Today one of the most popular programs for young children in the United States is Project Head Start—a comprehensive multi-dimensional early childhood (pre-kindergarten) program. As originally conceived, however, Head Start promised to improve the learning abilities of disadvantaged children. By giving such children extra attention before they entered school, supporters of Head Start argued that some of the children's disadvantages could be overcome.

With high hopes and strong public support, Head Start was launched as a part of the War on Poverty during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Even though its focus has shifted, the program continues today and enjoys broad popular support. What is not well known is the intellectual battle over children's IQs, which made the idea of Head Start possible. And almost forgotten is the vision of one man who shaped the course of what we now call child psychology or child development.

The key figure in this story was Lawrence K. Frank, who, when he began his work in the early 1920s, was a young recent graduate in economics from Columbia. Frank worked with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, a large philanthropic foundation, to help foster the study of children and promote a better understanding of children in the general public. The basic idea, Frank recalled in a 1963 interview, was to create a number of child development research centers "as a way of contributing to the welfare of children by providing more dependable understanding and knowledge of their growth and development." A key part of this design was "a program of parent education, tied with these centers." Frank added that "the general theory of this whole movement was that we knew little or nothing about children, and that a concerted and intensive study of their development would be of permanent advantage and would certainly forward all the numerous different agencies and programs for welfare of children in the United States."

In 1924, as Frank began his work, there were three child research centers already in existence, the Merrill Palmer School in Detroit, the Yale Psycho-Clinic, headed by Dr. Arnold Gesell, and the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. Founded in 1917 at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station was modeled after the Agricultural Experiment Station at Iowa State College in Ames. In the beginning, the role of the station was to promote practical child-saving, but the first director, Bird T. Baldwin, saw it as a vehicle for promoting psychological research on children at the university. A grant from the WCTU and increased funding from the state enabled the station to add a preschool nursery for research purposes—the first of its kind in the country—in 1922.

In the 1930s, the station was at the center of a major controversy involving the issue of the constancy of IQ in young children. Iowa researchers Beth Wellman and Harold Skeels found evidence to suggest that the IQs of children could be improved, but key figures in child development research led by Lewis Terman of Stanford (who had been a student of G. Stanley Hall, the founder of American child psychology) disagreed and argued that IQs remained stable in young children.

Much of the prominence enjoyed by psychology in the period after World War I could be traced to the way in which one of its concepts, the "intelligence quotient" or "IQ," captured the public imagination. The American public embraced IQ as a new a profound truth that might explain human behavior and took as gospel the idea that the existence of hereditary geniuses was a positive social benefit. At the same time, the public seemed to accept the behavioral and environmental vision of one of the country's most famous psychologists, John B. Watson. What followed in the 1920s and 1930s was a furious debate between two camps in the emerging discipline of psychology.

The Stanford Commonwealth Fund, another private philanthropy, in 1921 had begun its support of psychologist Lewis Terman's longitudinal study of one thousand California children with exceptionally high IQ scores. At Yale, Arnold Gesell, a major national figure in child psychology and another former student of G. Stanley Hall, was busy measuring infants and children and turning out books such as The Mental Growth of the Preschool Child and Infancy and Human Growth. For Gesell, maturation and growth took place along pre-determined paths and explained human development. Both Terman and Gesell rejected Watson's total environmentalism—the idea that all behavior is learned—in favor of a much more hereditarian view. Genius, in Terman's view was genetic, inherited and not the product of environmental influences. A corollary of this viewpoint was the idea that IQ—the measure of intelligence, according to some psychologists in the period—was a fixed property, incapable of environmental influence.

But the views of Gesell and Terman began to be challenged in the 1920s. For example, Helen Thompson Woolley, a psychologist at the Merrill-Palmer School in Detroit—a privately-endowed institution that included a nursery school which doubled as a child development laboratory—had found that the IQs of some of the children in attendance improved after a period in the school. Five years after Woolley's study, Helen Barrett and Helen Koch of the University of Chicago put children from orphanages in a preschool to see if the change in environment made a difference in the IQ scores. It did; there was a substantial rise in the scores of the experimental group, but like Woolley's study, this one went unnoticed as the views of Terman and Gesell dominated the emerging field of child psychology.

In 1931 Florence Goodenough and John Anderson, director of the Minnesota Institute, published Experimental Child Study, a work which downplayed the earlier results claiming that IQ could be improved. A psychologist who had been active in the period, J. McVickar Hunt, recalled much later that the real breakthrough in the struggle over the fixity of IQ came in the late 1930s from developmental psychologists at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station.

In Davenport, Iowa the Soldier's Orphan's Home, a state-run institution, expressed a need for the examination of the children placed there�so that adoptive parents would not be given a retarded, or as they said in those days, a "feeble-minded" child to adopt. As it happened, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station agreed to do the tests for the orphanage. Most of the children there had been born to unwed mothers and the conventional wisdom of the day assumed that because of their family history, they would prove to be low in intelligence since their parents (or at least their mothers; there was little information on the fathers) were themselves social failures. In the first year, the station tested 73 children who had already been placed for adoption: their mothers had an average IQ of 84, but the children tested had an average IQ of 115. Thus, these children had IQs which resembled the scores of their adoptive parents rather than their birth mothers' scores. This finding also gave considerable support to the idea that environmental influences could be very powerful.

Now the psychologist who had done the measurements, Harold M. Skeels and the other Iowa staffers decided to try and create the conditions of the station's preschool in the orphanage and see how much they could improve the IQ of the children. Some children would be in the school and there would be a control group who did not attend the school. After 20 months, the mean gain for the experimental group was 4.6 IQ points, a finding that could be explained through errors alone. While the station researchers were very disappointed with these results, they noticed another effect. Those children who remained in the orphanage for any length of time suffered a decline in their IQs.

In a related study, a student at the station, Marie Skodak looked at the effect adoptive parents had on children's IQ, a sequel to Skeels' original findings with the orphanage children. Skodak found that children placed and remaining in homes of parents with superior IQs registered strong gains, but the gains were the greatest for children with lower initial IQs, yet another finding that seemed to contradict the maturation theory and the notion of the fixity of IQ.

Meanwhile, the process of testing and shifting children continued and there was another sensational development. Two retarded children from the orphanage who had been placed in the adult women's ward at the state institution at Glenwood showed astonishing gains in IQ. Skeels theorized that the gains had resulted from the love and attention showered on the children by the adult retarded women. Now he moved all the children testing as retarded to the state institution at Glenwood. All the children were 3 years of age or less and their mean IQ was 64.3, and their median IQ was 65; the range was from 35 to 89. The control group of adoptable children were studied for 18 months and remained in the orphanage; their mean age was 16.6 months and their mean IQ was 86.7 and median 90; range for all but 2 was 91-103. After 18 months the experimental group at Glenwood had gained 27.5 points, and the control group had lost 26.2 points. This, to put it mildly was astonishing. The results seemed to say that retarded adults could improve young children's IQs, while state-run orphanages produced morons. The Iowa researchers believed that they had demonstrated precisely that.

The psychological establishment of the 1930s ridiculed the findings from Iowa and suggested that the Iowa researchers were either improperly trained or too naive to understand the nature of IQ, but other studies also began to show that IQ scores showed a great deal of variability and that environmental influences could no longer be ignored. After World War II, a 1948 study from the Berkeley Growth Study, "The Stability of Mental Test Performance Between Two and Eighteen years," lent the prestige of the University of California to the idea that IQ could be improved. The authors tested 248 urban children in the Berkeley Guidance Study form age 21 months to 18 years and found that 60 percent of the children showed improvements of 15 or more points in their IQs. One third of the group a showed change of 20 or more points; 9% 30 or more points; 15 percent saw a change of less than 10 points. Group averages of IQ showed a shift from 118 to 123. There were some individuals with much greater changes of as much as 50 points (both up and down) but, they reported, "changes in mental test scores tend to be in the direction of the family level, as judged by the parents' education and socioeconomic status." More than any other this report seems to have changed the thinking of many psychologists on the fixity of IQ.

In 1961 J. McVickar Hunt published Intelligence and Experience and concluded that experience had a major influence on the development of the human brain. Three years later Benjamin Bloom argued in Stability and Change in Human Characteristics that half of the variation possible in mental powers appeared by age 4, thus supporting the idea of intervention in the lives of young children, but, in a follow-up as dramatic as the original work, in 1966 Skeels published Adult status of Children with Contrasting Early Life Experiences, A Follow Up Study. He found 13 from the experimental group and 12 from the group that had remained in the orphanage. Those who had been placed in the Glenwood institution had gone on to have relatively normal lives, while those who had gone to the orphanage had suffered major difficulties in their lives: 1 died in adolescence in a state institution for the mentally retarded, 4 were still wards of institutions, one in a mental hospital, and the other 3 were institutions for the mentally retarded. In part because of the other studies mentioned, Skeels' follow-up study was accepted, even though the original Iowa work had been rejected by the IQ establishment.

In a 1971 compilation of earlier work the psychologists at Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley (formerly the Institute of Child Welfare) publicly acknowledged that their own work had challenged the conventional wisdom of the 1920s that mental ability was inherited. The situation, Bayley had concluded in 1970 was that "the complex interaction of genetic potential and environmental stimulation in the context of maturing and pliable neural structures presents a setting in which the exact expression of mental abilities may be impossible to predict."

While some psychologists would continue to hold allegiance to the fixed IQ viewpoint, the Iowa research had finally been vindicated and proved to be a bulwark in the foundations of Project Head Start. Thus one of the main intellectual stumbling blocks in the road to Head Start and the idea that early intervention could benefit disadvantaged children had now been removed. Few today credit the Iowa researchers for their pioneering efforts, although recently, in Before Head Start, historian Hamilton Cravens has clearly shown how important their work was. Similarly Lawrence K. Frank's name is not well-known, although he ought to be remembered as one of the founders of the discipline of child psychology which provides intellectual and professional support to project Head Start. Sometimes it is also forgotten that Frank's vision was much more than a matter of raising IQ. His vision was to promote social improvement by applying the discipline of child science to social problems. Today both Head Start and child psychology are healthy and important parts of the way American society responds to its children. Both the Iowa researchers and Lawrence K. Frank deserve to be remembered for their roles in helping these positive developments come about. For Further Reading:
Cravens, Hamilton, Before head Start: The Iowa Station & America's Children. Chapel Hill: The University Press of North Carolina, 1993.

Hawes, Joseph M. Children Between the Wars: American Childhood 1920-1940. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Hawes, Joseph M. and N. Ray Hiner, eds., American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Westport, Ct: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Sears, Robert. Your Ancients Revisited: A History of Child Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Zigler, Edward and Susan Muenchow. Head Start: The Inside Story of America's Most Successful Educational Experiment. New York: Basic Books, 1992.