As I mentioned, IMO, the best way to help disadvantaged kids would be to give them free nutritious food at school twice a day starting in kindergarten. [...] There are reams and reams of studies supporting this idea.
Supporting the idea that starting adequate nourishment in kindergarten, limited to 180 days a year, reverses the effects of 5 years of inadequate nutrition? The two human studies you provided were working with much younger kids.
I could get behind "free nutritious food every day, starting significantly prior to conception," as a best way, but free school breakfast and lunch is a day late and a dollar short.
I never said that you can reverse the effects of 5 years of inadequate nutrition (??). Please don't make unfounded accusations that derail a debate and turn it into a shouting match.
I did say (more than once) that access to prenatal care is very important. I absolutely agree that our society should help poor kids get nutritious food starting very early. I also think that the easiest place to
start is in school, because free lunch programs are already in place. But they need to substitute good food for fried food and get rid of soda machines (as I also mentioned earlier).
As for the Abcedarian project, the study was very small and the larger study didn't get the same results. Also,
this peer-reviewed critique of the project says that the IQ differences found at ages two and three had disappeared by age five. The abstract notes that "these results are typical of early intervention studies." The paper itself presents a detailed critique of the study and raises specific points that weren't addressed by the Abcedarian authors. This is not typically a good sign. It also raises some signficant weaknesses with Abcedarian. If anyone wants the critique, PM me and I'll email it.
I've read many education studies that claim incredible/miraculous/fantastic results. On close inspection, the studies have more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese (
this one stands out as being a particularly bad example of pseudoscience), yet it's been widely cited. But the problem is that most people accept what the authors claim at face value. People rarely take the time to carefully analyze miraculous findings of an education study. When someone DOES make a criticism, s/he's often ignored or shouted down with epithets that distract from the actual criticism.
Honestly, this stuff drives me nuts because I see so many of these kinds of studies being funded and published, and we waste money and effort chasing fantasies.
