What a Modern Perry Preschool Project Has Taught Us about Early Childhood Investment

The Perry Preschool Project was an experiment conducted from 1962 to 1967 to test how high-quality early childhood education could affect the IQ of at-risk African American children from low-income families in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Graduation, earnings, and crime all moved. Rates of return of 7–10% reshaped policy. But Perry was a product of its era: one treatment, one site, a small sample, and 40 years of waiting before the evidence crystallized. It could tell us that early investment works. It could not tell us why it works, which components matter, or how to deliver them at scale. To fill this gap, Professor List and his team began their own study in 2008, randomizing children in Chicago Heights, Illinois, into a series of interventions and applying a battery of assessments aimed at understanding the mechanisms through which early childhood education affects human capital formation over the life cycle. In these slides, we go through the results of this experiment and put into perspective the lessons learned from this modern Perry Preschool Project.