In “Nathan Glazer’s Warning,” Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute uses Glazer’s writings to examine the revival of federal social policy (i.e., social engineering) by the Obama administration.
The following is a particularly interesting passage about the failure of federal education and training programs:
Glazer, by contrast, immersed himself in social science. Take a chapter in The Limits of Social Policy called “Education, Training and Poverty: What Worked?” In that chapter, Glazer reviews the social-science literature on 18 social programs, from the Job Corps to Head Start, from Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the School Breakfast program, as well as a “meta-evaluation” based on 42 studies of early-childhood education programs. His conclusions aren’t polemical, but they are withering nonetheless. “At least some of the states known for high expenditure on education and social needs have shown remarkably poor records.” “After having done badly in schooling, we do not do well at making up for the failure through work-training programs, though we have certainly tried.” And crucially: “The evaluations of specific programs that were available during the first ten years after the launching of the [War on Poverty] confirmed the verdict: nothing worked, and, in particular, nothing that one did in education worked.”
I do not believe that the failure of federal social policy will dissuade Obama from pushing for government action designed to “change and improve people and their neighborhoods.”
