Head Start fails
Head Start Basically Has No Effect
Big definitive study, negative results, media silence.
We're talking here about a failed educational investment of over $100 billion, and it's not newsworthy.
As far as I know, Project Head Start has never been shown to produce lasting results, in any study, and there have been lots of those. The study reported above is the huge new one, and it finds the same failure.
Early childhood intervention was thought to be the key to boosting academic performance of poor and minority kids. Developmental psychologists had a number of theories, including some highly dubious ones, about why that should be so. None of those theories of has panned out.
What early enrichment programs appear to do, and all they appear to do, is to promote intellectual growth at an earlier age than it would otherwise occur. That's why kids in the program often show an initial boost in test scores. Measured against age-norms, earlier intellectual growth raises their percentile rankings, compared with kids not in the program.
But earlier growth does not increase eventual intellectual level, it merely alters the timing. As the other kids catch up, the initial advantage disappears. This has been called the "hothouse effect" -- you get the tomatoes earlier, but not any more tomatoes than you would have gotten eventually anyway.
Intellectual ability, at least as measured by IQ tests, is virtually certainly a product primarily of inherited, genetic differences. The potential of environmental enrichment to improve IQ scores in wealthy societies like ours is extremely limited, as we have discovered during decades of trying and failing.
But since basic academic skills can be taught in ways that do not require a high IQ, there is no excuse whatever for mass failure in our public schools, and that includes inner city systems where failure has become the accepted norm, and generations of kids are being dumped like garbage. That ongoing tragedy is a product of the power of bloated administrative bureaucracies and self-interested teachers unions to resist innovation, not a result of low IQ scores.
Byron
Big definitive study, negative results, media silence.
We're talking here about a failed educational investment of over $100 billion, and it's not newsworthy.
As far as I know, Project Head Start has never been shown to produce lasting results, in any study, and there have been lots of those. The study reported above is the huge new one, and it finds the same failure.
Early childhood intervention was thought to be the key to boosting academic performance of poor and minority kids. Developmental psychologists had a number of theories, including some highly dubious ones, about why that should be so. None of those theories of has panned out.
What early enrichment programs appear to do, and all they appear to do, is to promote intellectual growth at an earlier age than it would otherwise occur. That's why kids in the program often show an initial boost in test scores. Measured against age-norms, earlier intellectual growth raises their percentile rankings, compared with kids not in the program.
But earlier growth does not increase eventual intellectual level, it merely alters the timing. As the other kids catch up, the initial advantage disappears. This has been called the "hothouse effect" -- you get the tomatoes earlier, but not any more tomatoes than you would have gotten eventually anyway.
Intellectual ability, at least as measured by IQ tests, is virtually certainly a product primarily of inherited, genetic differences. The potential of environmental enrichment to improve IQ scores in wealthy societies like ours is extremely limited, as we have discovered during decades of trying and failing.
But since basic academic skills can be taught in ways that do not require a high IQ, there is no excuse whatever for mass failure in our public schools, and that includes inner city systems where failure has become the accepted norm, and generations of kids are being dumped like garbage. That ongoing tragedy is a product of the power of bloated administrative bureaucracies and self-interested teachers unions to resist innovation, not a result of low IQ scores.
Byron
posted by Byron | Thursday, January 14, 2010
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