintendenwhy he wanted her to move to Perry, now alarge, modern brick building that houses 11kindergarten and 10 rst-grade classes alonwith three preschool classes.

This is a special place, and I want yoto take care of my babies, Dr. Hawkins toldme, Buddin says. And I said, Youre rightIt is special. You couldnt drag me out ohere now.

JEFFREY MER

Giving Children a Head Start IsPossibleBut Its Not EasyBegun in 1965, the U.S. Head Start program is still trying to nd the best way toprepare poor children for school

NEWS

On the move. A Head Start center in Kankakee, Illinois, serves thechildren of migrant and seasonal workers.

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