Our Proud Heritage
Two Teachers Look Back
The Ypsilanti Perry Preschool, Part I
Louise Derman-Sparks and Evelyn Moore
We are honored to present this column about a milestone in 20th century
American early care and education—the Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Michigan,
1962 to 1967. (A second column on the preschool will follow in the November
2016 issue of Young Children.) Readers will celebrate the seismic importance
of the program not only to the field of early care and education but also to the
public and private education policies throughout the nation.
The Perry Preschool and study took place less than a decade after the 1954
US Supreme Court decision Brown et al. v. Board of Education of Topeka et
al. It is important for today’s early educators to know more about the social
and political climate of our field during a time of organizing and struggles
for greater civil rights. Louise Derman-Sparks and Evelyn Moore write about
“an important debate [that] raged among educational theorists about the
causes of and solutions to the educational disadvantages and lower academic
achievement facing African American children.” They have presented a gift to
NAEYC members by sharing their memories of their participation in a landmark
experience in the lives of a small group of children, their families, and the
teachers and staff who shared what was known about quality early education in
the 1960s.
—Edna Runnels Ranck and Charlotte Anderson, Editors, Our Proud Heritage
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The Ypsilanti Perry Preschool (1962–1967), in
Michigan, was one of the early preschool programs
in the United States intentionally designed to
increase school success for children from families
with very low incomes. The children attending the
preschool then became the subjects of a famous
longitudinal study about the impact of early
childhood education on aspects of children’s later
lives (Schweinhart et al. 2005). This research took
place both during the period of the Perry Preschool
and for many years afterward. The Perry Preschool
operated under the auspices of the Ypsilanti Public
Schools Special Education Department, while the
HighScope Educational Foundation conducted
the longitudinal study about its children. David
Weikart initiated and was director of the Perry
Preschool, and then led the HighScope Educational
Foundation and its longitudinal study of the Perry
Preschool outcomes until 2013. The findings of that
study became a major resource for convincing the
federal government—and governments around the
world—to invest in early childhood education for
children living in great poverty.
However, the voices of the Perry Preschool
teachers remained unheard. Then, in July 2013,
Dr. James Heckman, director of the Center for the
Economics of Human Development, University
of Chicago, invited the two of us to a meeting
about the central factors underlying successful
early childhood programs for children from lowincome families (Heckman et al. 2013). After the
meeting, Dr. Heckman suggested we write about
our years as Perry Preschool teachers (1962–1965).
In November 2013, we spent three amazing
days talking about and recording our long-ago
teaching experiences, which Dr. Heckman’s
center transcribed. We found our recollections
to be strikingly consistent and they became the
first source of data for telling our story, as well as
available for Dr. Heckman’s work.
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We also drew on two additional sources: a 1964
Progress Report about the Perry Preschool
(Weikart, Kamii, & Radin 1964) and a yellowing
set of Perry Preschool teachers written lesson
plans and reports about small group activities
(unpublished manuscripts, 1962–1965). To learn
about the last two years of the Perry Preschool,
when we were no longer there, see “Applying
Some Piagetian Concepts in the Classroom for the
Disadvantaged,” by Hanne Sonquist and Constance
Kamii (1967).
Our Proud Heritage
O
nce upon a time—over 50 years ago, in fact—we were teachers in the Ypsilanti Perry Preschool.
Then in our 20s, it was Louise’s first job after graduate school and Evelyn’s second. Now, after
long careers in early childhood care and education, it seems time to tell our story. This column
is the first of two. It describes the Perry Preschool’s design, demographics, social-political-ideological
context, and educational principles and curriculum. The second column will explore the implications
of the Perry Preschool for early childhood education today. Our intent is to expand and deepen the
discussion about a historically important part of the early childhood education movement.
Design and demographics
Perry Preschool
The children who attended the Perry Preschool
were all African American and lived in the
segregated Ypsilanti, Michigan, African American
community. One public elementary school—Perry
School—served all the children in the community
until they attended integrated middle and high
schools. Perry School was the site of the Perry
Preschool in years two through five (in year one it
operated in the neighborhood community center).
Criteria for recruitment to the Perry Preschool
were officially described as “3- and 4-year-old
children living within the boundary of the Perry
School district, coming from culturally deprived
families, and testing in the range of educable
mentally retarded” (Weikart, Kamii, & Radin
1964, 4). In addition, families had to be living in
poverty. The “educable mentally retarded” criterion
was required by the Michigan and Ypsilanti
Departments of Special Education, the first
funders of the Perry Preschool. IQ (intelligence
quotient) testing was the method for identifying
the so-called educable mentally retarded children.
Although many educators now reject the legitimacy
of IQ tests and scores, during the 1960s they were a
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central element in some theories about school failure
among African American children from low-income
families. At the time, African American children were
the focus of research and writing about school failure.
Criteria for hiring teachers for the Perry Preschool
included their educational background and
experience as well as their interest in the Perry
Preschool mission. All had bachelor’s degrees in early
childhood, primary, or special education; a few had
master’s degrees. Teachers were African American
and White American, and women. The authors of this
column were the new kids.
HighScope Longitudinal Study
The design of the Perry Preschool longitudinal study
compared the preschool children with control group
children, using the same measurements over the
same time. The control group children met the same
criteria as the preschool children, such as IQ scores,
family demographics, and neighborhood. The control
group children did not attend any form of preschool.
For almost three decades, the study followed the lives
of 123 children from African American families who
lived in the neighborhood of Perry Elementary School
in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s. Ultimately, the
statistically significant positive outcomes for the
preschool children had a major role in shaping the
early arguments for preschool programs.
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The societal context
Educational thinking, practice, and priorities always
reflect prevailing societal, political, economic,
and ideological dynamics. The idea for the Perry
Preschool arose during the inspiring and demanding
years of the 1950s civil rights movement, with many
people working for social change. John F. Kennedy’s
and Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidencies in the 1960s
also played a role, responding to the widespread
efforts of the movement. However, institutionalized
racial segregation was still the reality throughout the
United States.
Although many White Americans experienced
poverty, the institutionalized lack of economic,
educational, and health opportunities for
African Americans and other people of color
disproportionately narrowed their range of options
and quality of life. While the 1954 Supreme Court
decision in Brown et al. v. Board of Education of
Topeka et al., 347 US 483, based on substantive
evidence of unequal schooling for African American
children, made intentional school segregation illegal,
actual changes in school systems took many years of
national and local civil rights movement work.
Ideologically, an important debate raged among
educational theorists about the causes of and
solutions to the educational disadvantages and lower
academic achievement of African American children.
Advocates of the cultural deprivation approach
were on one side of this debate; advocates of an
empowerment approach were on the other. Cultural
deprivation advocates attributed the children’s lower
rate of school success and lower IQ scores to their
families’ inferior culture, language, and parenting
practices. They proposed that teachers and social
workers teach families a better way to parent, thereby
“fixing” children and parents through preschool and
parent education.
Opponents of the cultural deprivation position
attributed children’s failure in the school system to
its racism and classism and to the lack of appropriate,
innovative teaching methods and curriculum.
Empowerment advocates rejected the validity of IQ
testing and argued for change in the schools and for
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September 2016
eliminating the worst forms of poverty. They wanted
early childhood programs to foster children’s sense of
efficacy and empowerment, to provide a foundation
for academic skills needed in later schooling, and
to offer families skills for navigating the pathways
of the school system to help them attain a highquality education for their children. Educational
empowerment advocates also worked with others
to increase families’ access to fair employment
and housing.
Most Perry Preschool teachers—including the two
of us—held the empowerment perspective, while
administrators mostly took the cultural deprivation
perspective. The teachers’ empowerment beliefs
shaped actual practice with the children and families,
although publications about the program reflected
the administrators’ cultural deprivation thinking.
Nevertheless, many of the Perry Preschool teachers and
administrators shared the dreams and values of the
civil rights movement and thought of their teaching as
a contribution to the movement. Indeed, this column’s
authors were actively engaged in the civil rights effort.
Consequently, we brought great passion to our work
with children and families. While hard to measure, it
is worth considering what role teachers’ commitment
played in the positive long-term life outcomes for the
Perry Preschool children.
Educational principles and
curriculum
The Perry Preschool did not start or operate from
an already developed curriculum; rather, its
pedagogy evolved over the program’s five years,
drawing on several educational approaches. Piaget’s
epistemological theory became predominant in the
preschool’s last two years. The teachers were the
primary engine of the curriculum’s evolution. Working
together as a team, we reviewed weekly the children’s
responses to the week’s learning opportunities and
materials and the children’s individual cognitive
and social-emotional development needs. We then
used that information to plan for the following week.
The teachers functioned as reflective, intentional
professionals, which the early childhood education field
now considers crucial to high-quality programs.
The developmental principle that emotional well-being
and emerging cognitive abilities “are the bricks and
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A misperception has arisen over the years—namely, that
the Perry Preschool used the curriculum developed by the
HighScope Educational Foundation (Hohmann, Banet, &
Weikart 1979). That curriculum, however, did not appear until
several years after the Perry Preschool closed its doors in
1967. The Perry Preschool’s curriculum came first, and, while
it influenced the later HighScope curriculum, the two are
not synonymous.
mortar of the foundation of human development”
(Shonkoff 2007, 2) informed the teachers’ thinking
and daily practice. Although the Perry Preschool
director focused on the children’s cognitive growth and
downplayed the role of social-emotional dynamics,
the teachers did not separate these two fundamental
aspects of human development. We strived to
foster both.
Teachers built caring, supportive, and stimulating
relationships with each child and family, in the context
of their community. We worked hard to communicate
our belief in the children in all our interactions with
them. We fostered children’s learning through their
active engagement with the world. This included lots
of time for play and for generating and exploring
their own ideas, as well as those of their peers and
teachers. Children expanded and deepened their ability
to observe what was happening, and they developed
language to describe what they saw, thought, and
felt. Teachers created a rich learning environment
made possible by a generous budget—more akin to the
budgets that programs serving upper middle-class
children typically had. We were able to purchase highquality, traditional early childhood education materials
in addition to using natural materials gathered by
the teachers. Knowing that the children’s world was
mostly limited to their segregated community, we
also took frequent field trips to explore places beyond
their homes.
In year one (1962–1963), the balance between childdirected and teacher-directed teaching was an
arena of productive debate among the teachers and
administrators. The two experienced early childhood
teachers argued for the former, reflecting early
childhood education thinking of the time, which
disapproved of directive teaching. The Perry Preschool
director and the two teachers with special education
backgrounds argued for the latter. The resolution was
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to provide a combination of both—the approach now
considered most effective by the early childhood
education profession.
Perry Preschool teachers believed in the fundamental
importance of building respectful, two-way,
collaborative learning relationships with the families.
We strived to communicate our belief in each child’s
intelligence and capacity to learn, and we encouraged
mutual exchange of information and ideas with
families. We found that families shared the teachers’
desire to support the children’s educational progress,
and many expressed hope that their children would
go to college. Families also indicated their awareness
of the struggle for civil rights going on in the larger
society, hanging photographs of the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy in
their homes.
However, achieving authentic relationships with
families took effort and time. In many cases, teachers
had to overcome families’ distrust of people from
social agencies and the school—often because of
families’ previous negative experiences. We had to
prove to the community that we were not yet another
group of professionals coming into their homes to tell
them how they should live their lives. In fact, in the
first year, some families refused to open their doors
when teachers were trying to recruit children for
the preschool.
Initially, the longtime principal of the Perry
School provided significant help in gaining family
willingness to enroll their children in the preschool.
Community and families support grew as the
preschool earned a reputation as a good place for
their children. Time was also a positive factor in
building trust with families, since teachers worked
with them for at least one year and with most for two
years. However, each new teacher still had to prove
herself a friend to the community.
The preschool program
Children attended a morning session five days a
week, and families received a weekly afternoon
home visit for two years. Four teachers worked as a
team with twenty-four 3- and 4-year-old children—a
very desirable ratio. The diversity of the teachers’
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backgrounds, training, and experience deepened the
sharing of invaluable insights and information.
Morning preschool
The three-hour, center-based morning program was
located in the community center during year one,
and then in Perry School, in a large room previously
used as the gym. Traditional early childhood learning
centers comprised smaller spaces within the gym. The
largest block of time in the daily schedule consisted
of child-choice active learning activities in learning
centers (e.g., blocks, art, small-motor manipulative,
dramatic play, and the book corner). Teachers set up
and periodically changed the available materials,
based on their assessment of the children’s needs and
interests within the framework of the preschool’s overall
mission. We also provided individualized scaffolding
based on carefully observing what children were doing
and then asking open-ended questions to encourage
further experimentation and conversation about their
chosen activity.
Small-group teacher-planned and directed activities,
snack time with informal conversations, and outdoor
play made up the rest of the daily schedule. Teachers
often chose specific themes as a framework for a
series of activities—a key element of the unit method
popular in preschools at the time. The unit method
is similar to what we now call the project method.
Content of the small groups mostly focused on
reading and math readiness, language development,
and science. Organizing themes reflected both the
teachers’ estimation of children’s cognitive needs
and the children’s interests (e.g., transportation,
leaves and seeds, how materials transform). Small
group time always included hands-on activities, and
frequent field trips provided children with experience
and data. Snack time conversations built on issues
children brought up and observations teachers made
during the child-choice activities. Because the Perry
School was the only school in Ypsilanti without a
playground, teachers set up activities such as tag,
races, and ball games.
Afternoon home visits
Each teacher carried out weekly afternoon home
visits, lasting about an hour and a half, with
the same families throughout the school year.
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Teachers brought materials adapted to the needs
of each child’s learning, such as books and small
manipulatives to use with the child. The budget for
home visit materials was generous. Parents (usually
mothers) joined the teacher and child and almost all
participated with interest. In addition, teachers and
participating family members engaged in weekly
conversations about their children’s development
and learning, as well as any other topic raised by the
parents (e.g., health issues or a problem with a social
work agency).
While the official objective of home visits reflected
a cultural deprivation viewpoint, many of the
teachers, including us, saw our roles differently. We
did not try to change childrearing, but rather looked
for and built on the families’ strengths, and offered
ways to support the skills their children needed for
cognitive development and school success. Teachers
relied heavily on modeling new ways to interact with
children to do this. Some teachers, including the
two of us, also shared strategies for being advocates
for the children in the school system. However, we
tended to keep silent about this part of our home
visits with the preschool administrators, because it
was not what we were supposed to do.
In sum, the Perry Preschool’s pedagogy combined
aspects of prevailing early childhood educational
thinking in the 1960s and new curricula ideas.
Reflecting on what we achieved, we see that much of
what we did resonates today as best practice—a topic
we turn to in Part 2 of our column, which will appear
in the November 2016 issue of Young Children.
References
Heckman, J. 2013. “Understanding and Comparing the
Mechanism Producing the Impacts of Major Early
Childhood Programs With Long-Term Follow-Up.” Milgrom
Proposal. Unpublished manuscript. Chicago: Center for the
Economics of Human Development.
Hohmann, M., B. Banet, & D.P. Weikart. 1979. Young Children
in Action: A Manual for Preschool Educators. Ypsilanti,
MI: HighScope.
Schweinhart, L.J., J. Montie, Z. Xiang, W.S. Barnett, C.R.
Belfield, & M. Nores. 2005. Lifetime Effects: The HighScope
Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40. Ypsilanti, MI:
HighScope.
Shonkoff, J. 2007. “Emotional and Cognitive Development
Linked.” NIEER’s Preschool Matters. http://nieer.org/psm/
index.php?article=233.
Sonquist, H.D., & C.K. Kamii. 1967. “Applying Some Piagetian
Concepts in the Classroom for the Disadvantaged.” Young
Children 22 (4): 231–46.
Weikart, D.P., C.K. Kamii, & N.L. Radin. 1964. Perry Preschool
Project Progress Report. Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilanti Public
Schools.
About the authors
Louise Derman-Sparks, MA, is a longtime early
childhood anti-bias educator of children and adults. A
former NAEYC Governing Board member, senior author
of Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves
(published by NAEYC), and Leading Anti-Bias Early
Childhood Programs: A Guide for Change (copublished
by Teachers College Press and NAEYC), she speaks,
conducts workshops, and consults throughout the United
States and internationally. [email protected]
Evelyn K. Moore was a special education teacher
when she learned of the innovative Perry Preschool
during the 1960s. After teaching at Perry Preschool,
Moore cofounded the National Black Child Development
Institute in 1970. The author of Paths to African American
Leadership Positions in Early Childhood Education, Moore
represented her field on numerous fronts, including the
National Education Goals Panel and the Act for Better
Child Care Services. [email protected]
About the editors
Edna Runnels Ranck, EdD, is moderator of the History
Seminars at NAEYC’s Annual Conferences and is on
the board of the District of Columbia Early Learning
Collaborative. She has authored book chapters on
historical aspects of early childhood care and education,
and has served as a past president of OMEP-USA.
Charlotte J. Anderson, PhD, is children’s curriculum
specialist for Life Skills for Living, in San Antonio, Texas.
Charlotte is a previous child care provider and director
and has led numerous workshops for early childhood
teachers and administrators.
Photographs: © iStock
Copyright © 2016 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. See Permissions and Reprints online at www.naeyc.org/yc/permissions.
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