下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
—attributed to Margaret Mead
I n 1982, two perceptive social scientists from Kansas City, Kansas, Betty Hart and Todd Risley, asked a very simple question: Why had their innovative program to help prepare high-risk preschoolers for school failed? Designed to enhance the academic potential of children by intensively increasing their vocabulary, it seemed a perfect solution to a prevailing problem. But it was not.
The initial results of Hart and Risley's project had been encouraging. Aware of the importance of language in a child's scholastic success, Hart and Risley had included a rigorous vocabulary component in the intervention. Its goal was to boost the children's lagging vocabularies so they would enter kindergarten on a par with better-prepared peers. Initially, Hart and Risley did observe a promising “spurt of new vocabulary words . . . and an abrupt acceleration in . . . cumulative vocabulary growth curves.” But while the children gained vocabulary as a result of the intervention, it was soon apparent that their actual learning trajectories remained the same and, by the time they entered kindergarten, the positive effects had disappeared and they were no different from the children who had not attended the intensive preschool program.
Hart and Risley's hope, like many of their generation's, was to break the “cycle of poverty” through preschool education. Active participants in Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, they were exemplary examples of their time, aiming “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”
Their initial search for answers began in 1965. While much of the United States was erupting in race riots and civil unrest, Hart and Risley met with University of Kansas colleagues to design a project aimed at drastically improving the academic achievement of impoverished children. Called the Juniper Gardens Children's Project, it began in the project's headquarters in the basement of C.L. Davis's liquor store. Its ultimate design combined “community action with scientific knowledge” and included a rigorous, vocabulary-intense curriculum aimed at increasing the children's school readiness and academic potential.
Grainy evidence of this project still exists in a 1960s YouTube video: “Spearhead—Juniper Gardens Children's Project.” In it, a young Todd Risley, in skinny black suit and skinny tie, walks purposefully into their “laboratory” preschool. In one of the classrooms, a young, smiling Betty Hart sits schoolmarm style on the floor, reading responsively with a circle of four-year-olds. The soaring tone of the film parallels their hope that “pressing social problems could be solved by improving everyday experiences.” The video ends with a crescendo and a dramatic voice-over: “This is one small inroad, a spearhead at Juniper Gardens, where community research seeks to overcome the obstacles which separate the children of our deprived communities from the abundance of the rest of the nation.”
The failure of the Juniper Gardens Children's Project could easily have been attributed to the prevailing answers of the times: genetics or some other unalterable factor. But Hart and Risley were not blithe acceptors of “conventional wisdom.” Refusing to accept their results as the final answer to a widespread problem, they insisted on finding out why it failed. The study they designed opened the door to understanding that the prevailing thought on why children fail was flawed and that there was, in fact, the potential for changing what had been perceived as unchangeable.