• Abstract
• Introduction and Literature
• Background
• Methods and Data
• Results
• Conclusions

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• RQ: Is Sesame Street programming content affect children's early school attainment, ultimate educational attainment, and labor market outcomes?
• Methodology: DID that avail the exogenous variation in exposure to Sesame Street programming, using census data on grade-for-age status.
• Results: Watching the show brought with it a sizable increase in test scores: relative increase in grade-in-age status.
  • The effect is more pronounced for boys and black, non-Hispanic children.
  • The show accomplished that at a cost of around $5 per child per year.

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• Early childhood education

  • To improve subsequent life outcomes, several policies have received attention.
    • Perry Preschool, Head Start, universal prekindergarten, ...
  • Academic research has generally supported the effects of these programs on disadvantaged children.
    • Duncan and Magnuson (2013)

• Sesame Street: perhaps the biggest, yet least costly intervention.

  • Initially aired in 1969: An immediate smash hit occurred.
    • Its fundamental goal was to reduce the educational deficits experienced by disadvantaged youth based on the preschool environment.
    • Relatively low costs to other early childhood interventions.
    • A small-scale RCT shows a substantial immediate impact on literacy and numeracy test scores at ages three and four. However, its longer-term effects have been anonymous.

• The purpose of the paper: To conduct a large-scale examination of the impact of the introduction of Sesame Street on elementary school performance, including longer-term educational and labor market outcomes.

  • Potential ability of television
    • Negative effects Gentzkow and Shapiro, 2008; Jensen and Oster, 2009
    • Kearney and Levine, 2014: A reality TV series on MTV reduced teen childbearing.

• Methodological Approach

  1. Geographic variation
     • Their analysis takes advantage of the county-level variation in viewers' ability to watch Sesame Street.
       • Due to physical problems of the broadcasting channels (UHF vs. VHF).
  2. Differences across birth cohorts at the time of the show's introduction.
     • Children aged under six.
  • Data: Census from the 1980, 1990, and 2000

• Results

  • Sesame Street's introduction generated a positive impact on educational outcomes.
    • 14% more likely to be attending the grade in the middle and high for their age.
    • Larger point estimates for boys, blacks, Hispanics.
  • Long-term outcomes
    • More likely to be employed.
    • Have somewhat higher wages as adults.

• Early childhood intervention
  • Cognitive ability is not completely inheritable (Hunt, 1961)
  • Childhood intervention may improve academic preparation among young children.

Following this legacy, Sesame Street was proposed in 1967, and first aired on November 10, 1969.

To foster intellectual and cultural development in preschoolers. (Cooney, 1967)

• Broadcasts

  • Because of a technical constraint (UHF vs. VHF), only around two-thirds of the population can watch Sesame Street on their televisions.
  • Even so, Sesame Street became a huge success: roughly 28-36 (33-42)% of those aged from 2 to 5 watched it in 1970 (1971) (Cook et al., 1975).

• Educational content

  • Earlier shows before Sesame Street did focus on teaching social skills such as getting along with others, but not on academic content.

• Preschool attendance when Sesame Street first aired

  • Those who attend preschool education is minority (only 9% and 19% ages 3, and 4, respectively, did so).
  • Kindergarten generally only lasted half a day: children had the chance to watch Sesame Street.
    • Among children age 5, 57% attended school with 83% of whom enrolled in school in half-day programs.

• *Sesame Street was broadcast on a UHF (ultra-high frequency) signal, not on a VHF (very-high frequency).
  • physical reasons (UHF is less likely to be received).
  • Federal Communications Commission moratorium, following World War II.
• "All Channel Receiver Act": 1962
  • required manufacturers to produce television sets that could receive both UHF and VHF signals.
  • Because TV sets were relatively expensive (roughly $700, where the median family income of $7,436).

• Educational Testing Service (ETS)'s development of Sesame Street to design and examine children who watched the program (Bogatz and Ball, 1971).

1. Random assignment to disadvantaged children in many locations.
2. Random assignment of treatments that provides cable television to low-income families.

• Result: a sizable impact of the show on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT).

• Comparable intervention: Head Start
  • Both had demonstrated evidence of short-term effectiveness (Gibbs, Ludwig, and Miller, 2013; Duncan and Magnuson, 2013; Shager et al., 2013 and Bogatz and Ball, 1971)
  • Sesame Street appeared to generate improvements in cognitive skills comparable to those of Head Start for a fraction of the cost.
  • Because of the differences in the focus of each program, we would expect similar long-term effects from Sesame Street as Head Start.
    • Head Start was designed to be a comprehensive program with a variety of services.

• Two exogenous variation: across cohorts and geography in exposure to Sesame Street programming.

$$ \begin{align} \text{Outcome} _ {ijc} &= \beta_0 + \beta_1 \times (\text{preschool69} _ {ic} \times \text{SSCov} _ j) + \beta_2 \text{Policy} _ {jc} + \beta_3 X _ {ijc} + \gamma _ c \times \gamma _ s + \delta _ j + \epsilon _ {ijc} \tag{1} \\\ \text{Outcome} _ {ijc} &= \beta_0 + \sum _ {c = 1967/1968} ^ {1973/1974} \beta_c \times (\gamma _ c \times \text{SSCov} _ j) + \beta_2 \text{Policy} _ {jc} +\beta_3 X _ {ijc} + \gamma _ c \times \gamma _ s + \delta _ j + \epsilon _ {ijc} \tag{2} \end{align} $$

• Equation (1)

  • $\text{Outcome}_{ijc}$ educational and labor market outcomes for individual $i$, in county $j$, in cohort $c$.
  • $\text{preschool69} _ {ic}$: cohorts of preschool age when the show began.
  • $\gamma _ s$: state fixed effects.
  • $\text{Policy} _ {jc}$: potential changes that could lead to an omitted variable bias:
    • Food Stamp Program between 1961 and 1975.
    • Head Start expenditures in 1968 and 1972.
  • All reported standard errors are clustered at the county level.

• Equation (2)

  • Allowing for the effect of Sesame Street coverage to vary across birth cohorts.
  • They also estimate models separately by race/ethnicity and gender.

• Measure of interest: Access to Sesame Street broadcasting.

  • Not actual viewership
  • Thus, the approach identifies an "intent-to-treat."

• What to know:
  1. Which television stations broadcast Sesame Street in a given area.
     • Children's Television Workshop: indicates stations aired Sesame Street in 1969/'70.
  2. What share of households in a given area: Driven by estimation.
     1. TV Factbook: provides a listing of every television station.
        • channel number (UHF/VHF)
        • latitude and longitude of its broadcast tower.
        • transmission signal power.
        • County-level coverage (categorical) for all commercial stations.
     2. Regress county-level coverage rates on the technical specifications of each channel.
     3. Assign to each county the simulated coverage (the highest among each station).

• Individual-level microdata from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Census of Population (IPUMS-USA).

  • restricted to those born between 1959 and 1968.
    1. Use the 1980 census to examine elementary school performance as captured by "grade-for-age" status.
    2. Use the 1990 census to measure ultimate educational attainment.
    3. Use the 2000 census to measure labor market outcomes (employment, hourly wage, and poverty status).

• An Issue of Migration

  • They cannot know the state and county of residence in 1969.
    • An alternative is the birthplace: only State-level, not county.
  • To deal with this problem, they restrict the samples to those whose recorded state of residence in the census is the same as their state of birth.
    • assume that the interstate mobility since birth is unrelated to Sesame Street coverage in 1969.
    • 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) suggests the assumptions be reasonable.

Difference in the percentage of students at grade level between the high-coverage and low-coverage areas.

• Children turned six after 1969 are exposed to Sesame Street.

• Children who were preschool age in 1969 and who lived in areas with greater simulated Sesame Street coverage were statistically significantly more likely to be at the grade level appropriate for their age.

  • A 30-point increase in coverage rates would generate a 3.2 percentage point increase in the rate of grade-for-age status.
  • With 20.3 percent of the sample behind their appropriate grade in school, the move lower the rate by around 16 percent.

• Comparison to Head Start

  • Currie and Thomas (1995): Those who attend Head Start are 47% less likely to repeat a grade relative to a sibling who did not.
  • They did not find a statistically significant effect for African Americans.
  • Caveat: the "academic dosage."

• Placebo analysis: Using 1970 census: ten-years earlier.
  • No discernable difference in the 1970 grade-for-age outcomes.

• First three columns: no evidence of changes in educational attainment.
• Last three columns: take on the expected signs, significant with the 5% level.

The magnitude of the effects is small: A 30 point increase in coverage rise employment by about 1 percentage point.

• Perhaps we should not expect to see large labor market effects driven by early childhood exposure to Sesame Street.

  • Comparison to literature
    • Chetty et al. (2011): 0.1 standard deviation increase in reading test scores is associated with a 1.2 percent wage increase.
    • Bogatz and Ball (1971): Sesame Street increased reading test scores of viewers by 0.36 standard deviations. Estimated effects are somewhat larger than that of the literature, but close ones.

• Effects on grade-for-age status.

  • Regression of the natural log of the wages in 2010 (by NLSY79) on grade-for-age status in 1979 among those born in 1962-1974.
    • students who are in the appropriate grade in high school earn 27 percent more than those who are behind.
    • Given 3 percentage points increase by getting more exposed to Sesame Street would earn a .81 percent increase in wages.

• A limitation of the analysis: they cannot capture specific mechanisms.
• High School and Beyond (HSB) survey
  • A school-based survey of around 60,000 students in 1980 that includes:
    • test scores, school grades, and self-reported measures of self-esteem.
  • Reverse engineering to identify the county locations of the school.

• Limitations
  1. A substantial minority of students do not advance through the educational system on pace with their birth cohort.
  2. The data omits students that had dropped out already.

The effects of Sesame Street may fade by the time they reached the latter stages, but the result is not conclusive.

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Kearney, Melissa S., and Phillip B. Levine. 2019. "Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 11 (1): 318-50.

DOI: 10.1257/app.20170300

• You can access the paper via Google Drive from here