Hillary's Model Village

...And the data problem may stem from the fact that "the two groups were not comparable in their intellectual prospects at birth...

...She takes us on a "journey" to the Abecedarian Project in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Dr...

...The Abecedarian Project has frequently been accused of, as one former employee of the project puts it, "always having trouble with the data...

...The project began in the early 1970s, when Ramey and his associates identified pregnant women whose children were considered at "high risk for retardation" owing to such environmental indicators as poverty, unemployment, illegitimacy, and race...

...Herman Spitz, former research director at the Johnstone center in Bordentown, New Jersey, believes that the data overwhelmingly support Murray's claims...

...It features a large box in the middle labeled SCHOOLS, inside of which is a wide array of social workers and "psychometricians" (measurers of mental functions...

...In the first edition of It Takes a Village, Mrs...

...When the children were between one and six months of age, they were divided into a control group and an experimental cohort...

...Baumeister estimates the difference to be about 1.5 IQ points and maintains that "whatever results they got were apparent at 6 months, and after the third grade, all gains were washed out, and there is now really no discernible difference...

...Murray presses the point in The Bell Curve (co-authored by Richard J. Herrnstein), perceiving that "the major stumbling block to deciding what [the project] has accomplished is that the experimental children had already outscored the controls on cognitive performance tests by at least as large a margin . . . by the age of 1 or 2 years, and perhaps even by 6 months, as they had after nearly five years of intensive day care...

...Ari Redbord is a student at Duke University and publisher of the Duke Review...

...Connected to this box are two other boxes labeled LOCAL ADVISORY COUNCIL and COORDINATING AGENCY, the second of which would handle "record keeping and information dissemination...

...Frances Campbell, senior investigator on the project, says that she does not look at IQ in assessing the effectiveness of the program: "This is not a good cognitive test," she says...

...Clinton explains, "By the time the children were three years old, the children in the experimental group averaged 17 points higher on IQ tests than the children in the control group, 101 versus 84...

...Says Alfred Baumeister, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, "If you actually look at the project beyond the few initial gains, over the 12 to 15 years there have been no evident gains...

...Both groups received medical and child-care services, but the experimentals entered an intensive day-care program for eight to ten hours a day, five days a week, with a teacher-to-child ratio of 1 to 3. This continued until they turned five...

...And if "it takes a village to raise a child," it takes cool thinking and steady nerve to see through the claims, and resist the importuning, of the social engineers...

...But while she believes that from randomness comes "good science," she concedes that "the numbers are not large enough to be reliable...

...Even so, Ramey continues to throw around such politically charged words as "moral imperative...

...But there are other, non-dollar costs as well...

...But the project is looked to by many in the public-policy community for far more than an outer limit...

...But responsive parents do not release their children to the chimera of state-created well-being...

...When Hillary Clinton says, "If we as a village decide not to help families develop their brains, let us admit that we are not acting on the evidence," she is ignoring the most crucial findings of the project's most recent years—findings that "we as a village" would do well to confront...

...What, indeed...

...And what they have in mind is nothing modest...

...Ninety-eight percent of the children were black...

...Not only are many public-policy advocates praising the possibilities of the Abecedarian way, they are making wild claims about actual results...

...A diagram of Ramey's vision is helpfully included...

...Driven by Ramey's taste for politics, Abecedarian scientists have become lobbyists for governmental action...

...On average," he says, "after 1.5 months, the experimental group was already outscoring the control group by about 6 points, which is the same difference 5 years later...

...And while she never gives a precise definition of such a community in her best-selling It Takes a Village, she does provide a model...

...Says Ramey, "We can't allow people to think that cheap programs have a realistic chance of succeeding...

...Someone, apparently, has done some fact-checking...

...As the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas Besharov explained in the Washington Post, when "the children got older, the gap between the experimental and control groups narrowed to 7.6 IQ points at age 5 and to a statistically insignificant 4.6 points at age 15...

...One public-school employee who worked with the project in the 1970s says that, while the experimentals' IQ scores may have risen, these children entered school "aggressive and ill-tempered" because they were raised collectively by physicians, psychologists, and nurses who catered to their every whim...

...And Frances Campbell, though she insists that true gains have been made, acknowledges that "baby scores don't mean much and do not predict adult intelligence...

...Craig Ramey "gathered together a group of more than one hundred newborns" for the purpose of shaping these children and increasing their IQ scores...

...The premise behind the selection, according to Ramey, was that mild retardation in underprivileged children "is more associated with sociocultural factors than any organic deficit...

...Charles Murray, the famous sociologist and a critic of the project, lauds the efforts of Ramey and his staff, believing that the Abecedarian Project "serves as a way of defining the outer limit of what day care can accomplish given the current state of the art...

...you can ask many questions of the data because the groups were randomly assigned...

...The results of the experiment—which carries a price tag of $10,000 per child annually—have been used by psychologists and welfare wonks to justify massive governmental intervention...

...Murray notes that "the results are much more equivocal" than the Abecedarians would like to admit...

...The major premise on which the model . . . rests is that a truly effective delivery system will have to have a national scope...

...The smallest box in the diagram is positioned shyly at the bottom of the page—it says FAMILIES...

...Of the Abecedarian caregivers, Hillary Clinton says, "They were doing precisely what responsive parents do," after "gathering the children...

...As Mrs...

...In an article published in American Psychologist, Ramey proposes a model that "could be used to deliver many services," the purpose of which would be "to monitor the physical and mental health of this country's children and to provide remedial services...

...By declaring that "this nation could reaffirm its concern about its young," he has left his social laboratory and entered the policy arena...

...They also received optimal nutrition and "as much health care as any group in history," according to Ron Haskins, who was associated with the program in the late '70s and is now chief welfare specialist for the House Republicans...

...She submits that "one year in pre-school would have had a greater impact on social skills" and asks, "What has all these millions of dollars really accomplished...

...The results seemed auspicious at first...

...After three years of schooling, only 13 percent of the experimentals had an IQ under 85, as opposed to 44 percent of the controlled children...

...Clinton writes, "Even more impressive than . . . these gains is their durability: the differences in IQ persisted a decade later...

...Two former employees of the project describe him as an "operator" and a "go-getter," one who, regardless of the data, "has always believed what he set out to prove...

...Twenty-one now, the kids in the two groups are almost equal...

...These facts are not widely disputed...

...But the newly released paperback edition is devoid of any reference to "durability...

...No truly substantial gains in intelligence could have taken place in 1.5 months...