The Perry school had no playground.
It was the only school without one in Ypsilanti Michigan, a town just
outside of Detroit. It was also where all of the black students went
to school. In 1958, the new special education director David
Weikart noticed the school,
but more importantly, he noticed the students. He saw what we now call
"an achievement gap" in Ypsilanti.
The special education population was almost all black, while the white
students generally seemed to do fine in school.
"Does it have to be this way?"
he thought. "What could we supply that was missing for these kids
that weren't doing well?"
He knew that once a student entered
special education, they would not leave. They were generally considered
a lost cause by the education system because that was just the way it
was – black children just had lower IQ scores than white students. Back
then, it was the heyday of the IQ test. IQ was widely thought as immovable,
static, and unchangeable. Every person had a certain level of intelligence
that would predict their success and African American children just
had lower IQs.
Dr. Weikart had an idea though: What if he could increase the IQ of
underprivileged African American students before they got to school?
We sometimes forget the role of preschool in our American history and
our struggle to become a more just society, especially now when so many
of the arguments for and against voluntary universal pre-k revolve around
financial principles. Preschool was invented to address the achievement
gap between poor and middle class children. Early Lessons, a documentary on American Radio Works by
Emily Hanford, describes the history of the Perry Preschool study, and
its role in today's pre-k educational landscape.
Preschool is possibly the most researched idea in education, a trend
that began with a school that was an experiment from the beginning.
The Perry Preschool founders campaigned door-to-door in area neighborhoods
to recruit African American children for the school. Then, they flipped
a coin. Random selection was used to choose who would be selected into
the school and who would be in the control group.
If you teach at-risk children and ever wonder if you are really making
a difference, or want to know how to talk about why kids need preschool,
listen to this documentary. The Perry Preschool experiment, the study
that generated the High/Scope active learning curriculum, reminds us that
in order for preschool to be as effective as the original Perry Preschool,
it must be of high quality.
As pre-k educators, we walk in the shoes of those who have gone before
us. Pre-k is not just about doing better on a test; it is about doing
better in life. The Perry Preschool experiment has proven that over
50 years in a fascinating portrayal of the history of pre-k as an intervention
to address inequity.
Transcript:
http://americanradioworks.
Audio:
http://www.publicradio.org/
