Having helped to establish a foundation of policy-directed scholarship in cognitive psychology since the 1950s, the Corporation chose to build on what was already known by financing experiments in early childhood and preschool education. The Brookline program was one such endeavor. It began, simply enough, because the school superintendent, Robert I. Sperber, had uncovered a problem, explained Margaret E. Mahoney, who was then an executive associate at Carnegie Corporation and later went on to become president of the Commonwealth Fund—the first woman president of a major foundation. “He was extraordinary,” she recalled. “I was sent to talk to him, and he told me that the kids in kindergarten and first grade ‘can’t play with others.’ I came back and told my colleagues that something was wrong, and something had to be done about it.” At her urging, other Corporation staff took a closer look at BEEP and decided it had potential.

Seeing serious problems in the youngest students, Sperber was concerned that public schools spent more on high school than on kindergarten and primary school, despite evidence that critical cognitive development was taking place in the first eight years of life. And he worried that children who entered school with a learning disability would end up in a cycle of failure, despite the best efforts of talented teachers. Consulting with preschool experts led him to conclude that for programs to have a lasting effect, they should shift their emphasis to prevention, starting not at age three or four but, ideally, at birth. And so the aim of BEEP became to help every child experience the best possible beginning in life by providing resources for the parents, and to draw the family, the school and the medical profession into a relationship of shared responsibility for the child’s early development.

“I believe that this is a most significant step forward in the building of sound early education programs,” wrote Mahoney’s colleague, the late Barbara Finberg, who believed in and advocated for the program throughout its existence, seeing it as central to the Corporation’s interests in learning how to enhance children’s cognitive development and help families foster their children’s growth in all its aspects. “Brookline proposes not just to develop and carry out a comprehensive program for its children; it intends to examine closely the planning and execution phases, what succeeds or fails and why, the benefits to the children, the families and the community, and the benefit to the school system, educationally and financially,” she wrote.

During her 38 years with the Corporation, Finberg essentially shaped the early childhood education field, emphasizing the need for research about how babies and toddlers learn and drawing attention to the absence of a national policy concerning the early years of children’s development, and influencing the board to help bridge the gap in this area of study. The question she strove to answer was not whether early childhood education should be available to all, but how to provide it.¹⁴ The same search for answers that, on Finberg’s recommendation, prompted the Corporation and others to fund Children’s Television Workshop and its creation Sesame Street in 1968, led soon after to support for the Brookline Early Education Program^*, support that continued for over ten years.

BEEP was an experimental medical, diagnostic and educational program aimed at determining whether comprehensive services delivered under public school auspices could enhance children’s development in the first five years of life and increase their ability to take advantage of school. Dr. Mel Levine, the program’s medical director, developed many of his groundbreaking ideas on neurodevelopment and learning while working with BEEP children and families. He has since written the best sellers A Mind at a Time and The Myth of Laziness, which explain the effects of variations in the way children learn, and he is a co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit institute dedicated to helping families, educators and clinicians provide strategies to help every child be a more successful learner.

The Brookline Early Education Program’s ambitious design involved multifaceted health and education activities—a response to the growing understanding of how children’s development was influenced by early experiences, which in turn depended on the involvement of children’s families as their first and best teachers. BEEP was a service program, a research project and a social change agent. Because of its longitudinal approach, the study was watched closely by leading education and child development experts. (One problem the staff regularly had to deal with was too-frequent requests for site visits by educators from all over.)
“BEEP was the first program I knew of that was so well integrated,” says Penny Hauser-Cram, an author of the follow-up study who had worked for BEEP first as a preschool teacher and later, during her doctoral studies, as an evaluator. She is now associate professor of counseling, developmental and educational psychology, Boston College and co-chair of the editorial board, Harvard Educational Review. “Besides the innovative combination of services there was a real cross-section of kids, which was exciting for us and de-stigmatizing for the families. It’s something that’s always talked about but rarely executed.” The program was multicultural and multilingual, and it was open to all residents of the community in the belief that many families who needed help could best be reached if the program was not labeled as exclusively for “problem” or “high risk” children. “It was a positive, not deficit, approach,” Hauser-Cram says. “Families still look back and say it was the most important thing in their lives.” In 1986, the American Psychological Association Task force on Promotion, Prevention and Intervention Alternatives in Psychology named BEEP as one of a small number of outstanding models to be included in a casebook for dissemination to the practitioner community.

Several circumstances made BEEP unique: The school superintendent’s interest in supporting children’s developmental well-being starting before they were born; the community’s proximity to Roxbury, a racially diverse section of Boston, which opened the door to children from nearby urban neighborhoods (and a separate program that allowed them to stay in Brookline schools through high school); participation of health professionals from Boston Children’s Hospital, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and continuous input from the project’s dedicated parent advisory council. BEEP was committed to the idea that the family is the most important educational force for a young child. Consequently, much of the program’s work was with parents, increasing their understanding of child development and sharing with them the design of home conditions that would encourage the child’s emerging abilities.

Located in a spacious brick house converted into “The BEEP Center,” the program offered an impressive array of services such as medical screenings, home visits by health and child development experts, playgroups and parenting groups, call-in or drop-in assistance and a lending library of educational materials and toys parents could take home—all in attractive, functional surroundings that also served as a passive childproofing teaching tool. The program staff emphasized and facilitated children’s access to regular healthcare, and all children had a pediatric primary healthcare provider. The educational philosophy underlying BEEP did not promote accelerating or forcing children’s development; instead, it was “oriented toward arranging for each child an environment rich in resources and in opportunities for the exercise of his or her natural talents,” according to program director Donald Pierson.

The initial enrollment totaled 282 children, one-third of whom were of other than Euro-American background, primarily black, Latino or Asian. As part of the experimental design, upon joining BEEP, families were randomly assigned to one of three groups that would determine the level of program services (assessments, education activities and child programs) available to them. All three groups took part in regular parent conferences and information sessions. The need to randomize did pose a dilemma for staff, according to Hauser-Cram, especially when, due to the experiment’s requirements, families who would have benefited from the most intense level of services ended up in the less-served group. “Inequities within a single program are hard to deal with,” she says.

14 Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe. The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.

* Carnegie Corporation was one of the first foundations concerned with early childhood development, care and education and has continued funding in these areas for over 30 years, influencing social policy and helping to create many innovative programs. In the 1980s, the Corporation’s work in middle school reform helped accomplish a restructuring of schools to better meet students’ needs. Having met these goals, for the immediate future, the Corporation will concentrate its resources on several large-scale, long-term programs in the areas of advancing adolescent literacy, reforming urban schools and reforming teacher education.lotta

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