Preschool Pays

New support for preschooling

In the hopeful early days of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, preschool Head Start programs for disadvantaged children were set up nationwide. But then, after studying the later progress of the preschoolers, researchers for Ohio University and the Westinghouse Learning Corp., among others, concluded that Head Start made very little long-term difference in the children. Now comes evidence that the benefits of high-quality preschool programs can last at least through age 15. That finding was made by Michigan Researchers David P. Weikart, 49, and Lawrence J. Schweinhart, 33, who last week released an interim report on an 18-year study of the progress of 123 low-IQ children at Perry Elementary School in south Ypsilanti, Mich.

The study, sponsored in part by the Carnegie Corp. of New York, kept tabs on disadvantaged children who were three and four between 1962 and 1966. Half of the children were placed in a special preschool program. Youngsters planned what they were going to do each morning, did it, and later reviewed what they had done with a teacher.

More unusual, and important, teachers made 90-minute home visits at least every two weeks, assisting parents who were trying to help their children learn. The other half of the children in the study, kept as a control group, got no preschool training and entered kindergarten at the regular age. Thereafter, up to the present, the progress of both groups was regularly monitored.

Researchers were at first encouraged to find that the preschoolers' IQ scores rose an average of twelve points above those of the control group. But these gains disappeared by the time the children had completed second grade. As they progressed through school, their grades were no better than the control group's. But the preschoolers did continue to score better on reading, arithmetic and language achievement tests. At every grade level tested, the preschool children scored higher than the control group; at age 14, they did better by a margin of 8%, a full grade level.

The key to this success appears to be persistence and a better attitude toward learning. Most of them (68%) did homework, in contrast with only 40% of the control group. Only 19% of the preschoolers had to go into remedial classes, about half as many as in the control group, and fewer tended to be troublemakers. More preschoolers held after-school jobs.

The cost of the preschool program was $5,984 a child for two years. Weikart and Schweinhart estimate, though, that eventual dollar savings for society could be considerable, not only because of less remedial instruction in school, but because of decreased expenditures for law enforcement and social welfare.

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