Our Legacy

In 1966, Joan Ganz Cooney and colleagues who would later found the Children's Television Workshop charted new territory by proposing to use the power of television to educate underserved preschoolers. Their efforts led to the creation of Sesame Street, now the single largest informal educator in the world. The curriculum development, research and creative process used by Mrs. Cooney and her colleagues ensured that new media experiences would benefit young children and their families. The remarkable success of the "Workshop model" led to the revolutionary use of the television as an educational medium. The positive impact on children's learning and social skills has been documented in over 1,000 research studies, chronicled in business case studies and documentaries, and is culturally embedded in the iconic popularity of the Muppets.

Forty years after the landmark study that led to the creation of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop has established The Joan Ganz Cooney Center to perpetuate Mrs. Cooney's vision in a rapidly changing world. The Center will focus new resources on the challenges children face today, asking the 21st century equivalent of her original question, "How can emerging media help children learn?"

Joan Ganz Cooney (b. November 30, 1929) began her career as a reporter in her hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. From 1954 to 1962 she worked as a publicist for NBC in New York and for the U.S. Steel Hour, a highly acclaimed CBS drama series. Mrs. Cooney eventually produced documentaries at WNET/Channel 13, winning her first Emmy for Poverty, Anti-Poverty, and the Poor, a documentary on the U.S. government's War on Poverty program.

In 1966, with the support of Lloyd Morrisett, then a vice president at Carnegie Corporation of New York, Mrs. Cooney produced a study entitled, The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, which provided the rationale for using television to teach disadvantaged children basic skills through programs that were both educational and entertaining. The report convinced the Corporation to partly finance such a project, and Mrs. Cooney and Dr. Morrisett were able to raise the rest of the $8 million through the U.S. Office of Education, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Ford Foundation. In 1968, the Children's Television Workshop was born (it was renamed Sesame Workshop in 2000).

Sesame Street debuted a year later and had an immediate and revolutionary impact on children's educational television. It was the first preschool program to integrate education and entertainment as well as feature a multicultural cast. It has been broadcast daily since 1969 in the U.S. on more than 300 Public Broadcasting Service stations and has been seen by hundreds of millions of children in more than 140 foreign countries. Indigenous co-productions reflecting local languages, customs and educational needs have since been produced for audiences in the Arab world, Israel, India, Indonesia, Bosnia, Portugal, Turkey, Germany, France, Poland, Norway, Sweden, Holland, Russia, China, South Africa, Egypt, the Philippines, Canada, Spain and Latin America.

To learn more about Joan Ganz Cooney:

• Watch an oral history interview, part of The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation's Archive of American Television.
• Read a biography by The Museum of Broadcast Communications.
• Read a biography, part of the PBS series They Made America.