KATHARINE B. STEVENS AND ELIZABETH ENGLISH
Chicago Child-Parent Center Program Founded in Chicago in 1967, the Child-Parent Center program (CPC) provides: a preschool program for economically disadvantaged three- and four-year-olds living in high-poverty neighborhoods; family support services beginning in preschool; a kindergarten program; and early elementary school intervention for children in first through third grades. The program seeks to promote students’ academic success, social competence, economic self-sufficiency, and overall health. In addition to Chicago, the program has recently expanded to other sites in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. In Chicago, the program is run by the Chicago Public Schools. It operates in 19 sites and enrolls just over 2,000 students in both a half-day (2.5 to 3 hours) and full-day (7 hours) program. Classes run 5 days a week for a 180-day school year. For the study described in the next section, all children participated in three years of CPC: two preschool years and one kindergarten year for a total of 1,350 to 3,780 program hours, depending on whether children attended half- or full-day programs. CPC also provides health and social services for children, including health screenings, nursing services, speech therapy, and free breakfast and lunch. Teachers must have a bachelor’s degree and certification in early childhood education, and they are paid the same salary and benefits as Chicago public school teachers. The CPC class size is 17 children for a half-day classroom with a teacher and teacher assistant and 20 students for a full day with a teacher and teacher assistant. Each CPC is staffed by a team that includes a head teacher, a parent-resource teacher, and a schoolcommunity representative. Head teachers coach other teachers, coordinate the curriculum, and provide professional development. Parent-resource teachers provide parent workshops and other health, safety, and nutrition supports. The school-community representative recruits children from CPC neighborhoods for the program, refers families to community and social services agencies, and provides home visits. CPC especially emphasizes parent engagement: two and a half hours of parental involvement are required every week in either in-school or at-home activities.
Study Description. An ongoing propensity score matching study has compared a group of children that attended CPC preschool with a group that did not, to investigate the long-term effects of children’s participation in three consecutive years of CPC (two years of preschool and one year of kindergarten). The first group was composed of 989 children whose parents enrolled them in CPC for three years— beginning at age three—and who completed the CPC kindergarten program in 1986. The second group was composed of 550 children who did not attend CPC preschool: 374 of those children attended kindergarten in non-CPC schools, and 176 attended kindergarten in CPC schools but did not attend the preschool program. These two groups were matched on age, neighborhood, socioeconomic status, and eligibility for government-funded early childhood programs. The study used data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study, which tracks 1,539 low-income, minority children (93 percent black and 7 percent Hispanic) who completed public school kindergarten in the spring of 1986. Data were first collected in 1985, and the program group has been followed for more than 20 years. The most recent results are from a follow-up with the two groups when they were 26 years old, which included about 90 percent of the original study participants. The Bottom Line. The CPC study found that children who attended CPC for three years (two preschool years and one kindergarten year) had better long-term outcomes than children who did not attend CPC preschool. Those outcomes included reduced child maltreatment, less need for special education, lower levels of depression, reduced crime and delinquency, and reduced dependency on welfare. The CPC study’s matching design allowed researchers to examine long-term academic and social outcomes for participating children. But two limitations of the study must be kept in mind when evaluating its results. First, 10 percent of study participants had dropped out of the study before the follow-up at age 26. It is not known why they dropped out or whether they are different in important ways from those who remained in the study. If the 10 percent excluded from the study is doing better than the other 90 percent, the study will 21
