Leading By Example: Evelyn Moore

Leading By Example: Evelyn Moore is a thirty-minute oral history documentary about early education's story, purpose, and direction with a renowned maker of change in the field, Ms. Evelyn Moore. A long-time advocate for children of color and the power of education to achieve equity, Ms. Moore's decades of leadership and vision continue to resonate today. Ms. Moore started her own public schooling as a child in segregated schools in Detroit, Michigan. In 1970, she co-founded the National Black Child Development Institute, an organization dedicated to improving the lives of our society's most vulnerable children, retiring as its president of in 2006 after 36 years of extraordinary leadership. This documentary focuses on Ms. Moore's early life and career as the lead teacher for the seminal Perry Preschool Study. From 1962-1967 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, 123 African-American children, ages 3-4, were the subjects of the Perry Preschool Research Demonstration Project. Born in poverty and at high risk of failing in school, half received quality early childhood education; half did not. Over the next 40 years, the HighScope Foundation followed these students and proved that the children in the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school, than adults who did not have preschool - helping to launch the movement for universal pre-kindergarten for all children today.