The Bell Curve Part 1V- Living Together Chapter 17-Raising Cognitive Ability

Do we favor training programs for chronically unemployed men? These programs will fail, as they have in the past, unless they are targeted for a population half of which have IQs below 80. Do we wish to reduce income inequality? If so, we must understand how the market for cognitive ability drives the process. Do we aspire to have a "world class" educational system for America? Before changing the present system, we had better think hard about how cognitive ability and education are linked. Part 1V explores some of these important relationships.

Chapter 18 reviews the American educational experience in the last decades of the twentieth-century. In Chapters 19 and 20 the focus shifts to affirmative action policies in education and the workplace. In the recent past, our country has dedicated itself to coping with particular types of inequalities, trying, unsuccessfully, to equalize outcomes for various groups. During this period of time the country has retreated from previous principles of individual equality before the law and has adopted policies that treat people as members of groups. The authors will attempt to make the costs and benefits of policies associated with affirmative action clearer than they usually are. In the final two chapters of The Bell Curve the authors attempt to predict the future. But first, Herrnstein and Murray discus the ramifications of policies designed to raise the nations mean IQ. Raising intelligence significantly would circumvent many of the social problems our country faces in the twenty-first century. In recent times we have concentrated on needed environmental improvements- better nutrition, stimulating environments for preschool children, good schools thereafter, etc. Nothing that has been tried has raised the intelligence of the people in our nation. There is ample evidence that improved nutrition has raised the mean IQ in several nations but this approach remains unproven in America. Special programs, such as Head Start, have had minor, and at best temporary, effects on school performance but have proven not to improve intelligence. The one intervention that has worked consistently is adoption at birth from a bad family environment to a good one. The average gains in childhood IQ associated with adoption are in the region of six points. Taken together, the story of past costly attempts to raise intelligence is one of high hopes, flamboyant claims, and disappointing results. It seems abundantly clear that the problems associated with low cognitive ability are not going to be solved by outside interventions, no matter how well intended, to make children smarter. We may be deeply and properly dissatisfied with the nurturing of American intelligence, but finding solutions that are affordable, politically tolerable, and have not been already tried, is another matter altogether. In this chapter the authors review the results of several social interventions that have employed to raise childhood intelligence. They close with their thoughts on what the results of these attempts to increase the intelligence should mean for policy in the future. They begin with a review of the programs to increase intelligence by improving nutrition. Historically, it is a fact that people in affluent countries are larger than their ancestors, presumably because they were eating better. IQ scores also have been rising in the well-fed segments of the population. This does not mean, however, that better eating makes smarter people. Recent studies on the subject have given, at best, mixed results. The most damaging blow to the proposition that nutrition effects IQ came from a study of over 100,000 Dutch men who were born during a time of intense famine at the end of the second World War. Nineteen years later the men took intelligence tests to qualify for national military service. These men scored no lower than men born to mothers who had no exposure to famine. A small sample of Welsh school children were given vitamins and mineral supplements for eight months. Their test scores were compared with an equal number of their schoolmates who received non-nutritive placebos. Those getting the supplements gained eight points in their nonverbal test scores but there was no improvement in their verbal scores. A study of 600 California eighth graders produced similar results. The vitamin and mineral supplements raised scores on most of the nonverbal tests of intelligence but failed to improve the scores designed to measure verbal intelligence. Other studies failed to show that vitamin and mineral supplements had any effect on IQ. It should be noted that most, if not all, of these studies were flawed in one way or another. As a result, as of 1995, when The Bell Curve was published, the effect of diet in the development of IQ remained unclear. Can IQ be raised by improving educational opportunities? Most people assume that below-average test scores from children from the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution results from the fact that they have received poor educations. Improve the schools, it is assumed, and the test scores will rise. Differences in schools do matter but not nearly as much as most people think. In a massive study of 645,000 underprivileged children mandated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, failed to find any benefit to cognitive ability that could be attributed to better school quality. The attempts schools made to improve their effectiveness did not reduce the cognitive differences among different children or those between ethnic groups. The Coleman report concluded that parochial schools generally do a better job of developing the cognitive abilities of their students than public schools. Yet the basic conclusions of the report have stood the test of time and criticism: Variations in teacher credentials, per pupil expenditures, class room size and other objective factors in public schools do not account for much of the difference in the cognitive abilities of American School children. The Coleman report told us that the cognitive differences among individuals and groups cannot be reduced significantly by further attempts to equalize the kinds of bricks-and-mortar factors and teacher qualifications that school boards and taxpayers most often concern themselves with. The failure of programs like school busing, Head Start and affirmative action make this point abundantly clear (my conclusion, not the authors). Can education improve IQ? A Swedish study performed 70 years ago was designed to determine the effect of education on IQ. Several hundred ten year old boys were tested for IQ and retested again ten years later. By far the most important determiner of IQ at age 20 was their IQ at age 10. In fact, the students IQ at age ten was five times more important than years of schooling. Other studies have shown that the more uniform a countries schooling is, the more correlated adult IQ is with childhood IQ. The conclusion the authors draw from these studies is that equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling in America will have little or no effect on the nations mean IQ. Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965, thereby initiating a massive and continuing effort to improve the education of disadvantaged students that continues to this day. Billions of dollars have been spent on this effort to level the educational playing field each year. In 1992 expenditures on ESEA were at an all time high of $5.6 billion. Hundreds of studies have been performed over the years to determine the effectiveness of ESEA funding. The data showed that students in compensatory programs still tended to fall behind students who were not in government subsidized programs, but not as fast as they would have if the schools they were in had received no compensation, an outcome that the institute treated as evidence of success. There was no evidence whatsoever to support a conclusion that compensatory education narrowed the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged school children. In recent years the focus has been on teaching specific academic skills and problem solving, not expecting improvements in overall academic achievement or general intelligence. Most often the large test score increases in local schools routinely reported by the drive-by media over the years have been plagued by fraud and teacher led institutional wide cheating on the standardized tests. The authors go on to surmise two studies that suggest that that educational improvements can increase the mean IQ of a nation. In 1979 the incoming president of Venezuela appointed to his cabinet a Minister of State for the Development of Human Intelligence. The new minister was convinced that the nation's average intelligence level was fundamental to its well-being and set out to determine what could be done to raise the IQ of Venezuelan school children. Nine hundred seventh graders in a poor district of the Venezuelan school system received sixty, forty-five minutes lessons of special instruction in addition to regular curriculum, the controls did not. At the end of one year the students who had received special instruction were between 1.6 and 6.5 IQ points smarter that those who received a normal education. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up to determine if these gains faded with time or how much a second or third year of special tutoring would have accomplished. A second source of data that suggests that education can raise an individual's IQ has been gleamed from SAT scores taking advantage of the fact that innumerable commercial coaching services are designed to raise SAT scores through a variety of educational pursuits. The question is not whether these preparatory courses raise a student's SAT score; rather, the question the authors address is whether or not taking these educational courses also raises a person's IQ. The data shows that the coaching services that successfully raise SAT scores consist of many hours of training, compatible to going to school fulltime. In this respect, 100 hours of study, on average, will increase the verbal SAT score 24 points and add 39 points to the math SAT score. There is no significant additional improvement in either score after 150 hours of study. The results of these studies show that prepping for a SAT test can, at least temporarily, raise a student's IQ between 0.1 and 0.4 standard deviations. It also is clear that these modest gains in IQ, brought on by intensive study, are short-term and fade with time. During the 1970s, when scholars were getting used to the disappointing results of programs designed to level the playing field for school-aged children, they were also coming to the consensus that IQ could not be changed after age six or at the age that most children enter school. If we start our educational processes sooner the results will improve, the academics predicted. Enter front and center, Head Start. One of the oldest, largest and most enduring program designed to foster intellectual development came about as a result of the Economic Opportunity act of 1964, the opening salvo of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty. Project Head START was designed to break the cycle of poverty by targeting preschool children in poor families. Before long thousands of Head Start centers were employing tens of thousands of workers and annually spending hundreds of millions of dollars at first, then billions, on hundreds of thousands of children and their families. The earliest returns on Head Start were nothing short of amazing. A few months spent by preschoolers in the first summer programs were said to increase IQ scores by as much as ten points and the summer programs were made year around projects. By 1966, however, the experts were noticing the dreaded "fade-out," the gradual convergence in test scores of children who participated in the program with comparable children who had not. Cognitive benefits that were picked up in the first grade usually were gone by the third grade. Bt the sixth grade they had vanished entirely. No lasting improvements in intelligence have ever been statistically validated with any Head Start Program. As with most of Johnson's social programs, Head Start proved to be total waste of time and money, a lot of money! (My conclusion, not the author's). Contemporary advocates of Head Start maintain it has reduced long-term school failure, crime and illegitimacy while improving employability. These supposed delayed benefits are called sleeper effects and have led some to claim "every dollar spent on Head Start earns three dollars in the future." Such claims do not survive scrutiny. The evidence for sleeper effects never comes from Head Start Programs themselves but from more intensive and expensive preschool interventions such as Perry School. One hundred twenty three black children from the inner city of Ypsilanti Michigan were enrolled the study in 1960. The IQs of these children varied between 70 and 85 at age three. Fifty eight received intensive cognitive instruction five half-days a week in a highly enriched preschool setting for one or two years and their homes were visited by teachers weekly for further instruction of parents and their children. The teacher-to-child ratio was about one to five and the teachers had master degrees in child development and other social work fields. Perry Preschool resembled the average Head Start program as a Ferrari resembles the family sedan. At the end of the two year program the children in the Perry program were scoring eleven IQ points higher than children in the control group. Again, as with all other Head Start programs, by the end of the fourth grade, no significant difference in the IQ of the two groups remained. Yet another example of "fade-out" and the futility of programs designed to alter IQ by preschool interventions. At best, the effect of such programs is small and cannot justify the investment of billions of dollars in run-of-the-mill Head Start programs. But, what would be the outcome if you started these interventions earlier in a child's life? The Abecedarian Project did just that, concentrating on babies that were at high risk for retardation because of their mothers' low IQs and low socioeconomic status. The programs started when the babies were a month old and provided care for eight hours a day, five days a week and fifty weeks each year. The programs emphasized cognitive enrichment activities with teacher-to-child ratios of one to three for infants and one to four until the children reached age five. At the end of the fifth year, the children in the day care groups outscored the controls by half a standard deviation on the various IQ tests performed. At last report, the children were 12 years old and were still doing better than the controls. This would be unequivocal good news were it not for charges that the subjects of the programs and their controls were not comparable in their intellectual prospects at birth. In fact, the experimental children were outscoring the controls by age one or two years and some were doing so by six months. This means that either the interventions had achieved all of their positive effects in the first 6 to 12 months of the project or the experimental and control groups were different to begin with. To complicate the issue further, it is well known that tests of intelligence in children younger than three are poor predictors of later intelligence and tests for infants under 6 months are extremely unreliable. The Abecedarian Project also suffered from its small sample size, the experimental and control groups being no larger than 15 and some as small as 9. The debate over the results was ongoing and unresolved when The Bell Curve was published in 1995. When all is said and done, there is only one way to completely transform a child's environment beneficently: adoption out of a bad environment into a good one. So, how many points does being raised in a good adoptive home add to an IQ score? As a group, adoptive children do not score as high as the biological children of their adoptive parents. The deficit is roughly seven to ten points. It is not completely clear what his deficit means. One hypothesis, and the most likely, is that the adopted children's genes hold them back or the negative effect of not being adopted immediately after birth (as only a few of them are) loses the benefits their adopting parents would have provided earlier on. None the less, researchers believe that adopted children have higher scores than they would have had if they had been raised by their biological parents. This difference is about six points. How does all this effect the policy agenda? Nothing is more predictable than that researchers will conclude that what is needed is more research. But certain kinds of research is not needed. Nothing will be learned by more evaluations of programs like Head Start. We already know it is difficult, and probably impossible, to alter the environment enough to positively affect the development of IQ by anything short of adoption at birth. The authors predict that the most promising leads will come from research designed to determine the psychological basis of intelligence rather than more studies to determine the cultural and educational variables that effect the development of intelligence. The authors close this depressing chapter by suggesting that we accept a good dose of realism. An inexpensive reliable method of raising IQ is not available. The wish that it were is understandable, but to think that the available repertoire of social interventions can do the job, if only the country spends more money on them, is illusory. No one has the slightest idea how to raise IQ substantially on a national level. We need to look elsewhere for solutions to the social problems described in the earlier chapters of The Bell Curve. Comment: The message of this depressing chapter is clear. Nations cannot raise the IQs of their children by preschool interventions that are practical from a financial point of view. Programs that have raised the cognitive ability of children are simply too costly to implement nationwide. Routine Head Start programs are nothing more than expensive "make-work" programs for those in the teaching profession and have no long term beneficial effects on the impoverished low IQ children of the underclass. Our efforts should be directed towards decreasing the numbers of these children by stricter immigration policies and by reducing the numbers of children born to welfare mothers. Both of these goals could easily be archived if there was the political will to do so.