A new National Bureau of Economic Research paper examines the impact of access to Sesame Street on various short- and long-term academic and labor market outcomes. Analysts focus on cohorts of children born from 1959 to 1968. These subjects would have entered first grade between 1965 and 1974, around the time of Sesame Street’s birth in 1969.
The researchers examine the progress of students who would have been at least six years old and already in elementary school at the time of the first airing, as well as those five years of age and below (who would have been exposed to the program during their preschool years). They make use of the natural variation in exposure to the program by calculating, by county, the share of television-owning households that were able to receive a signal over which Sesame Street was broadcast. Two-thirds of the population is estimated to have lived in areas where Sesame Street could be received on their televisions.
Using U.S. Census data as their primary measure, the analysts find that kids with access to the program were more likely to proceed through school in the grade appropriate for their age; in other words, they were not held back. Those in good reception areas were 1.5-2.0 percentage points more likely to be in the appropriate grade level, and in areas with a greater concentration of socioeconomically disadvantaged families, that figure rose to 3 percentage points. More specifically, white and black children who were five years of age or younger when the show was introduced and who lived in strong reception areas were 8–14 percent less likely, respectively, to be below the grade appropriate for their age. However—not surprisingly for such a mild “intervention”—they find no significant changes in high school graduation rates, dropout rates, or college attendance rates, nor on labor market outcomes like hourly wages, employment status, and poverty status.
Analysts comment that Sesame Street, because it was an electronic transmission of educational material, meets the definition of a Massive Open Online Course (or MOOC) and should be considered our very first MOOC—a moderately successful one, in fact. Indeed.
SOURCE: Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip B. Levine, "Early Childhood Education by MOOC: Lessons from Sesame Street," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper 21229 (June 2015).
