Compensatory Education for Disadvantaged Children

Abstract

With no intervention to stop this process, the intellectual prognosis for children from severely disadvantaged backgrounds is bleak. Although Bayley (1965) found no difference in mental test scores up to 15 months of age for infants of advantaged and disadvantaged parents, a number of cross-sectional studies of the disadvantaged have found apparent progressive declines on test scores with increasing age of the children (e.g., Coleman 1966; McCloskey 1967; Baughman and Dahlstrom 1968). It appears that this phenomenon is related to the degree of deprivation. Heber, Dever, and Conry (1968) found an apparent progressive decline based on cross-sectional data but only for children of intellectually very limited mothers (i.e., IQ less than 80). Similarly, Deutsch (1967) found that the more dis-