Thursday, November 03, 2005
Keep away!
Don't let newspaper folk touch statistics. If you do, you get things like this:
Margaret Bridges, co-author of the study and director of child development at the institute, acknowledged the study showed that disparities in early cognitive development between children from wealthy backgrounds and children from lower economic backgrounds would not necessarily decrease, and that the gap could be addressed by prioritizing resources for certain at-risk groups.
I want to emphasize that no plan or proposal or suggestion has been raised in this article. So the "disparities would not necessarily decrease" doesn't actually refer to what they're not necessarily decreasing because of.
Black children who attended preschool lagged in social development compared to black children who did not attend preschool, while white and Hispanic children showed almost no decrease compared to children of the same ethnicity who did not attend preschool.
All economic groups showed less social development compared to stay-at-home children, except those from middle-income families, who were not socially affected by attending preschool.
Note that Asian children don't actually exist. Also note that some races had less social development, while some had no difference. Miraculously, when you stuff all races together into an aggregate statistic, you get less social development. That's high-quality work.
Data on social development was collected by surveying teacher's observations. The study did not directly assess the social development of children not attending preschool.
Uh... so... um... what did they compare social development of those attending preschool to?
[Co-author argaret Bridges] acknowledged the study did not measure the strength or weakness of the individual preschool programs, but said it gave a good approximation of the effects of pre-kindergarten education.
"This study gives an overview of average quality," she said. "We're saying that in a childcare center of average quality, these are the effects we're seeing."
Cool. So where can I go to check out this average-quality childcare center? How much more useless can this work get? At first I thought The Daily Cal was just botching their reporting to make the work seem idiotic, but with a comment like that, who knows?
Oh, by the way, kids go to preschool. Therefore, here's a picture of some kids.
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