Lots of information from a social policy researcher using hard data.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4836557.ece"Attempts to raise academic ability have focused on the pre-school years, on the assumption that this is the period when the brain and personality are most malleable. Two decades ago a US academic group called the Consortium for Longitudinal Studies conducted an analysis of 11 of the best pre-school interventions and found they produced an average short-term gain of about seven IQ points relative to a control group, which fell off to a trivial three IQ points after three years - and to nothing in the final follow-up. The consortium's bottom line was that "the effect of early education on intelligence test scores was not permanent".
"There is some good news in the independently assessed maths scores: British nine-year-olds showed a significant increase. But maths in the early years is based on simple concepts that almost all children should be able to learn. Then, when mathematics moves to the abstractions of algebra and the logic of geometry, large numbers of children fall by the wayside - they are just not clever enough in logical-mathematical ability to keep up. That's why a test at the age of nine can show improvement while a test at 13 does not."
"This counterintuitive result was first exposed in the United States in 1966, with the publication of the Coleman report. To everyone's shock, the study - whose sample included 645,000 students - found that the quality of schools explained almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Measures such as the credentials of the teachers, the extensiveness of physical facilities, money spent per student - none of the things people assumed to be important in explaining educational achievement was important in fact. "
"When we turn to the 40%-60% of IQ that is environmental, children of the professional classes also have an advantage, but little of it has to do with money. Reading bedtime stories to toddlers every night does not cost money - but such behaviour goes from "almost universal" to "uncommon" as social class goes from top to bottom. To refrain from smoking, alcohol and drugs during pregnancy costs no money, but such restraint is once again correlated with social class."
