Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Waiting for Superman

I agree--it's not that helpful to just wish that were true. My point is that there are things we CAN do (birth to 3 stuff, intensive intervention with new parents even before the child is born) so that kids DO arrive in K in better condition to learn.

That seems reasonable, but until all teachers are somehow given the tools to encourage high achievers not every child will be given more than babysitting at school. I think it's good for schools to teach all their students, not just one slice of the whole group. So I do think that pedalogical ideology has to change as well as home factors.

((shrugs and more shrugs))
Grinity

Oh yes, I agree completely. I really, really agree.

My overall point is just that I don't trust what Diane Ravitch wrote, and I was trying to give a couple examples of speciousness in her arguments.

Interesting. Now I am just curious... What is behind your not trusting what she wrote?

A Brookings study "The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education" http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0720_hcz_whitehurst.aspx reaches more pessimistic conclusions about early intervention in general and the Harlem Children's Zone in particular:

"There is no compelling evidence that investments in parenting classes, health services, nutritional programs, and community improvement in general have appreciable effects on student achievement in schools in the U.S. Indeed there is considerable evidence in addition to the results from the present study that questions the return on such investments for academic achievement. For example, the Moving to Opportunity study, a large scale randomized trial that compared the school outcomes of students from poor families who did or did not receive a voucher to move to a better neighborhood, found no impact of better neighborhoods on student academic achievement.[x] The Nurse-Family Partnership, a highly regarded program in which experienced nurses visit low-income expectant mothers during their first pregnancy and the first two years of their children�s lives to teach parenting and life skills, does not have an impact on children�s reading and mathematics test scores.[xi] Head Start, the federal early childhood program, differs from other preschool programs in its inclusion of health, nutrition, and family supports. Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services.[xii] Even Start, a federal program that combines early childhood education with educational services for parents on the theory that better educated parents produce better educated kids, generates no measureable impact on the academic achievement of children.[xiii]

This is not to suggest that factors such as parental education and income, family structure, parental employment, exposure to crime, and child health are not related to student achievement. Such statistical associations are at the empirical heart of the Broader, Bolder claims. However, evidence, for example, that single parenthood is negatively associated with children�s academic achievement is no evidence at all that investment in a community service that intends to keep parents together will succeed in doing so, much less have a cascading positive impact on the academic achievement of children in families that are served by the marital counseling program. Per our recitation of findings from studies of Moving to Opportunity, Head Start, et al., efforts to affect achievement in school through broad interventions outside of school have little evidence of success."

<end of excerpt>

I don't wish to be taxed still more for still more social services, preferring to spend MY money on MY children. The party controlling the House is sympathetic to this viewpoint.

See the two points that I made in this thread.

I'm tempted to write a letter to the Times about this. Depends on time and energy tonight. I will also write more here at some point (on a deadline right now).

ok. Thanks Val. Somehow I missed your post at 10:18 when I read through the thread earlier.

Goodluck on yout deadline!

I did not read the article

A Brookings study "The Harlem Children's Zone, Promise Neighborhoods, and the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education" http://www.brookings.edu/reports/2010/0720_hcz_whitehurst.aspx

but if the following quote is accurate,

"Children from families enrolled in Head Start do no better academically in early elementary school than similar children whose parents enroll them in preschool programs that do not include these broader services"

It appears to me that stats are being used to support an argument that is just not there.

What I mean is that apples are being compared to oranges.

A more accurate comparison would be to compare the success of head start students to similar students who have no preschool from the same area. (Not to the group that decides to home preschool), but to the group that sees no value or simply can not afford preschool even with financial help.

My reasoning is that parents who already enroll their children in preschool programs (or providing appropriate home environment) are more able/likley to provide the broader services that head start provides. While, parents who do not, OR CAN NOT will be less able to provide these services and student support.



I'm just saying.

Yes, I agree.
Perhaps a related point- in children whose parents try to pull them out of their local public school and enroll them in a charter school, but don't get in since they were not chosen in the lottery for the charter school-
Those kids have higher test scores than similar kids at the public school, even though the kid didn't actually enroll in the charter school and just stayed at their same public school.
Presumably parents who are organized/motivated enough to try to get their kids into what they perceive to be a better school do other things at home that help their child succeed.

A lot of social scientists do understand selection bias.

Look up Perry Preschool and Abecedarian for randomized experiments on early childhood education and their positive findings. (Yes, academic score increases diminish over time, mostly gone by 8th grade, but long-term the treated kids are doing MUCH better in terms of things like incarceration rates, teen pregnancy, dropping out etc., especially the girls). Both Michal Anderson (Berkeley) and Jim Heckman (UChicago) have recent work looking at the long-term outcomes of those experiments.

I can't remember specifically who did the work (other than Carolyn Hoxby and Jesse Rothstein, but I don't want to go there... there are less controversial studies), but there are many relatively clean papers looking at charter schools and school choice using things like school lotteries and other instruments as exogenous variation to get around problems with selection bias. It's not a solved problem, but not all charter schools and school populations are the same either. The current conventional wisdom among experts (who understand how to find causation) is that some charter schools are better than regular schools and some are worse. On average they're about the same in terms of quality, though charter schools seem to be doing about the same at a lower expense. Why and when that is is still an area of intense study.