Six years ago, the National Bureau of Economic Research brought together academics from throughout the country–including two from UW-Madison–to conduct the first-ever rigorous study on the impact on child development if low-income families were simply given more money to spend. It was called “Baby’s First Years”–and the study provided a thousand low-income families in cities around the U-S–usually headed up by a single mother–with $333 a month, no strings attached. A control group was given just $20 monthly. All told, the research group raised $22-million for the project–with the cash coming from the federal government, foundations that support increased public assistance programs, and private donors.
The children involved in the study would be tested and compared in seven areas, including things like cognitive development, communications skills, and social and emotional behavior. The researchers wanted to prove, definitively, that if the Government would provide direct cash payments to parents, low-income kids would flourish.
Well, the results from the first four years of the Baby’s First Years study have now been released and they show……uhhhhhhh, never mind.
In all seriousness, the study found that after four years of their parents having more money to spend on their needs, kids in the families that got the $333 a month showed absolutely no difference from the kids in the families that got just the $20 in all seven areas of comparison.
The subject of this Two Cents is not going to be those results–as they should really come as a surprise to almost no one. I’d rather focus on the reaction and response from the researchers–the “almost” in my previous sentence–and their efforts to literally run away from the data.
The Baby’s First Years study results were released back in May. If you don’t remember hearing or seeing anything about it, it’s likely because there were no press releases heralding its findings. The researchers that took part were not offered to radio and TV stations around the country to discuss the results. Sympathetic news outlets and websites didn’t place it on the front page and promote it with social media posts.
That is a far cry from when the group released their first-year results in 2022–which showed slight improvements in the development of the children whose families got the higher amount. Then, there were headlines trumpeting the “success” of direct cash payments to battle the effects of poverty. The researchers all did press junkets. And those involved predicted even better results as the study went on. Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, was quoted in the New York Times saying “This is a big scientific finding. It’s proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount, leads to better brain development.”
The four-year update likely would have gone totally unnoticed–and the entire Baby’s First Years study completely forgotten–if not for reports from National Public Radio and the New York Times. (And here, I have to give great credit to those reporters, as the vast majority of the listenership and readership of those two outlets strongly support direct cash payments to the poor and an ever-increasing “social safety net”.) And it is within those reports that we see how “research” and “science” have been corrupted by the desire to produce only outcomes those involved in the studies want to see.
After having their premise that direct cash payments guarantee improved childhood development disproven by their own data, the researchers have broken into three camps. The first is the “say nothing” crowd. These researchers have declined to issue comments or answer questions about the study–with some claiming that they don’t want the results “weaponized by the Right”. The aforementioned Dr Farah is not quoted in the recent Times article to offer any insight on whether she still thinks this is a “big scientific finding”.
The second, and by far the largest, camp of researchers is now actively working to discredit the study in which they participated. Social Work Professor Katherine Magnuson of UW-Madison is quoted in last week’s Times article saying “Anyone who tries to tell you they know what the data mean is just speculating.” Professor Magnuson is not quoted in the 2022 article urging anyone like Dr Farah from “reading too much into the data” or claiming that those celebrating the one-year results are “just speculating”.
That group is also attacking their own research and findings by arguing that $333 a month simply “isn’t enough” to make a difference for low-income families and that they are sure that if much higher amounts were provided, the results would be much different. Others blame the pandemic for making any research done during that time “flawed”. One researcher tries to make the argument that low-income families received so much direct cash assistance from the federal and state governments in 2020 and 2021 that the $333 they got as part of the study was “washed out” by the extra income. That might actually be the dumbest argument I’ve ever heard, as the researcher admits that more direct government payments came in than at any time in our country’s history–and yet that still didn’t produce better child development results.
The third, and by far the smallest, segment of the researchers are those that admit their assumptions going into the study may have been wrong. University of California-Irvine Economist Greg Duncan says the results have changed his mind about direct cash payments to low-income families. Duncan believes the data shows that government funding is better put into services like early learning programs and food assistance.
The NBER study actually lasts for six years–meaning there will be two more years of data to compile and study. But unless there is a major turnaround in the performance of the children involved, that final report will likely end up on the group’s website on a page that requires you to click on ten links just to find it. It wouldn’t surprise me that everyone associated with it pretends it never happened and changes their email address and phone number to avoid having to answer any questions next time around.
And that makes me wonder, how many other studies like this–where the results didn’t “fit the narrative”–are successfully buried and never gain public notice? Scientists are human and they want to be liked just like the rest of us. Do you think Professor Magnuson really wants to defend her findings questioning the effectiveness of “wealth redistribution” at UW-Madison faculty mixers and dinners the rest of her career?
As I have mentioned in previous Two Cents, a major criticism of Balanced Literacy and the “three-cueing” system at its base was that no one in education had conducted controlled studies into its effectiveness in teaching kids how to read. Its adoption around the English-speaking world was based on one report by one woman in New Zealand looking at one class of students. And when neurologists conducted studies on how the brain actually works while learning to read–and found that phonemic awareness and the use of phonics as the base of reading instruction was best for children–they were told by those in education for decades to “stay in your lane”.
Given that the results of the Baby’s First Years didn’t surprise me at all, I’ll be more interested going forward in how many people “trust the science” and accept that the study proves throwing more money at some problems won’t solve a thing.
