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Five-decade study: Black girls build on preschool success, while Black boys struggle in some measures
Decades before the Trump administration forbade using federal funding for research into the topic, Craig Ramey wondered if high-quality early education for Black children in North Carolina might improve their life outcomes.
Armed with a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Ramey established the Abecedarian Project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The study assigned infants, most of them Black, who had been born into low-income families between 1972 and 1977, to an intervention group that received full-time, high-quality child care from infancy through age 5. (The project name was drawn from an old-fashioned term meaning someone who is just learning their ABCs.)
In the 1960s and '70s, researchers lacked a full understanding of why children from disadvantaged backgrounds had developmental delays compared to their more advantaged peers, said Ramey, now 81 and a professor and researcher at Virginia Tech. "What I wanted to address is whether we could prevent that delay from occurring in the first place," he said.
The children in the intervention group received individualized prescriptions of educational activities and games that focused on social, emotional and cognitive areas of development, withe particular emphasis on language.
Researchers tracked the participants well into their mid-40s, comparing them to a control group that did not receive the services. Their latest findings, published last year in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, found different results for Black boys and Black girls who were enrolled in the program.
Both boys and girls in the early education intervention group showed significant gains through their elementary, middle and high school years. That finding matches that of other long-running early education research programs, such as the Perry Preschool Project, which tracked subjects in Ypsilanti, Michigan, from their toddler years into their 50s.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
But the study also showed that while Black women continued to build on those cognitive gains into adulthood, the progress of Black men stalled out.
By their mid-40s, the students' cognitive outcomes were significantly different, with Black women continuing to gain in IQ, reading and math skills while Black males wound up scoring the same as those in the control group - their gains virtually erased.
"When boys hit adolescence they face some rocks in the road that are maybe different from what girls face," Ramey said.
The latest research looked only at results on cognitive measures; other research into the Abecedarian participants found long-lasting positive outcomes in other areas, such as health and social development.
What the Abecedarian Project showed, Ramey says, is that at-risk children don't have to enter the education system already further behind.
"We can change that and we can change it much more dramatically with much bigger and with longer-lasting results than anyone would have bet 30 years ago," he said. "In part that's due to a lot of our findings, and I'm proud of that."
But few, if any, programs have been able to successfully bridge that gender gap in long-term results. And now, many efforts to figure out how to support Black boys - or young Black children in general - are on the chopping block, as the Trump administration shuts down federal funding for research related to promoting educational equity.
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Brian Wright, an associate professor and program coordinator for early education at the University of Memphis, said he has already had one research project canceled as a result of the Trump administration's sweeping elimination of federal grants and programs.
That project, which would have been funded by the National Science Foundation, was to be a longitudinal study following kindergarteners through third grade to better understand, through a racial equity lens, their access and participation in STEM classes. In late April, the Trump administration told the National Science Foundation to stop awarding new grants and funding existing ones.
In fact, few - if any - programs today provide low-income children of color with the level of support that the Abecedarian Project did.
"I've been from the West Coast to the East Coast, I've interviewed teachers and families and children all over the nation," said Wright. "I get asked often this question of can I identify programs that are exemplars. I'm usually not able to do that."
Wright's research has illuminated which elements are essential for such high-quality early education programs, starting with educators who have deep training in elevating and celebrating the culture, race and traditions of students of color, who create spaces for them to play, enjoy childhood and feel understood, and whose class libraries and lessons reflect students' own experiences and realities.
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And for Black boys in particular, Wright said, these elements need to be paired with programs later in middle school and high school that preserve their childhood instead of rushing them through adolescence to prepare them for adulthood and the workforce.
The question, however, is how much more of that work can be done under the current administration.
Earlier this month, Wright and other policy experts and practitioners who focus on building high-quality education programs for students of color hosted a panel discussion at George Washington University to sound the alarm on the fact that not only is there a dearth of programs equipped to support Black boys, but federal officials are actively eliminating the best of those programs' practices.
"There are pockets where these things exist, but there's certainly more work that needs to be done," Wright says. "The fact that we can't name programs that are exemplars is telling that we have a lot of work to do."
This story about Black boys was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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