Oscar the Grouch would be unhappy. He hates good news — and here’s some about “Sesame Street.”
The classic children’s show really does make preschoolers more academically-ready for school, setting the stage for success in elementary school, a new study shows. The new working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was authored by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine, economics professors at the University of Maryland and Wellesley College, respectively.
Kearney and Levine look back at some of the earliest people who would have watched “Sesame Street” as children when it first aired and examine how they progressed through school, college and the job market.
They found “Sesame Street” helped disadvantaged students keep up with the academic pace of their grade level. Without “Sesame Street,” these students may have fallen behind their peers.
That means learning to count with Count von Count and singing along to “G, Grover” actually helps keep disadvantaged preschoolers on level footing with other students as they start their education.
“Our analysis finds positive impacts on the educational performance of children who experienced their preschool years when ‘Sesame Street’ was on television in areas with greater broadcast coverage,” Kearney and Levine wrote. “Specifically, such children achieved relative increases in grade-for-age status.”
They found “Sesame Street” to be so successful that they compared it with other well-known early childhood education programs, such as Head Start, in getting boys, black children and those living in low-income counties up to speed in their first years of school.
“Sesame Street” first aired in 1969 and has since broadcast over 4,000 episodes. The evidence that “Sesame Street” had a longer-term impact, on college and job market outcomes, was inconclusive, given that so many other factors affect one’s life in the 15-20 years between preschool and college graduation.
