Program Profile: Perry Preschool Project

This program provides high-quality education for disadvantaged preschoolers. The program is rated Effective. Participants showed statistically significant reductions in lifetime convictions, compared with the control group, but no significant effects on their use of rehabilitation services or lifetime earnings. Participants’ children also showed a statistically significant greater likelihood of completing high school without suspension and being employed, compared with control group children.

An Effective rating implies that implementing the program is likely to result in the intended outcome(s).

This program's rating is based on evidence that includes at least one high-quality randomized controlled trial.

Program Goals

The goal of the Perry Preschool Project is to improve disadvantaged or underserved children’s capacity for future success in school and in life. The intervention breaks the link between childhood poverty and school failure by promoting young children’s intellectual, social, and physical development. By increasing academic success, the program also seeks to improve children’s future employment opportunities and earning potential and to decrease crime, teen pregnancy, and welfare dependency.

Target Population

The target population was African American children ages 3–4 who were living in poverty and assessed to be at high risk for school failure.

Program Components

The program consists of a 30-week school year. During that year, there is a daily 2½-hour classroom session and a weekly 1½-hour home visit for each child. The home visits are a way to involve the child’s caregiver in the educational process and enable them to provide the child with support. Teachers also help mothers deal with any problems that arise during the home visits. There is about a 30-minute preparation for teachers before the initial home visit to figure out how to extend and replicate the classroom experiences to the home setting. Teachers organize group meetings of mothers and fathers with children in the program.

The school curriculum, originally called the “Cognitive-Oriented Curriculum” and currently named the “HighScope Curriculum,” emphasizes an open approach to learning, where children are active participants. There is a consistent daily routine within the classroom, which involves a “plan–do–review” sequence of learning activities. Children’s cognitive and social skills are built and supported through individualized teaching and learning. Children are encouraged to engage in play activities that involve making choices and solving problems that contribute to their intellectual, social, and physical development. These components of the program are heavily influenced by research in child, educational, and developmental psychology, which notes that children’s innate curiosity and exploration should be incorporated into a formal learning environment (Piaget and Inhelder 1969). As such, lesson plans are constructed around developmental goals and incorporate the needs and interests of individual children.

Teachers structure lesson plans and activities around key experiences. These key experiences are:

• Creative representation
• Language and literacy
• Social relations and personal initiative
• Movement and music
• Classification (detecting similarities and differences)
• Seriation (creating series and patterns)
• Number, space, and time

Within each one of these key experiences are more specific objectives and activities. For example, creative representation includes the following: recognizing objects by sound, touch, taste, and smell; imitating actions and sounds; relating pictures, photographs, and models to real places and things; role play and pretending; making models out of clay or blocks; and drawing and painting

These activities are incorporated into a consistent structure of child-planning time, work time, cleanup time, recall time, snack time, small-group time, outdoor time, and circle time. Within this structure of events, if specific children need more instruction with an activity, they receive it.

Program Theory

The core belief of the Perry Preschool Project is that good preschool programs can help children in poverty by giving them a better start in life and helping them break the cycle of poverty and poor academic performance. The underlying assumption is that family poverty and its associated hardships leads to poor intellectual performance in school, which then instills a negative disposition toward learning and further failure in school (Thornberry et al. 1998; Parks 2000). Children of poor families are at a greater risk for special education or remedial classes; they frequently do not perform at grade level. This leads to a greater disengagement from school and, for many students, dropping out of school. Without a solid educational foundation, these children are more likely to become adults that are not qualified for high-salaried positions (Parks 2000). Thus, a downward spiral or cycle of poverty is established, where the same circumstances are passed down to the next generation.

The Perry Preschool Project intervenes early in a child’s life and hopes to affect their attitude and disposition toward school and learning. It is believed that changing a child’s mindset toward education is much more important and has longer-lasting effects than focusing on immediate improvements in school achievement. Early success and encouragement breeds higher motivation, better performance, and a higher regard for teachers, classmates, and education in general (Parks 2000).

Study 1

Heckman and Karapakula (2019a) reported findings from a 50-year follow-up evaluation on the sample of children from the HighScope Perry Preschool study, which was originally conducted from 1962 to 1965. Researchers collected data annually when the children were between the ages of 3 and 15. Follow-up data were collected at ages 19, 27, 40, and 55. This report includes the study findings collected at the most recent follow up, when the participants reached age 55.

Children were initially identified after a fall survey, conducted each year from 1962 to 1965. Project staff created pairs of children matched on initial Stanford–Binet IQ tests and randomly assigned each pair to one of two undesignated groups. They then exchanged several similarly ranked pair members so the two groups would be matched on socioeconomic status, intellectual performance, and percentage of boys and girls. Once the two groups were identified, they were randomly assigned, through the flip of a coin, to either the program condition or no-program condition.

The total number of study participants was 123. Across the sample, mothers had a mean age of 31 years, an average of 9.2 years of education, and typically worked at unskilled jobs. Fathers had a mean age of 35 years, an average of 8.3 years of education, and typically worked at unskilled jobs. Forty-eight percent of fathers lived at home. Perry families had an average of 4.5 children (Weikart, Bond, and McNeil 1978; Heckman et al. 2010). Of these children, 58 were assigned to the program group, and 65 were assigned to a control group that did not participate in a preschool program. All the children were African American, of low socioeconomic status, and an age of 3 or 4 years. Their IQ scores were low (between 70 and 85, the range for borderline mental impairment), but they had no organic deficiencies (i.e., biologically based mental impairment). They were at high risk of failing school. Approximately 58 percent of the sample was male. There were no differences between the groups with regard to father absence, parent education level (ninth grade, on average), family size, household density (i.e., 1.4 persons per room), or birth order. At the baseline, the only statistically significant difference between groups was in the greater number of employed mothers in the participant group, compared with the comparison group (Schweinhart 2013).

Attrition in the sample was low at each follow-up period. At the follow-up period for this study, 83 percent of the original sample (102 out of 123) completed a new survey. The authors examined outcome measures analyzed in past studies, such as self-reported employment outcomes and measures of criminal activity, obtained from administrative records. Additionally, new measures on cognition, personality, and biomarkers of health were collected through epidemiological exams. Worst-case approximate randomization tests were used to analyze the outcomes. In addition, the authors conducted subgroup analyses on gender.

Study 2

Heckman and Karapakula (2019b) conducted a study on the intergenerational treatment impact of the Perry Preschool Project by looking at the children of the original program participants. The authors collected longitudinal data on the first generation of Perry participants; the midlife surveys administered in 2014, 2015, and 2016 included questions about their children (second generation). Ages of the children across all the years in which the interviews took place ranged from 1 through 43, with a mean of 28 years. Because the survey spanned multiple years, information about children born in the same year was not necessarily collected in the same interview year. In contrast, at the previous follow-up period in 2000, about 63 percent and 80 percent of the children were younger than ages 18 and 21, respectively.

Outcome measures for the children of the original Perry Preschool participants included school suspensions, education, arrests, addiction, and employment. Suspension, arrests, and addiction were analyzed individually and collectively. For this CrimeSolutions review, the pooled effect size for the three outcomes was scored. The authors used an augmented inverse propensity weighting (AIPW) estimator to calculate the intergenerational treatment effects on the outcomes. They also conducted subgroup analyses on gender.

Information on training and conferences, as well as required materials, can be found at the HighScope Educational Research Foundation website: https://highscope.org/

Re-review

In 2011, the Perry Preschool Project received a final program rating of Effective based on a review of a study by Schweinhart and colleagues (2013) that looked at participants at age 27. In 2019, a re-review of two studies (Heckman and Karapakula 2019a and 2019b) that looked at participants through age 50 resulted in the same final rating of Effective. Studies looking at participants’ early years in Perry Preschool Project were not included in the Evidence Base because the reported statistical analyses were not sufficiently detailed and the results for boys and girls were examined and presented separately. As consistent with the CrimeSolutions review process, subgroups are not scored, only the full study sample is scored.

Subgroup Analysis

Heckman and Karapakula (2019a) conducted subgroup analyses on gender in relation to crime outcomes. Findings indicated that the treatment effect on cumulative violent felony convictions did not achieve statistical significance among male Perry Preschool participants until age 50, however treatment effect on cumulative violent misdemeanor convictions was statistically significant from age 30 until age 50. Additionally, findings showed statistically significant reductions in arrests and convictions for crimes classified as property, violent, and drug-related misdemeanors for male Perry Preschool participants, compared with males in the control group between ages 20 and 50. Female Perry Preschool participants also showed statistically significant reductions in all measures of crime through age 40. Female Perry participants had statistically significantly fewer violent misdemeanor arrests and convictions, as well as fewer felony arrests of any kind, compared with control group women.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

Following are CrimeSolutions-rated programs that are related to this practice:

Psychosocial Interventions for Antisocial Behavior of Juveniles

This practice involves the use of psychosocial interventions to reduce antisocial behavior in juveniles. Psychosocial interventions consist of both preventive and therapeutic interventions but share the common goal of improving psychosocial functioning. The practice is rated Effective for the reduction of antisocial behavior.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

Juvenile Problem & At-Risk Behaviors - Antisocial behaviors

Early Developmental Prevention Programs for At-Risk Youths

This practice consists of early developmental programs that focus on enhancing child, parent–child, or family well-being to prevent social deviance and criminal justice involvement among at-risk children under age 5. The practice is rated Effective for reducing deviance and criminal justice involvement in youths who participated in early developmental prevention programs, compared with youths in the control group who did not participate.

Evidence Ratings for Outcomes

	Crime & Delinquency - Multiple crime/offense types
	Crime & Delinquency - Criminal justice involvement

Why might a practice's outcome ratings differ from the ratings of specific programs encompassed by that practice?