Educational Leadership

knowledge and skills. Their parents tend to be less well educated and more stressed, and to have fewer psychological and financial resources. These children are less likely to spend their days in playful conversational banter with an adult who has the time and patience to answer their innocent, incessant questions, helping them build their vocabularies and their general store of knowledge. They typically have fewer enticing educational toys that could kick-start their cognitive development—sets of blocks and fascinating puzzles; fantastic or mundane clothes for dramatic play; wildly colorful picture books telling amazing stories.

This is where preschool comes in. We know that preschool can provide the developmentally stimulating experiences that many children growing up in poverty lack. The evidence is incontrovertible.

But here’s a crucial point: To fight poverty, preschool must provide an enormous early boost that changes the academic trajectory of a child forever. Only a high-quality preschool program will do the job. Lower-quality programs do not have a significant impact on poverty because they do not make that life-changing difference. How

do we know this? A mature body of research on preschool provides guidance.

We’ve Got Studies

We are lucky to have evidence from three rigorous longitudinal studies that report the effects of high-quality preschool programs on children followed well into adulthood—the Perry Preschool study, the Abecedarian study, and the Chicago Child-Parent Centers study.

The Perry Preschool and Abecedarian studies have fol-
lowed children who were randomly assigned into preschool
experiment groups and non-preschool control groups over
several decades. These programs were both of the
highest quality, with the Abecedarian program
being particularly intensive in dosage and
duration. The Chicago study, a strong
quasi-experimental study, followed
many more children and is perhaps
more generalizable, with children
enrolled in more typical, public
preschools of relatively high
quality through the mid-1980s.
The Perry Preschool children are
now entering their 50s, the Abece-
darian children their 40s, and the
Chicago children are currently in
their mid-30s.
We are also fortunate to have several
state-level studies of large, current pre-
school programs (Barnett, Jung, Frede,
Hustedt, & Howes, 2011). These programs are
not old enough to have followed cohorts of students for
many years, but some have followed students into elementary
school. These studies have been conducted in states (espe-
cially Arkansas, California, New Mexico, Michigan, New
Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia) that
have put substantial effort toward accomplishing a most dif-
ficult and worthy goal—a consistently high-quality preschool
program of extensive reach.

more success in school and in life than the control children.

Finally, we have the recently published update of the Head Start Impact Study, with new 3rd grade findings (Puma et al., 2012). This huge national study has been long awaited with trepidation, because results from earlier studies were disappointing.