Sesame Street, which celebrated its 45th anniversary this year, was developed at a time that was as hostile as it was progressive: an era of riots and race-based violence. “It was intentional from the beginning to show different races living together," David Kleeman, who formerly oversaw the American Center for Children and Media, told Newsweek. “[Its developers] were very conscious of the modeling that kids and parents would take away from that.” It normalizes other kinds of diversity, too—from learning disabilities to destitution to imaginary friends, the show teaches children that it was okay to be different, that everyone struggles and develops in their own ways.

Today, despite growing diversity and expanding knowledge about the value of school integration, early-education classrooms in the U.S. don’t look much like Sesame Street. Preschoolers in state-run programs—the majority of whom are racial minorities—tend to be clustered in pre-k classrooms serving high concentrations of impoverished children of color, according to the TCF report, which was published in partnership with the Poverty & Race Research Action Council. Only a sliver of the children sampled in the TCF report were enrolled in classrooms that were both racially diverse and medium- to high-income. Analysts surveyed the position statements of more than a dozen of the country’s leading early-learning organizations (including the Children’s Defense Fund and the National Black Child Development Institute) and found that none of them cited socioeconomic or racial integration in preschools as an explicit goal.

From the get go, Sesame Street showed kids a different world than the one found in a typical pre-k classroom today. And it was a lot of kids. When it first launched, the show certainly had a broader reach than formal schooling did at the time, considering that just 19 percent of 4-year-olds in 1970 attended preschool, according to the new study. By 1970, meanwhile, as many as 36 percent of preschool-aged children in the country were watching the show—comparable to the percentage of Americans estimated to watch the Super Bowl today.

Research on Sesame Street is nothing new; more than 1,000 studies have apparently been conducted on it since it came out, most of them touting the show’s success as an educational tool. (When the show first came out, some parents were concerned that its structure—short segments filled with bright colors and simple concepts—might rewire children's brains to shorten their attention spans.)

The new analysis focused on the viewers who were exposed to Sesame Street as preschool-aged children when the show first came out. It found that kids who had better access to the show performed better in elementary school than those who were older at the time it came out or lived in areas where it wasn’t broadcast. (Because of TV-technology limitations, children in some areas couldn’t watch it.) The preschoolers with access were apparently more likely to start school on time and progress through grade levels at the ages deemed appropriate. And the effect appeared to be most significant among children raised in economically disadvantaged areas—an impact that mirrors that of pre-k.