A few months ago I was reading an old copy of School Administrator and came across a study I read about years ago and forgot. It rekindled my curiosity about the outcomes and I can't stop thing about it.
In the mid- 1960's a group of child psychologists wanted to see what the effects of pre-school were on 3 and 4 year olds. Researchers recruited low-income, low IQ parents from the town's black neighborhoods in Ypsilanti, Michigan, an old industrial town west of Detroit. Children in the treatment group were admitted to Perry Preschool, a high-quality, two year preschool program. Kids in the control group were left to fend for themselves. The children were then tracked for the rest of their lives. The subjects are now in their 40's, which means researchers have been able to trace the effects of the Perry intervention well into adulthood.
As a case for early-childhood intervention, the experiment always had been considered something of a failure. The treatment children did do significantly better on cognitive tests while attending preschool and for a year or two afterward, but the gains did not last. By the time the treatment children were in the third grade, their IQ scores were no better than the control group's.
However, when researchers looked at the long-term results of Perry, the data appeared more promising. It was true the Perry kids hadn't experienced lasting IQ benefits. But something important had happened to them in preschool, and whatever it was, the positive effects resonated for decades.
Compared to the control group, the Perry students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age 27, more likely to be earning more than $25,000 a year at age 40, less likely ever to have been arrested and less likely to have spent time on welfare.
James Heckman, a former Nobel prize winner in economics is re-examining the results of the Perry Project. Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the Perry study, and he learned that in the 1960's and 1970's, researchers had collected some data on the students that had never been analyzed. These were reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on "personal behavior" and "social development."
The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole or was absent or late; the second one rated each student's level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers.
Heckman labeled these noncognitive skills, because they were entirely distinct from IQ. After three years of analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.
It turns out the Perry Preschool Project worked entirely different than everyone had accepted. Although the program did not have long lasting IQ benefits, it did improve behavior and social skills. For the students in Perry Preschool those skills turned out to be valuable indeed.
Heckman is showing that if we want to improve the odds for children, and poor children in particular, we need to approach early education anew, to start over with some fundamental questions about how human skills develop and how character is formed. Daniel Willingham said that "We don't yet know how to teach self-direction, collaboration, creativity, and innovation the way we know how to teach long division."
Maybe James Heckman can show us how.
