Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Summer 2006
A study was conducted to evaluate BEEP children and assess the program’s effectiveness when participants entered kindergarten and again in the second grade. By kindergarten, 169 of the original children still attended local schools. (Most of the families lost to attrition had moved away from the Boston area, but the demographic makeup of the remaining group was relatively unchanged.) At both points in time BEEP children scored higher and demonstrated fewer difficulties in social development and learning skills than comparison children from the same classrooms and similar family backgrounds.
Overall, the greater the child and family’s involvement with the program, the more positive the results. Participation in the highest level of program services, for instance, tended to close the performance gap between children of more educated and less educated mothers—a deficit which researchers believed potentially put a child “at risk.” Classroom observations of BEEP kindergarteners in the areas of organization, social behaviors and use of time revealed that participants demonstrated higher levels of competence and school readiness than non-participants from their first days in the classroom. The second-grade results confirmed these findings and provided solid evidence that children’s academic performance was influenced for the better.
The Dilemma of Lasting Change
The short-term positive effects of BEEP and similar early education programs on children’s social development and academic performance are unmistakable—but the question is, do they hold up over time? A definitive “yes” answer could help secure the future of preschool programs in this country. But the likelihood that measurable positive changes, no matter how significant, will suffer the “washout effect” as children age has always been a concern for educators, parents, policymakers and taxpayers. This potential problem was addressed by the program’s founders, including pediatrician Burton L. White (author of The First Three Years of Life), who expressed his belief that the program’s continuous parent involvement and health and diagnostic component would increase the odds that children who started out stronger than their peers would maintain that advantage over the long haul.
Expectations for lasting change ran high at BEEP, and there were a number of other programs begun around the same time that were also banking on the promise of new research into early development. While assessments of the long-range returns from early childhood education are still in the primary stages of study and understanding, the earliest rigorous experiments on preschool efficacy have been evaluated. The most promising findings indicate that the real benefits come from nurturing noncognitive skills—social, emotional and behavioral competencies that lead to success later in life—and that positive effects are stronger when programs begin early, because initial improvements help students gain additional skills at the next stage of development.
During its lifespan, BEEP made a positive impression on many in the early education field—so much so, that in the 1970s a number of programs modeled on it were already in existence elsewhere in the country, according to a 1982 article in the Boston Globe. This article noted the frequently heard criticism of Head Start that IQ gains were short-lived, but also cited studies conducted over 20 years ago, which demonstrated “the program’s beneficial impact on community activism, aspirations and feelings of enfranchisement.” According to the Globe, in 1979, Cornell’s Consortium for Longitudinal Studies had reversed many negative opinions about the value of early interventions by proving that few Head Start children were assigned to special education classes or held back to repeat a grade.
Two more recent benchmark studies in the field, of the High /Scope Perry Preschool Program (1962–1967) in Ypsilanti, Michigan (also a Carnegie Corporation grantee) and the Abecedarian Early Childhood Intervention project (1972–1979) in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have produced cost/benefit analyses that attempt to quantify the programs’ long-term benefits. In both cases, increased earnings and decreased social costs (e.g., crime and welfare) lead to projections of significant net lifetime social benefits (approaching $100,000 per participant) from both these experiments.15 The BEEPers Come of Age study complements these other studies of early intervention, adding valuable information on the effects of services integrated across disciplines—with a particular emphasis on health.
It is a truism that healthy children learn better than those who are physically or emotionally unwell. Ample evidence also exists showing children in families with low educational opportunity are at risk in the areas of health and development. Publicly funded programs including Head Start, which are dedicated to improving outcomes for low-income children, provide a range of individualized services beyond education and development; medical, dental, mental health and nutrition components are living proof that the link between health and learning is widely accepted.16 At the same time, these programs vary widely in level and quality of services provided, and most experts and advocates think we can do better. The pediatrics field has been called upon to find new ways to coordinate more effectively with early childhood education efforts. And in addition to the integration of professional services, family involvement, increasingly viewed as a critical component of programs aiming for long-term impact, could play a bigger part.
BEEP, arguably ahead of its time in emphasizing health management and inviting substantive input from parents, has much to contribute to the present-day conversation on the health, educational and psychological benefits of comprehensive preschool programs. The follow-up study conducted by Judith S. Palfrey, M.D., Penny Hauser-Cram, Ed.D., Martha B. Bronson, Ed.D., Marji Erickson Warfield, Ph.D., Selcuk Sirin, Ph.D. and Eugenia Chan, M.D., MPH aimed to identify what long-term effects, if any, BEEP had on participants, and which aspects of the program parents considered most and least beneficial. The study tested the hypothesis that, compared to their peers, children who were part of the BEEP program would go farther in school, have higher incomes and be more physically and mentally healthy.17 Test subjects were young adults who had been enrolled in BEEP from 1973 to 1978, who were, by the time of the follow-up study, between 26 and 30 years old. The research team spent two years locating people who had been in the program, and almost everyone they found was willing to participate.
15 “A New Framework for Assessing the Benefits of Early Education.” Committee for Economic Development (CED), September 2004.
16 About Head Start (http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/hsb/about/generalinformation/index.htm).
17 “The Brookline Early Education Project: A 25-Year Follow-up Study of a Family-Centered Early Health and Development Intervention.” Pediatrics 2005.