STUDY RESULTS AND A PILOT PROGRAM

Bond was elected governor again in 1980, and he took an active role in planning another major statewide conference for the following year. The conference attracted 200 people with an interest in the education of young children—people in business and industry as well as professional educators. As a result, a top aide, directed by Bond to spend the entire day at the session, wrote a memo urging the governor to intensify his efforts on behalf of early childhood education.

By now the findings of the Harvard Preschool Project were underscoring the importance of Winter's efforts and those of her colleagues. Writing later in the May 1985 issue of the magazine Principal, she noted that the Harvard research revealed that "experiences during the early years influence the development of all major abilities. The extensive observations of children and parent-child interactions in homes, representing a variety of educational and economic backgrounds, make this study of particular value."

The Harvard study, Winter noted, showed that a child's language competence, curiosity, social skills, and cognitive intelligence at age six could with few exceptions be predicted at age three. "Our education system, however, essentially ignores the formative years," Winter said, "despite the fact that it is very difficult to compensate for a poor beginning with any means we now have available."

The Harvard study confirmed convictions long held by the group that had steadfastly advocated parent education. They again drew on a mixture of private and public resources to start a four-year pilot project that became the forerunner of Parents As Teachers. Called New Parents as Teachers, it was a cooperative effort of the Department of Education, four Missouri school districts, and the Danforth Foundation, which had earlier provided funding to hire Burton White as senior consultant for the Harvard study. For Mallory, it was significant that the pilot project would represent research "done in Missouri, for Missourians, by Missourians."

GEARING UP

Most of 1981 was devoted to training two parent educators and an administrator assigned part time for each of four pilot sites and to recruiting families to participate. The experiment began in 1982 with 390 families, representing a cross section of society based on socioeconomic status, age,