Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Quota system would dilute school's quality

That is still correlative, though, rather than a mechanistic explanation.

Could be that any time-intensive/attention-intensive intervention would have the same impact.

One of the problems here is that designing a large study with ONLY the studied variable in play is virtually impossible-- and frankly, probably more than a little unethical, at least with those interventions that have demonstrated positive impact on children.

So does improved access to healthcare improve school performance? Yes.

Does improved nutrition? Yes again.

Does improved access to library services? Yes, though not as much as EARLY childhood literacy efforts in those same SES disadvantaged neighborhoods.

I'm just not convinced that we truly know which of these is the "best" intervention to be using. Probably all of them.

Don't misunderstand me-- I don't think that even all of that is going to magically eliminate disproportionate performance that reflects SES. Part of the problem there, I hypothesize, is that we don't really know what the distribution SHOULD look like if there were no bias created by opportunity scarcity.

But when resources to implement interventions are scarce, then it really matters that we are doing the things that have the very best chance of doing the most good for the most children. Is that nutrition?

Honestly? I have no idea. It might be. It might just as readily be better healthcare or childcare, though.

I think it's a matter of values and knowledge, not just income.
As Brooks writes in his latest column "Why Our Elites Stink" http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/opinion/brooks-why-our-elites-stink.html ,

"I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest."

Val, none of those are published, peer-reviewed academic studies. The Ecoliteracy packet sounds nice but you must know that they're sort of spouting off and that their endnotes are not rigorous. The first one you link to looks promising, but they have not published anything yet. These are their preliminary results and they seem to be focused on BMI: http://www.agatstonresearchfoundation.org/HOPS_Study_Preliminary_Results_HOPS_1_and_HOPS_2.pdf

I actually follow this general subject quite closely for work and I really don't think anyone's come out with anything major on this WRT performance. You say "just do a Google search" as though one is going to come up with lots of solid science on this. You will come up with lots of people making conjecture, sure.

BTW, I don't want to give the impression that I am uninterested in improving childhood nutrition or unconcerned about childhood obesity or the abysmal state of school lunch. None of this is true. We are on the brink of a major public health crisis; I'm terrified by what I've seen WRT type 2 diabetes rates in children. However, if you think this is the primary way to improve academic underachievement in disadvantaged children, I really do think you're barking up the wrong tree.

Birth-5 intervention, excellent prenatal care, daycare and preschool. If a child is behind by third grade, chances are that he/she will never catch up.

Do you know a working-class family that wouldn't LOVE to spend more resources on helping their children get a leg up? If you don't have the income, your values and knowledge don't matter. You have to have it to spend it.

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/retirement/2008-05-19-generation-x-retirement_N.htm

All of the following in inflation-adjusted dollars:

- The median income for men now in their 30s is 12% lower than what their dads earned three decades earlier
- From 1974 until 2004, family income rose only 9%.
- Health insurance soared 74% since 1970
- The mortgage payment that a median-income family is paying for a three-bedroom, one-bath house jumped 76%
- The average cost of owning a car has declined from a generation ago. But auto-related expenses jumped 52% because the typical family now owns at least two vehicles. (because both parents work)

The fact that working class families have managed to increase their spending on their children at all despite all these crushing economic forces clearly shows that their values are in the right place.

On the other end, what's an extra $5300 a year in non-inflation-adjusted dollars to a typical affluent family whose income has skyrocketed over the same span?

A lot of these people spend money on things like travel, going out to eat, cable, cell phones, etc.

Life really isn't that expensive unless you buy a ton of useless stuff.

Granted, I don't have a mortgage and we have two older cars, but I still spend about $2000/month for a family of four.

Costs of living vary greatly by location. $2000/mo wouldn't cover my mortgage and transportation costs, and I also have older vehicles. Anything less would require relocating to an area with higher crime and even worse schools than we're dealing with now.

Eating out is not a luxury when two wage earners are spending significantly more time outside the house earning wages, between increased working hours and commute times. It's an opportunity cost that must be absorbed. There are far more opportunity costs, relating to health, child development, etc.

Throwing resources at low-income households can make things worse, because the resources are misused. Here is an example.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/us/new-digital-divide-seen-in-wasting-time-online.html
Wasting Time Is New Divide in Digital Era
By MATT RICHTEL
New York Times
Published: May 29, 2012
In the 1990s, the term “digital divide” emerged to describe technology’s haves and have-nots. It inspired many efforts to get the latest computing tools into the hands of all Americans, particularly low-income families.

Those efforts have indeed shrunk the divide. But they have created an unintended side effect, one that is surprising and troubling to researchers and policy makers and that the government now wants to fix.

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.

“I’m not antitechnology at home, but it’s not a savior,” said Laura Robell, the principal at Elmhurst Community Prep, a public middle school in East Oakland, Calif., who has long doubted the value of putting a computer in every home without proper oversight.

“So often we have parents come up to us and say, ‘I have no idea how to monitor Facebook,’ ” she said.

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A similar story from a few years back:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/weekinreview/15read.html
WHEN COMPUTERS HURT INSTEAD OF HELP
New York Times
June 15, 2008

Ray Fisman writes on the Web site Slate about why giving computers to poor children won’t necessarily help educate them.

Parents are more worried than ever about making sure their kids can compete in today’s high-tech world, and the growing digital divide is a subject of great concern for educators and policymakers. Federal subsidies in the United States provide billions of dollars for computer access in schools and libraries, and billions more may soon be spent in the developing world through programs such as One Laptop per Child. But even O.L.P.C.’s $100 laptop comes loaded with more distractions than my PET [the world’s first personal computer] ever had. So will kids use these subsidized computing resources to prepare for the demands of the 21st-century job market? Or do computers just serve as a 21st-century substitute for that more venerable time-waster—the television?

New research by economists Ofer Malamud and Cristian Pop-Eleches provides an answer: For many kids, computers are indeed more of a distraction than a learning opportunity. The two researchers surveyed households that applied to Euro 200, a voucher distribution program in Romania designed to help poor households defray the cost of buying a computer for their children. It turns out that kids in households lucky enough to get computer vouchers spent a lot less time watching TV — but that’s where the good news ends. “Vouchered” kids also spent less time doing homework, got lower grades and reported lower educational aspirations than the “unvouchered” kids. ...

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People have discussed improving nutrition as a way to help low-SES children in this thread. Obesity is a bigger problem than undernourishment for America's poor, and free breakfasts, which have been touted by nutrition advocates, can worsen the obesity problem.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/n...akfasts-some-children-may-eat-twice.html
With Classroom Breakfasts, a Concern That Some Children Eat Twice
By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
Published: April 19, 201

It is an innovative, intuitive and increasingly common way to ensure that food reaches the mouths of hungry children from low-income families: give out free breakfast in the classroom at the start of each school day.

The results, seen at urban districts across the country, are striking. Without the stigma of a trip to the cafeteria, the number of students in Newark who eat breakfast in school has tripled. Absenteeism has fallen in Los Angeles, and officials in Chicago say children from low-income families are eating healthier meals, more often.

But New York City, a leader in public health reform, has balked at expanding the approach in its own schools, and City Hall is citing a surprising concern: that all those classroom Cheerios and cheese sticks could lead to more obesity.

Some children, it turns out, may be double-dipping.

The city’s health department hit the pause button after a study found that the Breakfast in the Classroom program, now used in 381 of the city’s 1,750 schools, was problematic because some children might be “inadvertently taking in excess calories by eating in multiple locations” — in other words, having a meal at home, or snacking on the way to school, then eating again in school.

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The food stamps program may increase obesity in low-income women.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...the-link-between-food-stamps-and-obesity
Food Stamps and Obesity
Diane M. Gibson
UPDATED SEPTEMBER 28, 2011, 12:17 AM

Forty-two percent of low-income women in the United States are obese, and the rate of obesity is even higher among women who participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -- formerly the food stamp program.

Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether this is the result of receiving SNAP benefits or whether there is simply a correlation between obesity and SNAP participation that arises because the low-income women who are more likely to be obese are also those most interested in getting SNAP benefits. The research suggests that SNAP participation may actually cause an increase in the likelihood of obesity for low-income women. A relationship between SNAP participation and obesity has not been found for low-income men.

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Higher obesity rates in the poor is not caused by their living in food deserts:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/h...s-and-obesity-challenged-in-studies.html
Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity
By GINA KOLATA
April 17, 2012

It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.

But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said.

Some experts say these new findings raise questions about the effectiveness of efforts to combat the obesity epidemic simply by improving access to healthy foods. Despite campaigns to get Americans to exercise more and eat healthier foods, obesity rates have not budged over the past decade, according to recently released federal data.

“It is always easy to advocate for more grocery stores,” said Kelly D. Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, who was not involved in the studies. “But if you are looking for what you hope will change obesity, healthy food access is probably just wishful thinking.”

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If spending more on the poor does not help them overall, consider spending less and letting productive people keep more of their earnings.

I don't think I'd use the term "primary way." But I would say "ensuring good nutrition and good pre-natal care are really important things to do and will do a lot for cognitive and other forms of childhood development."

I stand by my assertion: there's a huge body of evidence showing solid links between malnutrition and cognitive impairment. I linked to studies on Google scholar in one of my messages. All those studies are peer reviewed. Here's one.

I don't really understand why the studies I've cited are being dismissed (and as a side note, why the criticisms of Abcedarian have been ignored). I mentioned published studies in at the end of the Ecopacket, like this one. I included the bird study because it was trying to control for factors that can't be controlled in humans. I'm not sure why studies in developing countries were dismissed; we have malnutrition due to poverty in this country too (as this study points out). Not to mention that malnutrition is a lack of nutrients, not necessarily calories. Obese kids may be malnourished.

There are multiple studies on this malnutrition and development going back decades. The idea that malnutrition affects development (cognitive and otherwise) negatively has been settled, and I'm not even sure why we're debating it.

Honestly, I'm trying to understand why anyone would necessarily even need a randomized study specifically showing that better food raises scores on standardized tests before adding it to that list you wrote at the end of your message. This requirement seems superfluous, given that the effects of malnutrition are so well-documented. IMO, the priority should be just getting to it and finding a way to feed people properly.

And I'm going to add this again. You haven't responded to my points about the Abcedarian study. There are have been serious criticisms of that study in peer-reviewed journals. Whenever you've critiqued a point I made, I've responded with more studies. You need to give me solid studies showing that Abcedarian-type methods produce long-term results of the types claimed, in the original study groups. And I'd like to see a response to my criticisms of Abcedarian (sample size, bias, etc.).

Food insecurity does exist in the United States, which is why in schools, we already have free and reduced-price lunch and breakfast programs. I would never advocate cutting or taking them away. I absolutely think they serve a valuable purpose. I just don't agree that we have evidence that eating, say, poor quality pizza, frozen green beans and canned fruit (typical school lunch now) makes you perform worse on tests than eating better quality pizza with whole grain crust, fresh fruit and salad (typical improved school lunch under lunch improvement programs). Wasn't that what you were talking about--improving the quality of school lunches and breakfasts? (Upthread: "IMO, we'd do better to ensure that free school breakfasts and lunches have high nutritional content (substitute fresh fish, fruits and raw or steamed vegetables for pink slime hamburgers and french fries, for example, and get rid of soda in school.") That's really a different thing than helping kids who are actually hungry. BTW, huge progress towards eliminating soda in schools has already been made. You'd be surprised how much, but if you have university library access, as you seem to, you could look this up. I think this is fabulous news, but the really interesting thing is that so far so one has been able to find any convincing drops in kids' BMIs or sweetened drink consumption. The theory is that kids are making up for it at home.

Mind you, I think it's a good thing to improve school food like that. I just really don't see evidence that it's going to suddenly give us high achievers.

BTW, we ARE in agreement WRT prenatal care. If we could reduce premature birth, which carries a horrendous cost, boy, we could do a lot to help kids, not to mention reduce healthcare costs. A lot of preemies have LDs. It's really tough for them. The hard thing is that we don't exactly know what causes prematurity, but we do know that women who don't get prenatal care are at a higher risk of it. There seems to be a stress connection, and something just came out about how being on your feet a lot of hours is connected.

Re Abcedarian, I'd have to go back and look at it again. It is repeatedly cited as a model program, as are a number of other intensive high-intervention quality programs with young disadvantaged children. It's pretty widely acknowledged in the family science field. You were griping earlier about them not being proven to raise IQ. So? Isn't IQ supposed to be fairly immutable anyway? I'm much more interested in other outcomes, such as lack of involvement in criminal activity, steady employment, HS graduation rates, income, etc. Here's another study:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01563.x/abstract

Using data collected up to age 26 in the Chicago Longitudinal Study, this cost–benefit analysis of the Child-Parent Centers (CPC) is the first for a sustained publicly funded early intervention. The program provides services for low-income families beginning at age 3 in 20 school sites. Kindergarten and school-age services are provided up to age 9 (third grade). Findings from a complete cohort of over 1,400 program and comparison group participants indicated that the CPCs had economic benefits in 2007 dollars that exceeded costs. The preschool program provided a total return to society of $10.83 per dollar invested (18% annual return). The primary sources of benefits were increased earnings and tax revenues and averted criminal justice system costs. The school-age program had a societal return of $3.97 per dollar invested (10% annual return). The extended intervention program (4–6 years) had a societal return of $8.24 (18% annual return). Estimates were robust across a wide range of analyses including Monte Carlo simulations. Males, 1-year preschool participants, and children from higher risk families derived greater benefits. Findings provide strong evidence that sustained programs can contribute to well-being for individuals and society.

Note that as usual, the programs for younger children were significantly more effective.