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How children succeed
I’ve just started reading a very interesting book - How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character - and I will review it in due course. But right near the start, the book tackles an issue that has long puzzled me - namely, why the kids in the famous Perry Preschool Project lost their cognitive gains before long, yet did better in later life than the control children. The Heckman referenced in the excerpt is James Heckman, a Nobel prize winning economist at the University of Chicago.
“The Perry Preschool Project is famous in social science circles, and Heckman had encountered it, glancingly, several times before in his career. As a case for early-childhood intervention, the experiment had always been considered something of a failure. The treatment children did do significantly better on cognitive tests while attending the preschool and for a year or two afterward, but the gains did not last, and by the time the treatment children were in the third grade, their IQ scores were no better than the control group’s. But when Heckman and other researchers looked at the long-term results of Perry, the data appeared more promising. It was true that the Perry kids hadn’t experienced lasting IQ benefits. But something important had happened to them in preschool, and whatever it was, the positive effects resonated for decades. Compared to the control group, the Perry students were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to be employed at age twenty-seven, more likely to be earning more than twenty-five thousand dollars a year at age forty, less likely ever to have been arrested, and less likely to have spent time on welfare.
“Heckman began to rummage more deeply into the Perry study, and he learned that in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers had collected some data on the students that had never been analyzed: reports from teachers in elementary school rating both the treatment and the control children on ‘personal behavior’ and ‘social development’. The first term tracked how often each student swore, lied, stole, or was absent or late; the second one rated each student’s level of curiosity as well as his or her relationships with classmates and teachers. Heckman labeled these noncognitive skills, because they were entirely distinct from IQ. And after three years of careful analysis, Heckman and his researchers were able to ascertain that those noncognitive factors, such as curiosity, self-control, and social fluidity, were responsible for as much as two-thirds of the total benefit that Perry gave its students.
“The Perry Preschool Project, in other words, worked entirely differently than everyone had believed. The goodhearted educators who set it up in the sixties thought that they were creating a program to raise the intelligence of low-income children; they, like everyone else, believed that was the way to help poor kids get ahead in America. Surprise number one was that they created a program that didn’t do much in the long term for IQ but did improve behavior and social skills. Surprise number two was that it helped anyway - for the kids in Ypsilanti, those skills and the underlying traits they reflected turned out to be very valuable indeed.”
GOOD-HEARTED EDUCATORS MATTER
Good-hearted educators — be they professionally trained or simply parents believing in their children — are the key to life long benefits for students.
That’s a well-known fact and scientifically validated by the numerous studies and experiments in human motivation.
As enunciated decades ago in “effective schools” literature high expectations of students and teachers count.
That is one reason home education is so successful. Compare that to the rather uneven results obtained by government teachers with “guaranteed-for-life-jobs” and a system that is so self-serving many students fall between the cracks.
I was so disappointed with Michelle Obama’s speech where she emphasized the character of herself, her husband, and their respective families in their achievements. She went on to emphasize that all children should have the opportunities they had to gain university degrees. As if university is the key to meaningful lives.
She sets the scene for two things — universalizing university for all — and neglecting to acknowledge that people can have productive, meaningful lives without necessarily going to university.
I’ve ordered the book mentioned in this post (How Children Succeed: Grit, curiosity, and the hidden power of character) and look forward to more discussions on the topic of character.