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P. Reese
P. Reese
Judy Biggert (R-Ill.), was attended by
more than a hundred people—including
policymakers, journalists, academics,
and advocates—interested in the effects
of teachers, preschool, and economic
programs on children’s academic success.
Larry V. Hedges, Board of Trustees
Professor of Statistics and Social Policy,
pointed out that teacher quality varies
most in the schools with the poorest
students, so that it matters more which
teacher a child has in poor schools than in
wealthier ones.
Social psychologist Thomas D. Cook,
Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in
Ethics and Justice, discussed how pre-
K programs do make a difference for
children—at least in the short term—but
that more research is needed to determine
which programs, run by the state or by
Head Start, are better and for whom.
From his research comparing various
welfare-to-work experiments, economist
Greg Duncan, Edwina S. Tarry Professor
of Education and Social Policy, found that
earnings supplement programs tended
to generate more consistent benefits for
children, especially in Milwaukee’s New
Hope Project. An antipoverty initiative,
New Hope provided a menu of options
including cash supplements and subsidized
healthcare and/or childcare.
8 Quasi-Experimentation Workshops
Spring 2006 marked the debut of a
series of workshops intended to help
educational researchers understand,
design, and conduct better quasiexperiments.
The workshops’ organizers—
IPR Faculty Fellow Thomas D. Cook,
Joan and Sarepta Harrison Chair in Ethics
and Justice, and his colleague William R.
Shadish of the University of California,
Merced—lectured on the theory and
practice of methods such as regressiondiscontinuity
designs and interrupted time
series. Pointing to many examples from
education, Cook and Shadish highlighted
the advantages of using such
practices and discussed the
circumstances under which
they would not work. Three
more workshops will take
place in 2007. The Spencer
Foundation funds them.
8 Summer Biomarker
Institute
At a three-day summer
Thomas Cook speaks with Spencer
institute held in June 2006,
Foundation President Michael
participants were educated in McPherson during a workshop.
state-of-the-art methods for
integrating biomarkers into populationbased
social science research. Organized
by biomarker experts Thomas McDade,
associate professor of anthropology
and associate director of C2S; Emma
Adam, assistant professor of human
development and social policy; and
Christopher Kuzawa, assistant professor
of anthropology, the institute also hopes
to build a community of scholars around
these field-friendly measures of health.
8 NIH Deputy Director
Gives Lectures
Deputy director at the National
Institutes of Health (NIH)
Raynard Kington, MD, MBA,
PhD, gave two talks on October
30. In the first, he spoke about
his research on the health
of black immigrants to the
United States. Recent black
immigrants to the United
States report health as good as
that of native-born whites and
better than native-born blacks.
But their health declines over
time, exacerbated by lower
rates of health insurance, changing diets,
or American culture, he said. In the
second talk, Kington addressed some of
the pressing challenges and issues facing
the NIH, including an unprecedented
Raynard Kington
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