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A decade and a half ago, a report by the Carnegie Corp., "Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children," announced new scientific research that purported to demonstrate the "negative early impact of stress on brain function." The specter of disadvantaged babies and toddlers, their synapses irreversibly damaged by being bathed in stress hormones, was supposed to be galvanizing-to lend hard-headed, not just soft-hearted, urgency to the otherwise familiar calls for social action on behalf of poor kids. In fact, the research had proved no such thing-and if it had, arguably the more plausible response might have been fatalism: Miss the early window for intervention, and we might as well give up on helping boost the achievement of poor children.
An article in the Washington Post today lays out similar story: "Research Links Poor Kids' Stress, Brain Impairment" reports on a paper, just published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that set out to test the hypothesis that childhood exposure to stress, as a result of poverty, leads to compromised "working memory"—short-term memory ability—at age 17, which would help explain the achievement gap. The researchers ran assorted data gathered from a longitudinal study and came up with correlations, but subtler proof of causation still awaits. Chronic stress isn't good for anybody, and it is higher among kids growing up under the poverty line: That seems to be very clear. But to rush to pinpoint specific, and crucial, brain effects seems less likely to be a recipe for well-targeted social policies than for, well, yet more stress.