Freakonomics - A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything, Revised and Expanded Edition by Steven D.; Dubner; Stephen J. Levitt

Author:Steven D.; Dubner; Stephen J. Levitt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780061131325
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2006-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

Now for the final pair of factors:

Matters: The child has many books in his home.

Doesn’t: The child’s parents read to him nearly every day.

As noted earlier, a child with many books in his home has indeed been found to do well on school tests. But regularly reading to a child doesn’t affect early childhood test scores.

This would seem to present a riddle. It bounces us back to our original question: just how much, and in what ways, do parents really matter?

Let’s start with the positive correlation: books in the home equal higher test scores. Most people would look at this correlation and infer an obvious cause-and-effect relationship. To wit: a little boy named Isaiah has a lot of books at home; Isaiah does beautifully on his reading test at school; this must be because his mother or father regularly reads to him. But Isaiah’s friend Emily, who also has a lot of books in her home, practically never touches them. She would rather dress up her Bratz or watch cartoons. And Emily tests just as well as Isaiah. Meanwhile, Isaiah and Emily’s friend Ricky doesn’t have any books at home. But Ricky goes to the library every day with his mother. And yet he does worse on his school tests than either Emily or Isaiah.

What are we to make of this? If reading books doesn’t have an impact on early childhood test scores, could it be that the books’ mere physical presence in the house makes the children smarter? Do books perform some kind of magical osmosis on a child’s brain? If so, one might be tempted to simply deliver a truckload of books to every home that contains a preschooler.

That, in fact, is what the governor of Illinois tried to do. In early 2004, Governor Rod Blagojevich announced a plan to mail one book a month to every child in Illinois from the time they were born until they entered kindergarten. The plan would cost $26 million a year. But, Blagojevich argued, this was a vital intervention in a state where 40 percent of third graders read below their grade level. “When you own [books] and they’re yours,” he said, “and they just come as part of your life, all of that will contribute to a sense…that books should be part of your life.”

So all children born in Illinois would end up with a sixty-volume library by the time they entered school. Does this mean they would all perform better on their reading tests?

Probably not. (Although we may never know for sure: in the end, the Illinois legislature rejected the book plan.) After all, the ECLS data don’t say that books in the house cause high test scores; it says only that the two are correlated.

How should this correlation be interpreted? Here’s a likely theory: most parents who buy a lot of children’s books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with. (And they pass on their smarts and work ethic to their kids.) Or perhaps they care a great deal about education, and about their children in general.

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