High/scope perry preschool program

The Perry Preschool Project, carried out from to , provided high-quality preschool education to three- and four-year-old African-American children living in poverty. About 75 percent of the children participated for two school years at ages 3 and 4 ; the remainder participated for one year at age 4. The preschool was provided each weekday morning in 2.

The average child-teacher ratio was The curriculum emphasized active learning, in which the children engaged in activities that i involved decision making and problem solving, and ii were planned, carried out, and reviewed by the children themselves, with support from adults. The teachers also provided a weekly 1. Programs shown in well-conducted RCTs, carried out in typical community settings, to produce sizable, sustained effects on important outcomes.

Top Tier evidence includes a requirement for replication — specifically, the demonstration of such effects in two or more RCTs conducted in different implementation sites, or, alternatively, in one large multi-site RCT.

Such evidence provides confidence that the program would produce important effects if implemented faithfully in settings and populations similar to those in the original studies. The Perry Preschool Project established the lasting human and financial value of early childhood education and led to the establishment of the HighScope Education Research Foundation and one of the first early childhood programs in the United States intentionally designed to increase school success for preschool children living in poverty.

As the longest-running longitudinal study in early education, the Perry Study continues to prove that investing in high-quality early education yields positive results for children and families.

Perry Preschool Project. What makes the study unique is that the children in the study were randomly assigned either to receive the HighScope Perry Preschool program or to receive no comparable program and were then tracked throughout their lives to age At earlier stages, HighScope Educational Research Foundation staff studied these same groups of children every year from age 3 to age 11, and again at ages 14, 15, 19, and Weikart began the study in by identifying young African American children living in poverty and assessed to be at high risk of school failure in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

They do not report standard errors. The rates of return estimated in this paper account for these factors. We conducted an extensive analysis of sensitivity to alternative plausible assumptions. However, returns are generally statistically significantly different from zero for both males and females and are above the historical return on equity.

Estimated benefit-to-cost ratios support this conclusion. This paper estimates the large array of long-run benefits of an influential early childhood program targeted to disadvantaged children and their families.