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SPEAKER: I've got freedom of speech.

SPEAKER: Well, the next one still looks like a war zone here. It looks like ground zero.

SPEAKER: Will the next round hit my husband, hit my soldier?

SPEAKER: Do you have a crush on me?

SPEAKER: No.

SPEAKER: Figures.

SPEAKER: I just believe I'll die for my cause.

SPEAKER: Hearing is seeing.

SPEAKER: From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks documentary.

SPEAKER: I would do whatever we needed to do to prove that these many African-American children were not retarded.

STEPHEN SMITH: 50 years ago, a group of people set out to prove that poor Black children could succeed in school.

SPEAKER: We really want your kids to make it.

SPEAKER: What could we supply that was missing for these kids that weren't doing well?

STEPHEN SMITH: Their solution was preschool. And it worked.

SPEAKER: It's about giving them a hand up early, rather than a hand out later.

STEPHEN SMITH: There's been a preschool revolution in America. But today's preschools may not live up to the promises of the past. I'm Stephen Smith. Over the coming hour, early lessons from American RadioWorks. First, this news.

CRAIG WINDHAM: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Craig Windham. President Obama is lifting the rule that has barred people who are HIV positive from entering the United States. The travel ban has been in place for 20 years. The process of removing it was begun during the Bush administration.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: If we want to be the global leader in combating HIV/AIDS, we need to act like it. And that's why on Monday, my administration will publish a final rule that eliminates the travel ban, effective just after the new year.

CRAIG WINDHAM: Mr. Obama speaking at the White House signing ceremony for extension of the Ryan White HIV/AIDS law. That law created a program providing medical care, medicine, and support services for hundreds of thousands of mainly low-income Americans who are HIV positive or living with AIDS. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton says the US wants to see how talks with Iran about that country's nuclear program play out before considering any new sanctions. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports.

MICHELE KELEMEN: This week, Iran suggests changes to a deal that was on the table for it to send abroad most of its low-enriched uranium to be turned into fuel for medical purposes. Secretary Clinton, in an interview with CNN, said the US and its partners are trying to determine whether the Iranian suggestion was their end response, or the beginning of a negotiation. She said that she wants to let this play out before considering new sanctions. Clinton added that the five permanent Security Council members, plus Germany are united in this and trying to show resolve while they seek some clarity in the Iranian position. Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.

CRAIG WINDHAM: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has issued a record $87 million fine against oil giant BP for failing to correct safety hazards after an explosion at a refinery that killed 15 people in 2005. Ed Mayberry of Houston Public Radio has the story.

ED MAYBERRY: It's the largest fine in OSHA's history, $87 million in penalties against BP for failing to correct safety hazards identified after the explosion at its Texas City refinery. That's after a six-month inspection revealed hundreds of violations of a 2005 agreement to repair hazards at the refinery. BP was issued 271 notifications for failing to make corrections over the four-year period since the explosion.

OSHA also says the company committed hundreds of new violations by failing to follow industry controls on pressure relief safety systems and other precautions. A BP spokesperson says the company believed it was in full compliance with the settlement agreement and will work with government officials to resolve the issue. BP has already pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the explosion. For NPR News, I'm Ed Mayberry in Houston.

CRAIG WINDHAM: Rescue crews are searching an area of the Pacific off the Southern California Coast near San Diego, where a Coast Guard transport plane and a Marine helicopter collided in mid-air last night. There were nine crew members aboard the two aircraft. So far, no sign of any survivors. Wall Street, the Dow is down 226 points. This is NPR News from Washington.

SPEAKER: Support for news comes from LendingTree with the innovative loan coach, which provides personalized financial advice for every step of the lending process, @lendingtree.com.

STEPHEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio news, I'm Stephen John. Health officials in Fargo-Moorhead say they're surprised more people didn't turn up for their first vaccination clinic for the H1N1 flu. A Fargo Cass Public Health spokeswoman says only half of the stock of H1N1 flu mist was used up yesterday during a vaccination clinic at Minnesota State University, Moorhead. In most states this fall, demand for the vaccine has far outweighed supply. At the Moorhead Clinic, officials administered 750 of the 1,500 available doses.

Governor Pawlenty has ordered flags to be flown at half staff today at the Minnesota State Capitol in honor of Ramsey County reserve deputy, Michael Wilkin. Wilkin died after being struck by a car last weekend in Maplewood. His funeral is today in Mahtomedi. The family of an Oak Park Heights man who died while on spring break in Mexico has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against his traveling companion. 20-year-old Josh Gundersen died in March. His mother says the main reason for the lawsuit is to find out what happened to him.

Cloudy skies for the region today. A chance of rain in the South. Rain maybe mixing with snow in the West and North, highs from the upper thirties Northwest to the upper fifties in the Southeast. This is Minnesota Public Radio news.

GARY EICHTEN: And this is midday on Minnesota Public Radio news. Good afternoon. I'm Gary Eichten. It's been a quiet revolution in America's schools in recent decades. We've added a whole extra grade to a child's education. It's called preschool. And economists say preschool is one of the smartest ways to spend public money, especially in tight economic times. We have a new documentary from American RadioWorks that explores the history of preschool. It's called Early Lessons.

MISS FAYE: Good morning, Kayla. Good morning [? Demarius. ?]

SPEAKER: Ooh, she looks pretty.

STEPHEN SMITH: It's just after 8:00 in the morning. We're in the preschool classroom at River Breeze elementary school in Palatka, Florida, which is in the sort of Northeastern part of the state. Children are being dropped off by their parents. Very rainy morning this morning. So there are a lot of wet raincoats and backpacks. But they put them in their cubbies, get right down to a game with their teacher, Miss Faye.

MISS FAYE: I see what letters Lauren--

SPEAKER: F-- F.

MISS FAYE: This is a F for--

SPEAKER: Fish.

MISS FAYE: Fish All right, Jaylen, let's everybody--

STEPHEN SMITH: This classroom represents an enormous change in American education that's been going on recently. A whole new grade is being added to the American child's educational career, the year prekindergarten, preschool. Time was when most four and five-year-olds were at home, or maybe they went to a daycare. Now, most children are in school. In fact, here in Florida, voters actually changed the state constitution to say that every four-year-old has the right to a preschool education.

MISS FAYE: --letter--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MISS FAYE: Sound--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

MISS FAYE: Letter--

SPEAKER: A.

MISS FAYE: Sound--

SPEAKER: "Ah".

MISS FAYE: And why is this red?

ALL: Because it's a vowel.

MISS FAYE: Because it's so vowel. Let's name our vowels.

ALL: A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y.

STEPHEN SMITH: From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks documentary, Early Lessons. I'm Stephen Smith. So how did this happen? How did preschool become so big in America? The answer is research. Preschool is perhaps the most researched idea in all of education. But it kind of came about by accident. To find out how preschool in this country started, you got to go back about 50 years and learn about a man who had absolutely no experience and, frankly, no interest in early childhood education, but needed to solve a problem. Here's producer Emily Hanford with the rest of the story.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EMILY HANFORD: This story begins in 1958 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a small city outside of Detroit. Back then, all of the African-American children in Ypsilanti went to one segregated elementary school, the Perry School. A teacher from that time says it was the only school in the city that had no playground, just a dusty field filled with thistles and thorns. And here's what happened in 1958.

A young graduate student came along and noticed how badly a lot of students at this school were doing. His name was David Weikart. And he was new on the job as director of special education for the Ypsilanti public schools. No one was talking about achievement gaps back then. But it was so obvious to Weikart. Most white students in the school system were doing fine. But a lot of African-American students were repeating grades, dropping out, and being assigned to special education. So it was his job to help them. And he thought to himself--

DAVID WEIKART: Does it have to be this way? What could we supply that was missing for these kids that weren't doing well?

EMILY HANFORD: Weikart thought there was something wrong with the schools, if one group of students was doing badly, while another group was doing fine. But most people didn't see it this way. They thought there was something wrong with the children.

EVELYN MOORE: Educable mentally retarded.

EMILY HANFORD: That's the label that a lot of poor Black children got, says Evelyn Moore. She was a special education teacher. She says students ended up in her class, because they scored low on IQ tests.

EVELYN MOORE: You know, at that time, once you had an IQ test, you had the IQ.

EMILY HANFORD: She says people believed deeply in the idea of IQ. Everyone was born with a certain amount of intelligence, a quotient. It was genetic, fixed for life. Education wasn't going to change it. But Moore says some of her students weren't really retarded.

EVELYN MOORE: They know all the baseball players. They know all the words to these songs. So they can learn to read.

EMILY HANFORD: Moore thinks some children were being shoved off to Special Ed because they had behavior problems. And too many were Black kids from poor families. That bothered Special Education Director, David Weikart, because once students were put in Special Ed, no one really expected them to learn much. They were pretty much doomed to failure. Weikart wanted to do something to help those kids succeed.

So he went to a meeting of school principals armed with charts showing how poorly African-American students were doing. When he was done with his presentation, nobody said anything. Some of the principals went to the window for a smoke. One just sat there, arms crossed tightly. Others left the room. Eventually, they returned. They said there was nothing they could do. The children were just born that way. Weikart describes this scene in his memoir. He died in 2003. This interview is from a video made the summer before he died.

DAVID WEIKART: So from that, I decided, well, how could I affect these kids and help kids do better in school? Because I couldn't change the schools. And that was then well, obviously, you do it before school.

EMILY HANFORD: So preschool. Now, this was a radical idea in 1958. Some families who could afford it sent their children to nursery school. But nursery school focused on learning how to play and share. Weikart wanted to create a real school for three- and four-year-olds.

DAVID WEIKART: There was no evidence that it would be helpful. There wasn't data.

EMILY HANFORD: But Weikart had a hunch that early environments really matter. He thought poor Black children weren't learning the kinds of things that were on IQ tests at home. School wasn't helping them develop their skills either. So Weikart set out to invent a new kind of school, not just a school for three- and four-year-olds, but a school that would finally give African-American children a chance.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When teacher Evelyn Moore heard that a man in Ypsilanti was setting up a program to help poor Black children with low IQs, she called him up. And he hired her.

EVELYN MOORE: I was passionate. I would do whatever we needed to do to prove that these many African-American children were not retarded.

EMILY HANFORD: When Evelyn Moore moved to Ypsilanti in the summer of 1962, it was a segregated city. White people lived on the North side. A lot of them worked at nearby universities and had good jobs in the auto industry. African-Americans lived on the South side in the neighborhood around the Perry school. They worked as janitors, domestics, store clerks, if they could find jobs at all. There was a lot of unemployment, a lot of poverty.

But it was a safe neighborhood. Evelyn Moore remembers that. Everyone knew each other. And in the summer of 1962, Moore and three other teachers fanned out into the neighborhood looking for children for the preschool.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: Knocking on doors, knocking on doors. I don't believe we had a script. Many people wouldn't open the door to me. I think they thought I was a social worker or a government worker.

EMILY HANFORD: This is teacher Louise Derman-Sparks.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: Gradually, word got around that the four of us were recruiting children for a preschool program.

EMILY HANFORD: And then it wasn't a hard sell.

EVELYN MOORE: Because many of these children, I don't know how many, their sisters and brothers were in special education. So their mothers knew. They knew what could happen. And so they saw this as an opportunity.

EMILY HANFORD: Moore says she clearly remembers two things about going into people's homes during that summer of '62. The first is how dark the homes were. Lights were low. Shades were drawn. She thinks it had to do with the way people felt. But the other thing she remembers is that in almost every home, there were two pictures on the wall, John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

EVELYN MOORE: That was noticeable to me. And I guess they represented hope at that time for people. And in terms of the project, I think the young kids represented that hope too to parents. I mean, that they may have to give up on the older kids. But here's a new possibility.

(SINGING) It's been a long a long time coming.

But I know a change going to come

EMILY HANFORD: The first day of the Perry preschool was in October of 1962. The teachers had plans for cooking, painting, digging in the dirt. This was not going to be a school where children had to sit quietly and take directions from a teacher. They were going to do projects and experiments. They were going to get messy. And on that first day of school, the children arrived holding their mothers hands, all dressed up in their Sunday best.

EVELYN MOORE: These people were sending them to school, you see. And when you're in school, you look like you're going to school.

EMILY HANFORD: The mothers were beaming. They thought their children had been chosen, says Moore. But in fact, it was totally random who ended up in the preschool, because this whole project was set up as an experiment, an experiment to see whether preschool could help children do better. So it needed a study group that went to preschool, and a control group that didn't. Study director David Weikart and his research team flipped a coin, literally. And half the children were in the preschool. The other half stayed home.

SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]

EMILY HANFORD: It's hard to know exactly what the Perry preschool was like. There are no photographs, no films from the early days. This sound is from a film made in the 1970s. It shows children sitting down for snack, chatting. But it was nothing like this in the beginning. Evelyn Moore says the children barely spoke at all, because in their families, children weren't supposed to talk much.

EVELYN MOORE: The children who were quiet and disciplined were considered smart in some ways, you know. He's a good child. He's a quiet child.

EMILY HANFORD: This idea that children should be seen and not heard, it's an old and powerful belief. And it's a practical parenting tool, if you're a poor single mother living in a small apartment with a bunch of kids. That's how a lot of the Perry children grew up. The teachers wanted to change that. And they believed language was the key to opening up their minds and their possibilities.

EVELYN MOORE: Tell me what you did last night. Talk to me about what your mommy did yesterday.

EMILY HANFORD: These are the kinds of questions teachers would ask to get the children talking. Moore says it took her a while to learn how to do this.

EVELYN MOORE: Having been trained as an elementary teacher, it's like this is right, and that's wrong. These are answers.

EMILY HANFORD: But what she realized is that when you talk to children this way, they don't say much.

EVELYN MOORE: If you give them just, tell me what color this is, it's red. That's the end of that.

EMILY HANFORD: So the idea at Perry was to ask the children open-ended questions. What did they think? What were they curious about? The teachers were trying to help the children understand--

EVELYN MOORE: That it's OK to talk about what they know, and that they do know things.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: We wanted to open up the world to the kids. We wanted them to know that the world was there. And they had a right to be in it. We used to take them to the library.

EMILY HANFORD: Louise Derman-Sparks says they went on a lot of field trips.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: These were kids who never left their neighborhood.

EMILY HANFORD: They took the kids to the fire station, a farm. Moore remembers a trip to an Apple orchard.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: We picked the apples. We brought them back.

EMILY HANFORD: And they made applesauce. It was a science lesson to show how apples change when they're cooked.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: Then the brilliant idea struck us. Let's take the children back to the Apple orchard in winter.

EMILY HANFORD: It was cold. The trees were bare.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: And I can remember very vividly saying, well, where did the apples go? Well, what do you think happened to the apples? And one of the kids looked at me and said, teacher, I didn't take them. [LAUGHS] So there went all of our big concepts we were teaching, because already, kids thought, I'm being accused of something.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EMILY HANFORD: And what the teachers really wanted the children to know is that there wasn't anything wrong with them. They weren't bad. They weren't stupid. And they could succeed. But it wasn't just about inspiring them. The teachers were also thinking about those IQ tests. They did a lot of reading, writing stories, puzzles, games. The teachers were focusing on cognitive development, stimulating children's brains, getting them to think and figure things out. And they did it all through hands-on activities and play. Teacher Louise Derman-Sparks says they played lots of records, did a lot of dancing too.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: That's how I learned how to dance a whole lot of things I didn't know before.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Everybody's doing a brand new dance now

Come on, baby, do the locomotion

I know you get to like it if you give it a chance now

Come on, baby, do the locomotion

EMILY HANFORD: The Perry preschool teachers say they had fun. What they were doing was exciting and new. But some things were hard. The children's families were very poor. Sometimes they didn't have enough money to pay their bills. And the teachers wondered if they should be helping them. But the researchers said, no, there could be no other intervention. This was an experiment to test the effects of preschool, not financial assistance.

Something else that was hard for the teachers was less tangible. It was the very nature of what they were doing. The premise of their preschool was that children were not learning enough at home. They needed an enriched environment to bring them up to speed. Implicit in this idea seemed the notion that poor Black families were doing something wrong.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: The reason the kids weren't doing well is that their homes were not giving them the culture that they needed to succeed in school.

EMILY HANFORD: Derman-Sparks says it seemed kind of a racist idea. But part of her job was to visit the kids' parents at home every week and teach them too.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: The curriculum that we were supposed to follow for the parents was to bring a whole bunch of learning materials and show the parents how to support their children's cognitive development. So we'd bring this big sack of stuff. And the parents were supposed to watch us doing cognitive, kind of, one-on-one activities with the kids.

EMILY HANFORD: Things like matching games and memory games. Derman-Sparks says it was, kind of, awkward sometimes. She remembers her first visit to a boy who lived with his grandmother and teenage mother.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: And went up these rickety stairs to this house that was behind the church. And I knock on the door. And the mother, who's the teenager, answers it. And it was one of these rare old apartments, you know. So you could just go see right into the kitchen. And the grandmother was cooking on the stove. And I hear her saying [BLEEP] is she here. So I didn't feel exactly welcomed. And frankly, I could really sympathize with her. She had been working all day on her feet. And now she was trying to get dinner on the table. And I'm coming in with my little sack of toys.

EMILY HANFORD: Derman-Sparks says she learned to put her sack of toys aside and just sit in the kitchen with the grandmother. They'd have a cup of coffee or Kool-Aid and talk. Looking back, Derman-Sparks says she thinks the real purpose of the home visits was to send a message to the families.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: We are your children's teachers. We were their first teachers. And we think your kids are great. And we really want your kids to make it.

EMILY HANFORD: But making it was going to be all about those IQ tests. That was the bottom line. Would two years in preschool be enough to boost their scores and prevent them from failing in school?

(SINGING) Lift up your nose

La la la la la

A freedom's in the air

La la la la la

And it smell so good

La la la la la

Lord, it smells so sweet

When the Perry preschool began, it was radical and new. But preschool was in the air. Other programs were starting up all over the country. This sound is from Mississippi. A new generation of educators and activists was embracing preschool as a way to help poor children and a way to fight poverty itself. And in May of 1965, preschool went big.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON: On this beautiful spring day, it's good to be outside in the rose garden.

EMILY HANFORD: President Lyndon Johnson announced a major new effort in his war on poverty, a federal preschool program called Head Start.

PRESIDENT JOHNSON: I believe that this is one of the most constructive, and one of the most sensible, and also one of the most exciting program that this nation has ever undertaken.

EMILY HANFORD: Johnson basically promised the nation that children who went to Head Start would be lifted out of poverty, because Head Start would make them smarter. It would raise their IQs. But Perry preschool teacher, Louise Derman-Sparks worried there was too much riding on those IQ tests. She says they didn't seem to do a very good job measuring what her students knew.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: We had these puzzles that were called Go-together puzzles, you know, where you had like a bingo card with six pictures. And then you had separate picture cards. And you were supposed to put what goes with each thing. And one of the children that I had kept putting a toothbrush on the refrigerator picture. Now in an IQ test, he would lose six months intelligence.

EMILY HANFORD: But what she knew from visiting this child at home was that toothbrushes did go with refrigerators. His mother put them there to keep them away from cockroaches. So what was actually on her part an act of resilience, hurt her son's IQ.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

IQ gains were the promise, though. And people wanted to know, does preschool work? The Perry teachers and researchers were anxious. Everything they'd done with their students, would it all add up to IQ gains? And it did. After just one year in preschool, the average IQ score went up 15 points. That's a big jump, enough to keep many children out of special education. And that was the goal. The early results from Head Start showed IQ gains too. All over the country, there was a lot of excitement about preschool. But then in 1969, something happened.

SPEAKER: The Office of Economic Opportunity today made public a study showing that poor children who took part in the Head Start program did not get much out of it.

EMILY HANFORD: The report was called the Westinghouse Study of Head Start. It became synonymous with the term fadeout. The initial IQ gains from preschool faded out. By third grade, the IQ scores of children who had gone to Head Start were no different from the scores of children who had not. Richard Nixon was now president. He supported Head Start during his campaign. But after the Westinghouse Study was released, he wrote across the top of a memo, no increase in any anti-poverty program until more research is in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Back in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the Perry researchers were finding fadeout too. The high hopes that preschool could really change things for poor Black children seemed like a misguided dream from another era. But then study director David Weikart started to notice something interesting. The children who had gone to preschool were doing a little better in school. Their IQs were no higher. They were no smarter than their peers. But they were having fewer problems, not getting in trouble as much, not as likely to be in special education. And then in the late 1970s, the Perry team got a big surprise. This is researcher Larry Schweinhart.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: We were still phoning into the mainframe at the University of Michigan. And you stick the phone in the little cradle, and everything. And we get these big long pages of printouts, and--

EMILY HANFORD: The computer was spitting out results from achievement tests the study participants took when they were 14. And Schweinhart couldn't believe what he was seeing, significant differences in the scores. These were not IQ tests that supposedly measure how smart you are. These were achievement tests that evaluate more directly what a student has learned in school. And the students who'd gone to preschool did better on these tests.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: And we also, at that time, we did not find any differences in IQ. So you've got the IQ test, no difference, and the achievement test, big difference, bigger than ever difference.

EMILY HANFORD: This was puzzling. The assumption had always been that raising IQ was the key to helping children achieve in school. The smarter you are, the better you do. And here was evidence to the contrary. And get this. One reason the preschool students did better on achievement tests, they were more likely to finish their tests. The students who had not gone to preschool left more questions blank. They didn't even try.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: In fact, I remember writing a little line in the front of the first report that I wrote, the most important thing you learn in a place is how hard you try. And it struck me, as I was looking at the data, that the kids who had had the preschool program experience were trying harder.

EMILY HANFORD: This got the researchers thinking. Maybe what preschool did wasn't really about IQ. Maybe the children who went to preschool were doing better because they cared more about school. The researchers wanted more evidence. So when the students were in high school, they interviewed them. They interviewed their parents. They collected teacher ratings and report cards. And here's what they found.

The students who went to preschool got higher grades. They spent more time on their homework. They were more likely to say school was important to them. Their parents had better attitudes toward their children's education. And when it came to graduating from high school, preschool made a difference for the girls in particular. Overall, 67% of the preschool group graduated from high school, while only 45% of the comparison group did. And IQ had nothing to do with it. Being smart in the way people had traditionally defined it wasn't what really mattered for the Perry children. The researchers wanted to know more. What would happen to the kids after high school? So they hired Van Logans.

[DOOR KNOCK]

VAN LOGANS: Hey. What you want, Van? We got to get together to do this interview.

EMILY HANFORD: Van Logans was a coach at Ypsilanti High School. He lived in the Perry neighborhood. When the researchers approached him about the job, he hesitated.

VAN LOGANS: Because any time white folks want to study Black folks, I'm apprehensive.

EMILY HANFORD: But eventually, he agreed, because he thought maybe some good would come from the study, change things for African-American children. Logans interviewed all of the study participants, the ones who went to preschool and the ones who didn't.

VAN LOGANS: They had interviews in cars, in airports, you know, just dope houses.

EMILY HANFORD: Logans says the Perry neighborhood had changed. When he started doing interviews in the '80s, the neighborhood was rough, desperate. He says crack cocaine hit the area hard.

VAN LOGANS: You know, guns stuck in my face. Who's that? Oh, that's the coke lady, man. Hey, man, put that down. What's the matter with you? What's up? I'm sorry about that, man. Hey, man. I'm about to check your boy, man. Quick draw him a draw. Then they started laughing and stuff. And I'm in.

EMILY HANFORD: Logans first interviewed the study participants when they were 19, and again, when they were 27 and 40. This is one of the things that makes the Perry study significant. It followed people for such a long time. The other thing is the way it was set up, with children randomly assigned to a study group or control group. This is the gold standard in scientific research. And by the time the study participants were 40 years old, there were big differences between the two groups.

The people who'd gone to preschool were doing much better in life. They were more likely to be employed. They made more money. They were more likely to own homes, cars, to have savings accounts. The men who'd gone to preschool were more involved in raising their children. And the biggest difference of all had to do with crime. The people who had not gone to preschool were twice as likely to have been arrested by the age of 40. Here's researcher Larry Schweinhart.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: It's just very difficult to find anything that will reduce crime. And here's a program that took place way before the crime and reduced it.

EMILY HANFORD: The Perry results got a lot of attention. And there were several other studies now too. They all show that preschool has significant long-term benefits. But those benefits weren't necessarily showing up on tests. And the public debate about preschool in the '80s and '90s was all about test scores and fadeout. There were huge fights about Head Start in Congress. And many politicians asked, what's the point of spending taxpayer money on preschool, if IQ gains don't last? But Larry Schweinhart says, what's the point of education, to do better on a test, or do better in life?

LARRY SCHWEINHART: If sometimes felt like a prospector coming down from the hills and saying, hey, we found gold up there. And everybody's busy doing whatever they're doing. So we don't have any time to look for the gold. Well, but there's gold. Why don't you go get the gold? All you got to do is go there, and you can find the gold.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EMILY HANFORD: Now it's not like no one was buying the idea of preschool, quite the opposite. By the late 1990s, a lot of American children were going. But a new kind of opportunity gap was emerging. Many families couldn't afford to send their children to preschool. And a group of preschool advocates said, this is a problem. Look at all the research. Every child should be able to go to preschool. Preschool should be a new grade in school, just like kindergarten. But this was not going to be an easy sell. It would cost billions of dollars. Governors and state lawmakers were going to have to buy into the idea of preschool in a big way.

ARTHUR ROLNICK: My name is Arthur J. Rolnick.

EMILY HANFORD: This is the guy who convinced a lot of them.

ARTHUR ROLNICK: I am Senior Vice President and Director of Research here at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

EMILY HANFORD: Rolnick was an unlikely candidate to be the next big advocate for preschool. He's an economist. And his expertise is pre-Civil War banking. But as a senior VP at a regional Fed, he goes to a lot of community meetings. And in 2002, he found himself at a lunch for an organization called Ready for Kindergarten.

ARTHUR ROLNICK: Their executive director was making a pitch for more money for early childhood development, basically making it on a moral argument, that it's the right thing to do. And I naively raised my hand and said I thought that argument wasn't going to take you very far.

EMILY HANFORD: Because there are all kinds of good things to spend money on. But Rolnick says, to survive, every good idea needs an economic argument. And he thought maybe there was an economic argument to be made for preschool. He'd heard of the Perry study. Economists had analyzed it already and showed that Perry ended up saving society a lot of money because of reduced crime costs, in particular.

ARTHUR ROLNICK: But nobody had asked a very basic question that businesspeople would ask, or economists was ask. In today's dollars, Perry preschool invested $10,000 a year for two years. So that's a $20,000 investment. And we asked a very basic question. What was the return on the investment?

EMILY HANFORD: He was looking for the kind of number you see on a 401(k) statement. What are you making every year off your investment? He and a colleague decided to calculate what that would be for the Perry preschool. They compared what Perry cost to what the school system saved on special education, what the government earned from tax revenue due to higher earnings, and all that money saved on crime. Then they translated that to a bottom line. How much did the taxpayers make every year off that initial investment? The number they came up with, 16%.

ARTHUR ROLNICK: That's well above what you can get in the stock market. That's well above most venture capitalists would view as a very high rate of return. And we would argue it's a very safe rate of return, that invested this way, it's almost a guaranteed return.

EMILY HANFORD: Rolnick and his colleague published their finding in a regional Fed newsletter. It immediately caught the attention of economists, business people, and politicians. And the preschool movement was transformed. Ten years ago, a conference about the benefits of preschool would have attracted educators, liberals, a lot of women. Now, it's a lot of men in suits.

DUDLEY GOODLETTE: I think this is totally not a partisan issue, and shouldn't be. It's about educating our children. It's about raising our children. It's about giving them a hand up early, rather than a handout later.

EMILY HANFORD: Dudley Goodlette is at a preschool conference for business leaders, being held at the US Chamber of Commerce. Goodlette is a Republican, and a former member of the Florida House of Representatives, where he was primary sponsor of the legislation that changed the state constitution to give every child the right to preschool. Goodlette says the economic argument is key to convincing people like him. At this conference, the conversation is not about test scores and fadeout. It's about the bottom line.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: You're listening to an American RadioWorks documentary, Early Lessons. I'm Stephen Smith. So the push is on to expand preschool to make it a whole new grade in a child's educational career. States have nearly doubled their spending on preschool in the past five years. The hope is that today's children will get what the Perry children got. But will they? Are today's preschools really living up to the promise? Coming up--

SPEAKER: We just had a curriculum. And we just went about doing it. Now we pay more attention to what we teach and why we teach it. I would say, when you know why you're doing something, you will do it better.

STEPHEN SMITH: For more on this story, including all the results of the Perry study, and a look at the debate over IQ, visit our website, Americanradioworks.org. Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation. American RadioWorks is supported by the Batten Institute, the Research Center for Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, batteninstitute.org. Early Lessons will continue in a moment from American Public Media.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: Early Lessons coming to you here on Minnesota Public Radio news. Good afternoon. I'm Gary Eichten. You know 13,204 listeners contributed during this week's Member Drive. And if you are one of the new or renewing members who joined in, thanks for helping to pay for the news on Minnesota Public Radio. If you meant to contribute but didn't, still time. Go to Minnesotapublicradio.org. Or call 1-800-227-2811. And by the way, to celebrate the success, we're throwing a party at the Fitzgerald Theater tonight at 7:30. Stop by for silent films, music, acrobats, and the movie Maven. Members get a discount.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

STEPHEN SMITH: From American Public Media, this is an American RadioWorks documentary, Early Lessons. I'm Stephen Smith. And this hour, we are talking about what may be the biggest, the fastest expansion of public education in American history, preschool. We're in a preschool, a pre-kindergarten classroom at River Breeze Elementary in Palatka Florida. Kids are broken up into their small groups here. And there's a bunch of kids over here writing on erasable whiteboards.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: Hey. This real shark.

SPEAKER: All righty. Ready for-- ready for me to draw a shark here? All right. Let's see. What do sharks have?

SPEAKER: Teeth, teeth.

SPEAKER: Teeth. Yeah, there you go. So there's a shark with teeth. Does that look, kind of, like a shark?

SPEAKER: Oh.

SPEAKER: Looks like a shark airplane.

SPEAKER: It looks like a shark airplane.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: Fish. Can you help me with--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: Want me to help you write a fish or draw a fish?

SPEAKER: Picture.

SPEAKER: You want a picture. What does a fish look like? Does it look kind of like a round part?

SPEAKER: Yeah.

SPEAKER: And then a triangle for a tail.

SPEAKER: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER: And then there's an eye. And here I'm going to make some bubbles coming out of his mouth, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop, bloop. Yeah, you kids are learning stuff in preschool I didn't learn until I was in sixth grade.

SPEAKER: This is pre-K.

SPEAKER: This is pre-K. You're right. You guys are in pre-K.

SPEAKER: --a lot of bubbles in his mouth.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: No-- Look at-- ow. OK, good job recognizing that Lamont is the word changed up on you guys. Let's read it again, [INAUDIBLE]. Let's do that again.

ALL: The bear [INAUDIBLE]

SPEAKER: All right.

STEPHEN SMITH: Now we've talked about the famous study at the Perry preschool in Michigan, and about the impact that program had on the kids who went there. Well, here in Palatka, Florida, and in communities across the country, everyone, from educators to parents, policymakers, business people, everyone wants the kind of results that were achieved at the Perry preschool. The question is, are we setting up preschool programs that will get those results? Here's Emily Hanford with the rest of that story.

EMILY HANFORD: Voters here in Florida made a bold move a few years ago, when they changed their state constitution to give every child the right to come to preschools like this. But as the state races to set up more preschools, experts say Florida is setting up a lot of preschools that aren't very good. And they're not at all like the Perry preschool.

JOE HUDSON: We've worked with teachers who were in front of the room all the time. Kids were sitting in tables all the time. She was doing all the talking all the time.

EMILY HANFORD: That's Joe Hudson. She says preschool students in Florida are doing lots of worksheets, tracing their names over and over again. Preschool is starting to look more and more like school. And Hudson says research from the Perry preschool and other early childhood programs shows that preschool should be different. So she's heading up a project in Northeastern Florida to change preschool. She got a $4 million grant from the federal government to do it. And she and her colleagues are using the money to help preschool teachers better understand why preschool is important, and what the research says about what works.

FAYE WRIGHT: So what we're going to do first is, I want you to think about the lesson itself. So this is on page 53. So--

EMILY HANFORD: Here in Palatka, four preschool teachers are in a classroom. But they're not teaching, they're learning.

FAYE WRIGHT: What are we wanting the children to take away from this lesson?

EMILY HANFORD: Most preschool teachers don't get this kind of training. They're handed a curriculum guide. And they're pretty much on their own.

FAYE WRIGHT: We just had a curriculum. And we just went about doing it.

EMILY HANFORD: This is Faye Wright, the teacher whose class we've been visiting.

FAYE WRIGHT: Now we pay more attention to what we teach, and why we teach it, I would say. When you know why you're doing something, you will do it better.

SANDY LEWIS: Let's think about what is it that they're going to do. What's the fun part, the hands-on, the activity of this lesson.

EMILY HANFORD: Sandy Lewis is the teacher's teacher. She says hands-on learning is a big focus here. Research shows that young children learn more from active experiences than from worksheets and formal lessons. And so she's encouraging the teachers to shake things up. Put children in small groups. Let them do more on their own. It begins with rearranging their classrooms, teacher Faye Wright.

FAYE WRIGHT: Well, now we have seven centers, seven identified areas that teach children different things. We didn't have that before. We didn't have a science center.

EMILY HANFORD: They didn't really think about teaching science. It was, write your name, know your numbers, and your ABCs. Then take a break, go play. And when the children went off to play, the teachers went to their desks to plan lessons. But what the teachers say they're learning is that children learn best through play, and through the interactions they have with each other and their teachers.

FAYE WRIGHT: We have been taught we need to be everywhere that they are in order to hold that conversation with them. So now when they go to centers, we're in the centers with them. It is their time to play. But it's also time for us to talk to them about what they're doing.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: And after, we're going to play with dirt. I go swimming.

FAYE WRIGHT: Oh, OK. So after you play with the sand and the animals, then you go swimming.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

FAYE WRIGHT: Oh no--

EMILY HANFORD: A goal of this program is to remind teachers that preschool should be fun. Get children excited about coming to school. Teacher Katina Smith says she used to be, kind of, a drill sergeant. She laughs at herself now, and says she's amazed at how much her students seem to learn when they do things on their own, and how proud they are of their work.

KATINA SMITH: Even if it's just a line, and they never put a line on the paper, just the line, they are proud of that line. And they want to stick it on the wall. And that makes them want to go back over there and try to write something a little bit more, which is what we want. And by drilling them, they get away from it. It makes them not want to do it. And I figure if you just let them go, just to see what they can do.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

EMILY HANFORD: One reason Smith's so impressed with her students' progress is because the children in her class are considered developmentally delayed. They're headed for special education, just like the Perry children. And just like the Perry children, they're all from poor families. They come into school with many of the same challenges. The biggest thing, they don't talk much. Here's Smith and another teacher, Myrtle Hill.

MYRTLE HILL: No one reads them stories.

KATINA SMITH: --read stories to them.

MYRTLE HILL: No one really talks to them. They hear the radio. They hear the TV.

KATINA SMITH: They're in a household where there's nothing but a lot of young kids having kids. Language, well, all they can think of is coming home, making sure their kids are bathed, clothed. And that's it. Take care of this at the house and for us going out, some of them haven't been crossed the bridge.

EMILY HANFORD: Smith is referring to a big bridge that spans the Saint Johns River and divides Palatka in two. Some of her students have never even seen the wealthier side of the city. She says this program has helped her understand what a difference education can make for them. School is their opportunity to have access to a different world. Smith says it's incredible the way some of her students have changed.

KATINA SMITH: Now, talking maybe more than I really want them to talk. But that's OK. And I have one baby just walking around just singing the ABC song, because she came to me doing nothing at all. Now she go home. Her mama said, what did you do to her? She's walking around my house singing the ABC song, which she never did. She never heard the baby speak before.

EMILY HANFORD: So how did that happen?

KATINA SMITH: There's a part where feeling safe and comfortable to speak. We're in this environment. Yes, you can talk at this. This is your area. This is your place. It's your room.

EMILY HANFORD: Six students in this program have made so much progress that instead of going to special education next year, they'll be in regular classes. Test scores have gone up. But if history is any indication, those test score gains might not last.

LINDA HAYES: We can't put all of our eggs in one basket. We can't assume that investment in preschool inoculates children for what continues to happen as they move through school.

EMILY HANFORD: This is Linda Hayes. She's an early education expert at the University of Florida and an advisor to the teacher training program in Palatka. She thinks the debate about fadeout has put all the blame on preschool. But if you put a child in a good preschool, and send her on to bad schools--

LINDA HAYES: Then the door that had opened for me begins to close. So I need support, yes, in getting ready for school, if I'm a child at risk. But I also need support as I move through school.

EMILY HANFORD: She thinks this is why those initial IQ gains faded out for the children. They had a really good preschool experience. They had great teachers. They learned a lot. Then they went on to poor segregated elementary schools. They didn't get the same kind of attention.

Teachers were not focused on getting them to talk, opening up their minds, building their confidence. It was sit down, be quiet, do what the teacher tells you, according to Perry preschool teacher, Louise Derman-Sparks. She says some of the children would come down to visit the preschool class after they'd gone to kindergarten. And they would complain. They didn't like kindergarten. She remembers one boy in particular.

LOUISE DERMAN-SPARKS: He came down every day, because he was so bored. He said it was much more interesting to be in the preschool.

EMILY HANFORD: Derman-Sparks says she finally had to tell him he couldn't keep coming down to the preschool. He had to get used to kindergarten.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(SINGING) Let's all sing the alphabet

To start out before we start

Let's begin with ABC

And we'll end up with XYZ

Then--

EMILY HANFORD: So preschool is not an inoculation. You can't send children to preschool and expect that to be enough. This is what advocates have been saying for years to defend against the charge of fadeout. Preschool isn't about changing children. It's a first step in the long process of helping them get a better education. And that's the key to a better life. Education is the way out of poverty. The more education you have, the better you do.

But here's something interesting about the people who went to the Perry preschool. Even the ones who did not graduate from high school ended up doing better in life. They did not get more education. But they were still better off. Why was that?

SPEAKER: OK.

SPEAKER: There you go.

EMILY HANFORD: This is where a garage in Ypsilanti, Michigan comes in.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: Let's see.

EMILY HANFORD: Larry Schweinhart is now the president of the research organization that's been continuing the Perry study all these years. He's giving me a tour of what's in this garage.

LARRY SCHWEINHART: There's tests, the Stanford-Binet tests that were given from age 3, through age 9 here. There's a parent interview for age 15.

EMILY HANFORD: These are the original documents from the Perry preschool study. Most of this stuff is on hard drives now. But Schweinhart says researchers are packrats. They keep everything. And good thing they do, because another researcher has come along with some new questions about the Perry study. And he's looking for answers in all this original data.

JAMES HECKMAN: My name is James Heckman. I'm a professor of economics here at the University of Chicago.

EMILY HANFORD: Jim Heckman is probably one of the world's most influential economists. He won a Nobel Prize. And he's really interested in the Perry study because of what he sees as the fundamental paradox at its core. The people who went to the preschool were not smarter than their peers, but they did better in school. And they did not necessarily get more education, but they did better in life. And the assumption at the heart of a lot of economic theory is that intelligence and education level are the keys to everything.

JAMES HECKMAN: So that's the miracle. And that's the-- but that's also the black box.

EMILY HANFORD: Why did the Perry preschool children do better? That's what Heckman wants to figure out. So he's working with psychologists, something he never imagined. And together, they're developing new ideas about what it is beyond smarts and diplomas that helps people become capable and successful. And here's what Heckman's learning.

JAMES HECKMAN: There are traits that seem to be somewhat different from just the raw ability to solve a problem.

EMILY HANFORD: Personality traits like--

JAMES HECKMAN: Perseverance, self-control, things like openness, agreeableness, extroversion.

EMILY HANFORD: Heckman calls these non-cognitive skills. They're less a set of skills than a collection of traits and abilities that are not about how much you know or how fast you think. Heckman says we used to think of these traits as part of a person's character, sort of an old-fashioned notion that didn't get a lot of attention in economic theory. But a growing body of evidence from psychology suggests the development of cognitive ability itself is associated with personality traits, defined by psychologists as patterns of thought feelings, and behavior.

JAMES HECKMAN: What we're coming to learn is that traits of young children like openness to experience, lack of shyness, some agreeableness, even, will make the child much more ready to explore the environment. The act of exploration builds skills. It creates mental capacities. It gives you facts.

EMILY HANFORD: It's a dynamic process. The desire to learn, the drive can't really be separated from learning itself, the process of becoming capable and intelligent. So if a child is discouraged from learning early in life, that can actually shut down the learning process. On the other hand, success in learning early on makes people want to learn more. The more they want to learn, the more they end up learning. Motivation is key.

JAMES HECKMAN: Now you're getting to something really deep, how is it that motivation is affected? What causes motivation? And that's something that I think we still don't really understand. But I think what I do think we found from these early interventions is they have affected the motivation of the children.

EMILY HANFORD: And here's the kicker. Motivation really matters when it comes to testing. The very tests that purport to measure how smart you are or how much you know, these tests are time consuming and hard. You need a reason to do well. Incentives make a difference.

JAMES HECKMAN: If I give a disadvantaged kid some M&Ms for each correct answer on an IQ test, I can close big gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged kids by just incentivizing them.

EMILY HANFORD: IQ remains a deeply divisive issue, partly because people with high IQ scores typically do better in all kinds of ways. They get more education. They make more money. But what do IQ tests really measure? Heckman says one of the things they measure is motivation, how much effort are you willing to give?

And so it raises the question, do people do well in life because they have high IQs? Or is the thing that helps you do well on an IQ test the same thing that helps you do well in life? Heckman thinks what matters more is motivation, perseverance, attitude, the soft stuff that he says schools tend to ignore these days, because they're so focused on raising test scores.

JAMES HECKMAN: No Child Left Behind, the whole emphasis on cognitive skill testing is insane. I mean, it's really misdirected.

EMILY HANFORD: It's not that cognitive skills don't matter. They do. But Heckman says schools aren't paying enough attention to how students become skilled.

JAMES HECKMAN: Every day, we're creating people. And we can enrich that process or can retard it. And so if we only focus on an aspect of it, it's true we may bring along the non-cognitive component as an accident. But there are better ways to do it, to motivate. But the best way right now, I don't think we know. I don't think we know.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

EMILY HANFORD: But he does think preschool has something to do with it. He thinks the children who went to the Perry preschool were changed by that experience. They didn't become smarter in the way everyone had hoped. But he thinks the preschool may have affected the development of their personalities.

Going to Perry opened them up, gave them a kind of confidence, a willingness to try that their peers did not have. They all went on to the same poor schools. But the Perry preschool kids got a little more out of it. And maybe it's that little more that made the difference. Or maybe they just kept trying harder, squeezing what they could from whatever opportunities came their way.

So is this what happened? Did the people who went to preschool do better in life because they tried harder? I wanted to ask them that question, but I couldn't. The researchers promised anonymity, which is typical for a study like this. There's only one person who's talked to all of the study participants, Van Logans.

VAN LOGANS: The race is to the first hurdle. Nine times out of 10, the guy who gets to the first hurdle, and is doing it right, is going to win that race.

EMILY HANFORD: Logans is still a coach. And he teaches African-American history at a middle school in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Today, he's sitting on two stacked milk crates at the edge of the practice field, teaching the boys track team how to hurdle.

VAN LOGANS: Clear the first hurdle. And then it goes to the beat. [VOCALIZING]

EMILY HANFORD: Logans has done all of the interviews with the Perry preschool participants since they were 19. He doesn't think they remember much about what the preschool was like. But he does say some of them mentioned the teachers.

VAN LOGANS: You would hear certain names come up of a teacher that they really liked. And they took that with them.

EMILY HANFORD: Did they ever say that preschool changed their lives?

VAN LOGANS: Was it a one-to-one correlation of you think you ended up being a doctor, having a doctorate because you went to preschool? And nobody's going to tell you that. But they'll tell you that it didn't hurt. They will definitely tell you that.

EMILY HANFORD: One of the people who went to the Perry preschool apparently did get a PhD. But he was the exception, not the rule. And this is something to keep in mind about the Perry preschool. A lot of the excitement now is because of the money it saved society. Children were not as likely to end up in special education. They were not as likely to go to prison. Their lives were improved.

But is an improved life the same as a good one? The reality is the Perry children started out in very poor families in a segregated world, where just about everything was stacked against them. And they did better. They were more likely to be employed. But at the age of 40, a quarter of them did not have jobs. And yes, they made more money. But their median income was only $21,000 a year. And they were more likely to go to college. But only 9% of them got a degree. So one thing that seems pretty clear is that preschool, even when it's really good, is not enough to level the playing field for poor children.

SPEAKER: Oh.

(SINGING) Can turn a gray sky blue

I can make it rain whenever I want it to

EMILY HANFORD: The shadows are getting long on the track field. Van Logans sings to himself, while the boys finish up their drills. Logans still lives in the neighborhood and says he sometimes runs into the study participants on the street. They say, when are you going to come back and interview me, man? Logans says, whenever they call me.

VAN LOGANS: It's like reading a good book. And you got to almost to the end. And you want to know, what happened? What happened to these people?

EMILY HANFORD: He may get a chance to find out. The Perry researchers thought their study was done. But now a health researcher wants to know if the people who went to preschool are healthier than the people who did not. And so it appears the Perry preschool study is not over. The researchers are making plans to collect more data and do another set of interviews.

VAN LOGANS: Oh, oh, like butter, baby. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Y'all must have had a great coach last year. That must be where that came come. Oh-oh. Oh-oh. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Next man. Next man. Yeah, next man.

[THE TEMPTATIONS, "I CAN'T GET NEXT TO YOU"] --rain whenever I want it to

Oh I

I can build a castle from a single grain of sand

I can make a ship sail, hon, on dry land

But my life is incomplete and I'm so blue

STEPHEN SMITH: The vast majority of American children go to preschool now. Some are in Head Start. Others go to private preschools. And more and more attend neighborhood public schools, like the children in Palatka, Florida. That's a radical change from 50 years ago, when David Weikart came up with the idea of the Perry preschool.

But most of today's preschools don't come close to the quality of the Perry program. One expert we talked to estimates that only 30% of American children are in high-quality preschools. He says teachers don't get enough training. And there's not enough money. Average state spending on preschool now is about $4,000 a year per child. The Perry preschool cost more than 2 and 1/2 times that. Experts say we'll have to make a much bigger investment in preschool if we expect the 16% return on investment that Perry achieved.

And something else is happening that troubles many advocates. The children who need preschool the most, poor minority children that preschool was originally designed to help, there's evidence that these children are the least likely to attend high-quality preschools. So now that everyone knows how valuable preschool is, it appears that wealthy white children are getting the most out of it. And poor Black children are being left behind, once again.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You've been listening to an American RadioWorks documentary, Early Lessons. It was produced by Emily Hanford and edited by Catherine Winter. The American RadioWorks team includes Ellen Getler, Ocean Cailin, Frankie Barnhill, Craig Thorson, and Judy McAlpin. Special thanks to Nancy Rosenbaum, Suzanne Pico, and Marc Sanchez. I'm Stephen Smith.

To download a podcast of this program or a special e-book that Emily Hanford has written about the Perry preschool, visit our website Americanradioworks.org. There, you can also find our entire archive of more than 100 documentaries. That's at Americanradioworks.org. Support for this program comes from the Spencer Foundation. American RadioWorks is supported by the Batten Institute, the Research Center for Global Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, batteninstitute.org.

SPEAKER: American Public Media.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, that does it for our midday program today. Gary Eichten here. Thanks so much for tuning in. Quick reminder that we have links to all of the great American RadioWorks documentaries on Minnesota Public Radio, the MPR News cu.org website, mprnewscu.org. Stay tuned.

Now Talk of the Nation Science Friday coming up next. Sarah Meyer is the producer of our midday program, Julie Siple, assistant producer. And Randy Johnson is our technical director with help from Clifford Bentley. Also thanks to Johnny Vince Evans, Diego Ruiz, Tom Weber, and David Chang for getting the program on the air this past week.

Invitation to join us on Monday. We're going to have a primer on instant runoff voting, getting ready for Tuesday's election. We will also have a debate with the major party candidates, endorsed candidates, for mayor in Minneapolis, Saint Paul on Monday.

SPEAKER: Programming is supported by Doherty Employer Services, working to be their clients' human resource outsourcing partner. Doherty, managing the complex business of HR, benefits, and payroll administration, and risk management more at Doherty--