Sesame Street as beneficial as preschool
STUDY SHOWS DIVIDE
NEW YORK • Most Americans born since the mid-1960s have a favourite Sesame Street skit. Jennifer Kotler Clarke watched hers on a black-andwhite television set in her family’s Bronx apartment. There were two aliens: One of them had long arms that didn’t move, while the other had short, moving arms. The aliens wished to eat apples from a tree, and they succeeded, after a couple of minutes, by working together. “Let’s call this co-operation,” one of them says. “No,” the other replies, “let’s call it Shirley.”
Clarke grew up to be the show’s vice-president for research and evaluation, and she has long believed that the program’s laughs and lessons stick with children. Now, landmark academic research appears to back her up.
The most authoritative study ever done on the impact of Sesame Street, released on Monday, finds the famous show on public TV has delivered lasting educational benefits to millions of children — benefits as powerful as the ones children get from going to preschool.
The paper from the University of Maryland’s Melissa Kearney and Wellesley College’s Phillip Levine finds the show has left children more likely to stay at the appropriate grade level for their age, an effect that is particularly pronounced among boys, African-Americans and children who grow up in disadvantaged areas.
After Sesame Street was introduced, children living in places where its broadcast could be more readily received saw a 14 per cent drop in their likelihood of being behind in school.
The researchers also say those effects come from Sesame Street’s focus on presenting viewers with an aca- demic curriculum, heavy on reading and math, that would appear to have helped prepare children for school.
The new findings offer comforting news for parents who plopped their children in front of public TV every day or memorized entire Elmo DVDs unwittingly.
Sesame Street made its debut in 1969 with a diverse cast of humans and brightly coloured fuzzy Muppets, including Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, and, of course, Big Bird. It was the first explicitly educational children’s program in the U.S., and it was an immediate hit: In the early 1970s, one-third of all American toddlers watched it.
That’s even more striking considering another third of the nation’s toddlers couldn’t have watched the show if they wanted to — they didn’t have the right kind of antenna to tune in to their local public television station.
This was well before the popularization of cable. TV broadcasts arrived over the air, on two different kinds of signals. The higher-quality signal was known as VHF. The lower-quality signal was called UHF, and many households at that time were unable to tune it in. By a quirk of federal licensing, the public broadcasting channels in many major cities, including New York and Boston, aired on VHF channels, while others, including Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., aired on UHF.
Levine read about that divide in early 2014. He realized it was the sort of rare natural experiment that economists live for — two groups of people, divvied up by fate and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, who could be compared over time to see whether there was a difference in their educational outcomes.
“It’s econo-metrically phenomenal,” he said, “because it’s essentially random, who had UHF and who had VHF.”