John – Excellent point. But I think the article is even more biased than you suggest. The author keeps referring to poverty as if it is solely a materially defined concept, i.e. if poor blacks had more stuff, their IQs would rise. But this is undermined by the fact that as difficult as it may be to live in material poverty today, poor people today live better than most middle class people a generation or two ago. The study sounds very plausible to me, but it really only makes sense if — as you suggest — the influence of poverty is behavioral not material. The habits and lifestyles of those living in poverty — homes where reading is nonexistent, parental supervision too — have to be a much bigger factor than who has a color tv or a microwave oven or a car — because most of America’s poor have those things too. If you talk to people who work on AIDS in urban minority communities, they will tell you that poverty is a big problem, of course. But beneath the surface what they mean by poverty is the chaos and irrationality of life in the underclass. A stable two parent family is surely a better hedge — as studies have shown — than material wealth or enrollment in Head Start.
Indeed, you’d think the author might have mentioned that Head Start isn’t very successful over the long run. The gains children achieve in the early years evaporate over time. That may be an argument for more funding of and a more aggressive form of Head Start — you can draw a liberal or conservative lesson from that fact. But, somehow I doubt the reason kids lose the advantages of Head Start has to do with a lack of cash-on-hand.