In 1962, children 3 years and 4 years old in a small Michigan city did something that would increase their likelihood of graduating from high school, getting married, owning a home. It would lessen their chance of having a criminal record or going on welfare. It would significantly boost their IQ scores. It would change their lives.
What they did was go to preschool.
For that era, and especially for children such as those impoverished black children who lived near Perry Elementary School in Ypsilanti, an early, intense learning experience was unprecedented. Preschool was almost unheard of then. Head Start, the federally funded program primarily for low-income children ages 3 to 5, was three years away, and only 18 states mandated kindergarten. Toddlerhood was a time for play.
Instead, those 58 Ypsilanti children spent 2 1/2 hours every weekday morning stretching their minds and strengthening their social skills.
They learned to recognize series and patterns, similarities and differences, how to deal with conflict, draw and paint and play with clay. They visited the post office, fire station, grocery store and walked through their neighborhood while teachers pointed out differences among trees, leaves and other common objects along the route. Once a week, the teachers visited their homes to help parents reinforce and expand on their children’s school lessons.
Follow-up research, most recently done when the oldest were 27, showed that Perry Preschool graduates tended to enter the American mainstream with such hallmarks as jobs, marriages, homes. But a control group of children from the same neighborhood who were not enrolled turned up in greater numbers as burdens on the mainstream. As adults, far more of the second group had prison records, spotty employment histories or were on welfare.
When the Perry project was planned, the researchers had a hunch-but no evidence-that a stimulating program for preschoolers and their parents could significantly change the children’s futures. Now, the evidence has come in.
More than 50 research projects in various locations, using diverse curricula and beginning at different ages, all come to the same conclusion. That conclusion is supported by a growing amount of scientific literature on child development that adds biological and neurological research to psychological and sociological studies.
The conclusion is: Early intervention works.
The most recent research on the infant brain suggests a slight change in that declaration: Earliest intervention works best.
Scientists have found that very young children are at the height of adaptability, primed to learn, eager for new experiences. Also, because bonding in the first year is crucial, a child unable to form an attachment at home may find, in an intervention program, someone to love him and teach him to love.
To work, intervention programs must be of high quality. They also must be consistent and persistent-one criticism of Head Start and other such programs is that their effects erode within a few years after the children enter grade school.
The best programs reach out to families, as well, involving them in the children’s development and teaching parenting skills. Programs must be accessible-some early-intervention programs for infants in Chicago have waiting lists of four to six months, half a lifetime for those babies.
The recipe for changing lives sounds simple. Provide the newborn with someone who is crazy about him; feed him nutritious food; raise him in a stimulating environment free of domestic and community violence. Provide all of that well into the school years.
But the most important ingredient is something no government agency or program can supply: a loving adult.
The rest of the mix can be considered a long-term insurance policy that society takes out on children to protect against later violence and wasted lives. But many political candidates, cognizant of public fears about crime, have used those concerns to promote instead the short-term security of stricter law enforcement and incarceration.
Even so, the cries of disadvantaged infants to become a part of the American mainstream are just beginning to be heard, amplified by a chorus of interest in children’s rights and issues.
For the first time, for example, a U.S. attorney general is suggesting that crime fighting may well begin in the cradle.
“Start early,” Janet Reno said in August to a national conference on youth violence in Washington. “Unless we start when children are conceived, unless we give them the foundation in (ages) 0 to 3 to grow, we are never ultimately going to succeed.”
In an October speech before the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Albuquerque, President Clinton spoke of morality and children. In an earlier speech, the president had mentioned Chicagoan Robert Sandifer, a homicide suspect and murder victim at age 11. In Albuquerque, Clinton focused on the 10- and 11-year-olds who allegedly forced Eric Morse, 5, to fall to his death from a CHA high-rise: “What we must be worried about is wave upon wave of these little children, who don’t have somebody both good and strong to look up to, who are so vulnerable that their hearts can be turned to stone by the time they’re 10 or 11 years old.”
Congress and the president underscored the importance to the nation of early intervention when, in May, they approved legislation extending the Head Start preschool program to an as-yet-undetermined number of children from birth to age 3. The Head Start birth-to-3 program likely will blend educational activities with elements of good infant day care. Those ideally would include not just quality programs but surroundings that allow for private and group play areas, safe ways to climb and slide, muted colors for walls and furniture.
“Adults can’t function in a group for 11 hours a day,” said Louis Torelli, a designer of infant day-care spaces who is based in California, “and yet we expect that of children. They need to take a break from time to time, and if there’s no place to go, they’ll have tantrums or get in fights.”
Intervention can be expensive. Head Start this year is spending $3.3 billion on 745,000 children, about a third of those who are eligible. That averages more than $4,000 a pupil.
“We can spare $20 billion from defense for (Head Start) and do more for the defense of this country,” said Dr. Julius Richmond, a professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School and Head Start’s first director.
But he and others are asking taxpayers to make a leap of faith, to believe that money spent on children today will pay dividends years, even decades, in the future.
“It’s true you are putting out expenditures now, but the savings are quite rapid,” said David Weikart, president of High/Scope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, sponsors of the Perry study. “It’s the same argument that hotel builders make when they want to build a hotel: Invest now, and you get no money until the guests come-a 10- or 15-year horizon. I don’t see any reason why hotels should have better planning than programs for kids.”
Perry Preschool spent the equivalent of $7,252 in 1992 dollars on each pupil. But when the monies later spent on welfare, incarceration, special education and similar expenditures were tallied, for every public dollar spent on the program children, $7.16 had been spent on the non-program children by age 27.
“The choice is between spending $1 and spending $7,” Weikart said. “People say it costs too much, but that’s not the right use of the word `cost.’ What costs too much is not doing it.”
