ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Sesame Street's effects on academic knowledge and skills. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s had drawn national attention to the needs of inner-city children and provided an atmosphere of activism toward positive social change. Educational researchers had recently published data that both established the importance of early education and documented gaps in school readiness between low-income, minority children and their more privileged White counterparts, findings that gave rise not only to Sesame Street, but to Head Start as well. In developing Sesame Street, the Children's Television Workshop (CTW) created what would eventually come to be called the CTW Model or Sesame Workshop Model an interdisciplinary approach to television production that brings together content experts, television producers, and educational researchers, who collaborate throughout the life of the project. The educational impact of Sesame Street was first documented in a pair of studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service (ETS).
