Let’s take ‘Sesame Street’ out of the equation for PBS funding 

As Congress threatens to defund public broadcasting, the defenders of PBS and NPR keep defending themselves by pointing to the importance of their longstanding signature program: “Sesame Street.”

At a recent fiery House Oversight hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green denounced public media as “radical left-wing echo chambers.” The response by Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) was to urge his colleagues to “fire Elon Musk, save Elmo,” while displaying a full-sized image of the iconic puppet.

But making “Sesame Street” the foundation of their defense is a dated and suspect tactic for the defenders of public broadcasting — and not only because Bert and Ernie’s home has long since migrated to HBO, nor even because newer, commercially produced children’s programming such as the “Octonauts” (ecology and sea life) and “Bluey” (creative solutions to problems) clearly have educational dimensions once confined to “Sesame Street.”  

The limits of using “Sesame Street” as the justification for public broadcasting goes back further. It can be found in the single best (and under-appreciated) evaluation of the program’s impact on young children, a 2015 National Economics Journal paper by economist Melissa Kearney and Philip Levine, “Early Childhood Education by Television: Lessons from Sesame Street.” 

In a clever analysis reminiscent of Freakonomics, Kearney and Levine examined the effect of this show in its early days by using a long-forgotten aspect of television technology. Since many households were unable to receive PBS if they lacked Ultra High Frequency (UHF) televisions in the pre-cable era, it was possible to compare education effects in areas where “Sesame Street” was available and where it was not. It was what the economists call a natural experiment. 

On one level, the impact of the program was strikingly positive. It did a good job of preparing young children to be ready for school and to start their education at “grade-level.” According to Kearney and Levine, exposure to “Sesame Street” in the early 1970s “led to positive impacts on the educational performance of the generation of children who experienced their preschool years when Sesame Street was introduced in areas with greater broadcast coverage.” 

That’s exactly the sort of finding PBS likes to promote. But the Kearney-Levine paper also reached a less positive conclusion: that the positive impact of “Sesame Street” was not sustained.

Indeed, the data can be interpreted, they say, to conclude that “any effect of the show on either academic achievement or socio-emotional development had completely faded by the time a child reached the latter stages of his or her high school career.” No one who has followed the decline of student proficiency in recent years should be surprised by that result.

Nor can we even be certain that “Sesame Street” caused the positive results in the analysis. Numerous studies have found that parental involvement with children, whether through shared activities, reading aloud or homework help, is the secret sauce in promoting success in school. A Journal of Educational Psychology study concludes that “family involvement in school should be a central aim of practice and policy solutions to the achievement gap between lower and higher income children.” A study in the journal Family Issues found that parental involvement led to “positive growth in children’s attention, persistence, motivation to learn, and receptive vocabulary; and decreased problem behaviors.”

Even a more recent study done for PBS made clear that the goal of a math education through “family engagement” was key to any positive impact. 

“Sesame Street” was a bona fide phenomenon when it was introduced in 1969. There is every reason to believe that parents were inspired to watch it with their kids — in other words, it sparked parental involvement. Indeed, it may be that watching almost any age-appropriate program with an “involved adult” would be a boost. For example, my wife and I found that explaining the cultural references in “The Simpsons” was a great way to teach American history at home.

In that context, it’s worth noting that Kearney, the MIT-trained economist who co-authored the “Sesame Street” study, has attracted far more attention of late for her new book. In it she writes that “the decline in marriage and the corresponding rise in one-parent homes has widened the gap in opportunities and outcomes for children of different backgrounds and today poses economic and social challenges we cannot afford to ignore.” Parental involvement is inevitably less likely when there is only one parent at home.  

This is not a “Sesame Street” message, it is worth noting. A segment titled, “It Takes a Street” features a video montage of various types of families, with a background song proclaiming that “people living together, loving each other, that’s what makes a family.” 

There may be reasons not to defund PBS and NPR. But “Sesame Street” is not one of them. 

Howard Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.