Preschool benefits span generations: Study

It’s hard to think of a more popular program than quality pre-K, but new research released this week only underscore the frustration parents are feeling as City Council still has a bill under consideration that could sabotage the funding mechanism that is powering the ambitious expansion of pre-K across the city, Philadelphia’s much-coveted Soda Tax.

We’ve all seen the research on quality pre-K. We’ve known for years how life-changing pre-K can be, not just in preparing young minds for success in school but also success in life. It’s a proven poverty fighter, shown to break the damning cycle of generational poverty, evening the playing field so that all children have the opportunity to flourish.

But this week, new evidence revealed how one quality preschool program that ran from 1962 to 1967 so benefited the students who attended it that the benefits actually spanned generations, affecting the children of those original students.

The preschool in question was the famous Michigan program, the Perry School, an intensive, high quality preschool program that served three- and four-year-old African American children living in poverty and at a high risk of failure in school.

Previous and well-circulated reports have illustrated how Perry students had higher educational attainment than their peers, and higher incomes and lower criminal activity as adults. But this week, some 50 years later, a new report shows that the children of those students also enjoyed higher academic success, less criminal involvement, and greater success later in life.

The children of Perry alumni attended non-Perry preschools at around the same rates of their peers.

Better social skills and executive function are partly to credit, say the University of Chicago authors of the new study. Perry students had higher rates of stable marriage, which meant their kids were three times more likely to have been raised by two married parents than their peers. Intriguingly, boys of fathers who were Perry students were 15 times more likely to have been raised by married parents than their peers.

As we head to the polls on Tuesday for the Philadelphia primary, we know there’s much at stake, as there often is whenever we vote. But we hope this latest research encourages you to reach out to your own network of friends and coworkers and let them know what exactly is on the line for the city’s children when candidates play politics with pre-K.