Clearer Sesame Street reception was linked to staying on grade

The short answer

Children who happened to live where the original 1969 broadcast of Sesame Street came through more clearly were more likely to stay on track for their grade in school afterwards. That is a real, carefully measured association from a natural experiment, not proof that any single child's viewing habits today will produce the same outcome.

What the evidence says

Economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine used an unusual natural experiment to study Sesame Street's early impact. In 1969, whether a household could receive the new programme depended partly on its broadcast technology, UHF signals travelled less reliably than VHF, and on distance from a transmission tower, factors unrelated to a family's income or education. Kearney and Levine linked this technical variation in reception quality to Census records on grade-for-age status, educational attainment and labour market outcomes in 1980, 1990 and 2000, comparing children who grew up in areas with strong reception to those in areas with weak reception. The published study, which appeared in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics in January 2019 after circulating as an NBER working paper from 2015, found that Sesame Street improved school performance, with the effect concentrated among boys.

For context

Because reception quality was driven by engineering rather than parental choice, this design avoids the usual problem of comparing families who chose educational television with families who did not, since that comparison would be contaminated by every other difference between those families. That is the study's real strength. Its weakness is precision at the far end of the timeline: the authors report that their estimates of the programme's effect on ultimate educational attainment and adult labour market outcomes were imprecise, meaning the data could not rule out a range of possibilities, from a modest lasting benefit to close to none. The clearest, most confidently stated result is the nearer-term one, staying on grade level in the years immediately following broadcast, not a guaranteed lifetime earnings effect.

A practical next step

When judging a modern educational programme or app by comparison to Sesame Street's reputation, you could ask which specific claim is being made, since this study supports a bounded claim about school readiness far more strongly than it supports claims about adult outcomes decades later.

• Is a comparison to Sesame Street about school readiness, or about long-term life outcomes?
• What population did the original study concentrate its strongest effects on, and does that match the child in question?
• Does a new programme have anything like a natural experiment behind it, or only a marketing claim?

Sesame Street's own long-run evaluation is a rare case of a natural experiment reaching back to a show's earliest broadcasts, and it earns its reputation on a specific, well-measured claim rather than a general one.