Bell Curve

398 Living Together Raising Cognitive Ability 399data convey: Equalizing the amount or objective quality of schooling inAmerica cannot be counted on to equalize cognitive ability much.Compensatory EducationJust a year prior to the Coleman report, the U.S. Congress passed theElementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, therebyopening a massive and continuing effort to improve the education ofdisadvantaged students that continues to this day. In the first fiscal year,grants for educationally deprived children under Title I of the ESEAwent from zero to $3 billion, rose to $4 billion in the next year, and haveremained there, or higher, ever since. Expenditures in fiscal 1992 wereat an all-time high of $5.6 billion (all figures are in 1990 dollars).'*Sponsors of Title I assumed that these programs would narrow the gapin cognitive functioning between disadvantaged children and other students.To prove this, the act also funded an aggressive, ongoing evaluationeffort, resulting over the years in a mounting stack of reports. In themid+1970s, the National Institute of Education (NIE) commissioned asynthesis of the results. Reviewing all the federal studies from 1965 to1975, researchers found no evidence that students in compensatory educationprograms closed the gap with their more able peers. Some plausibledata suggested that "students in compensatory programs tend to fallbehind other students, but not as fast as if they had received no compensatoryinstructions," an outcome that the institute treated as evidenceof success." The greatest support in the various studies was for asimpler "no effect" conclusion: The gap was about as great after compensatoryeducation as before.13" No evidence whatsoever supported a conclusionthat compensatory education narrowed the achievement gap.More optimistically, supporters of compensatory education can callupon the evidence of converging black-white test scores that we describedin Chapter 13 as indirect evidence that something positive hasbeen happening in elementary and secondary education for minorities.As we described, improvement has been the largest at the bottom of thelQ distribution, which in turn points toward compensatory programs asa possible cause. But direct evidence of the link remains elusive. In recentyears, compensatory programs have set more modest goals, forthemselves.13" Now, they focus on teaching specific academic skills orproblem solving, not expecting improvements in overall academicachievement or general inte1ligence.j'Stories Too Good to Be TrueAccounts of phenomenal success stories in education-the inner-cityschool that suddenly excels as the result of a new program or a newteacher-are a perennial fixture of American journalism. Are they true? Ifthe question is whether an inspirational teacher or some new program hasthe capacity to make an important difference in students' lives, then theanswer is surely yes. But claims for long-term academic improvement, letalone increases in cognitive functioning, typically fade as soon as hardquestions begin to be asked. A case in point is Chicago's Marva Collins,who gained national attention with claims that her shoestring-budget inner-cityschool, launched in 1975, was turning out students who blew thetop off standardized tests and were heading to the best universities. Betweenthe ages of 5 and 10, she claimed, her pupils, deemed "unteachable"in regular schools, were reading Plato, Aristotle, Chaucer, Shakespeare,and Tolstoy, according to stories in the popular media. According to othernewspaper reports, she was asked by both Presidents Reagan and Clintonto become secretary of education. She continues to train large numbers ofteachers in her meth~ds.'~ Are her celebrated anecdotes borne out by data?We do not know. Despite years of publicity about Marva Collins, we canfind no hard evidence.j5More generally, the large test score increases in local schools that arewidely and routinely reported hy the media have been plagued by fraud. Inseveral schools in and around Washington, D.C., for example, the WashingtonPost reported that gains in test performance were found to be due toimproper coaching on the tests by school employees or by allowing extratime for students to complete the tests.'" story in the Los Angeles 'limestold of various methods of cheating on standardized tests, including the replacingof wrong answers with right ones by teachers and staff, in at leastfifty elementary public schools ~tatewide.'~ The New York Times wroteabout a public school principal who had been caught tampering with studenttest scores for years.'H These specific instances seem to he part of awidespread problem."4Raising IQ Among the School-Aged: Converging Results from TwoDivergent TriesThe question remains: Is there any evidence that cognitive ability asmeasured by IQ tests can be increased by special interventions after childrenreach school age? We have some reason for thinking the answer isa highly qualified yes, and some basis for estimating how much, fromtwo sources of evidence drawn from strikingly different contexts.