A colleague of mine participated in a program evaluation of Head Start for Stanford Research Institute, under contract with the government.
The group he worked with found that if you separate Head Start programs into two categories--those focussing on "cognitive" variables (roughly, thinking skills) and those that were oriented toward "noncognitive interventions," (roughly, behavioral training,) the results differed.
Noncognitive programs showed significant gains which held up. Cognitive programs did no good at all. Looks like a finding that would be worth following up on, but so far the Head Start people have ignored it.
Oh yes, the study was done thiry years ago.
>>Noncognitive programs showed significant gains which held up. Cognitive programs did no good at all. Looks like a finding that would be worth following up on, but so far the Head Start people have ignored it.
>>Oh yes, the study was done thiry years ago.
The government education semi-monopoly, and the teachers within it, care little about demonstrable empirical results. This is painfully obvious by the repeated attempts to use "whole language" teaching methods for reading, when phonics has been shown time and again to be a superior method.