All signs pointed to Johnson. Meyler told us that she suspected him and that the charity contacted the bank, but there was no way to prove it. He gave money and a bag of rice on behalf of the school. Two staff members would tell authorities that after a bathroom lock was found broken, rumors spread among students and staff that Johnson had been in there with someone. Three girls would tell authorities Johnson raped them in that bathroom. Montilla, the principal, would tell authorities that a student had complained Johnson showed her pornography on his phone and was showing it to other girls.
The door was locked. Johnson said to wait. Minutes later, a year-old student emerged, her hair unkempt, her shirt not straight. Johnson was behind her, wearing only a pair of shorts. He said they were napping. Spada recalled that this reassured her. His sister, he says, was not from the streets. He watched as his sister began to act differently; she wet the bed and was not well. She was suspended from school for misbehavior. Her symptoms, Martor noted, were consistent with a minor sexually transmitted disease. Martor promised to keep it a secret, but she knew she would tell Johnson immediately, so he could deal with the culprit.
Martor told us she was scared for her safety, scared of losing her job and scared that she would not be believed if she told her superiors what the girl had shared. But then, the girl confided in another Liberian staff member, listed many other victims and came to Martor for a pregnancy test.
Martor kept quiet for five months. In this period, according to their statements to authorities, two girls were raped for the first time. On June 12, , Martor finally sat down with Spada and told her. At 24, it was her first managerial job. She said she told two colleagues and spoke by phone to Meyler in the U. What happened next is a matter of dispute. We need to think about whether this was our responsibility. They cannot help us. They cannot help our students. Contacted again just before publication, she said that she stood by her account and that the comment was one of the reasons she left the organization.
In addition, Spada said Meyler recently asked her what she had told us about More Than Me and did not challenge her recollection of what Borghese said on the call. To avoid alerting Johnson to the investigation, school leadership told him he was suspended in connection with the debit card theft and sent him home. Trying to arrest him on his turf could be dangerous; police needed to entice him out of West Point.
It fell to Meyler back in the U. On June 16, four days after Martor reported the abuse to Spada, he came. The police were waiting. Board member Chid Liberty said he was first informed of the rapes when she called him right before the event. In Liberia, as news spread about the arrest, rioters gathered outside the school and police station. Rape allegations were more commonly mediated between families in West Point, not prosecuted in court.
Meyler flew in to deal with the crisis. Facing threats from West Point, only 10 girls pressed charges. The press release established how the organization would frame the rapes. It was community business. MTM blog posts featuring Johnson were deleted or edited without comment. Videos were also removed. One board member not in attendance was Liberty.
The charity did not commission or write any report examining how the rapes had been allowed to happen. In the same week the girls came forward, Ebola claimed its first victims in Monrovia. By August , the graph of cases was rising exponentially. West Point became a hot zone with a strict military quarantine. While glacial international organizations were limited by bureaucracy, MTM could jump in and do what seemed necessary.
Funding for hundreds of community workers? Meyler shared each step of her Ebola journey on Instagram, posting graphic pictures of the dead and the dying, and of herself bearing witness. In an Ebola holding center filled with listless patients, she sang gospel songs, handed out toy guns and promised a dying boy a bicycle. No one else here is doing this. Showing love n dignity in death. They found a 3-year-old girl in a pink dress crying alone in an ambulance.
She had just watched her mother die, seen the corpse slung into a body bag. Then Warren sold footage to CBS, but according to an email exchange, the nature of the planned story upset Meyler and her board. She courted journalists who arrived to cover the epidemic, saying MTM had opened an interim care facility called Hope Meyler and her charity began to appear in stories across the world: Meyler became a face of the outbreak, the crusading American who ran toward danger to save the children.
Representatives from Liberian government departments asked each other: Did anyone sign off on MTM having a care facility? Maybe this is not your line of business. MTM provided documents showing that in the weeks following the meeting, they gained Ministry of Health clearance to operate in the health sector, and that they were registered as an educational charity when the school opened. The school would be fully accredited the following year. The Liberian government never accredited the care facility, and MTM attempted to allay its concerns by partnering with a larger international organization.
The whole thing collapsed at the end of November. In a presentation at her old church in Bedminster, N. I mean, not to say that the prayer for her to get Ebola was a good thing. But God took care of that. We could not find evidence that any government officials involved had died of Ebola. The charity gave us an email from an MTM board member, Amanda Kelso, who works at Instagram as global director of community programs and editorial. Leaving the country in December with Ebola on the wane, Meyler posted videos of Liberians dancing and singing in the street, holding signs congratulating her for her work.
Department of State and U. Agency for International Development. In the background, prosecutors were preparing their case against Johnson, but troubling news was filtering through about two key witnesses. Spada, the complainant in the case, was to be witness No. But she told the adviser she was leaving the organization and Liberia for good. She promised she would return to testify — she would use her own money if necessary. The adviser told us he confronted Meyler about something he had heard from his colleagues at the prosecution unit — that Meyler remained in phone contact with Johnson, had visited him in prison and was giving him money and food.
Why was she doing this with the man they were trying to prosecute for raping her students? And so she was in touch with him. But the meeting with the U.
He remembers telling Meyler she had to break off contact, immediately. In the dock in an orange jumpsuit, Johnson was serene, sometimes smiling. One after another, from behind a partition, the girls described rape suffered at his hands over five years, starting when they were as young as Liberian law on statutory rape criminalizes any form of penetration with a girl under Public Defender Elisha Forekeyoh cast the MTM girls as dishonest and sexualized, betraying the man who had cared for them.
She would later go into detail about the fact that she did not bleed after Johnson raped her the first time, at age Their memories were sometimes inconsistent, their stories so extreme, they were hard to believe even when corroborated. As the case went on, it became clear. Meyler told us she was never asked to testify. In her absence, Forekeyoh devised a defense theory of conspiracy with Meyler at its heart. Outside the court, only rumors circulated.
No journalists could attend; no stories mentioning the trial would ever be reported. Zero Tolerance for Sexual Abuse. It explained how big a problem rape is in Liberia, particularly in schools, and declared MTM one of the only schools to ever report it. Meyler had left Liberia the day after the trial began. She and Minister of Education George Werner had become a traveling double act, selling an idea to donors: Meyler said the government had asked MTM to take over 30 of its schools. In December, Meyler flew back into Liberia. She had one of the victims, fresh from telling her story in court, in front of a camera telling another.
Jurors, who in Liberian courts have the opportunity to question witnesses, kept asking Johnson about Meyler. What about these sleepovers involving her? Juror Raymond Roberts had watched the girls tell their stories, but something seemed off. Johnson needed 10 to go free. Then on Christmas, a gift of goat soup arrived. A few days later, the money came. It was a lot of money in Liberia. For those who believed there was a conspiracy by the charity against Johnson, the bribe offers confirmed it. The way they saw it, only MTM could have that kind of cash. In deliberations, some jurors were adamant they should set Johnson free regardless of the bribe offers.
The jurors voted 8 to 4 in his favor, but the two others he needed to go free had eluded him. It was a hung jury. He would have to stand trial again. On March 4, , two months after the mistrial verdict, a short postscript was added to a blog MTM had posted during the trial:. The number of girls who went to court was never acknowledged publicly, or that Johnson had been a central figure in the organization, or that rapes took place in the school.
What the organization did say was not accurate. The charity added a board member with experience in education in That fall, MTM began operating six government schools as part of what had become a controversial outsourcing experiment. In November, an anonymous WhatsApp message began circulating in Liberia. It made a series of outlandish-sounding allegations against the organization. The message said that, in addition to Johnson, a second staff member had been implicated and quietly fired. It mentioned sexually transmitted diseases being passed on to victims. He and board chair Skip Borghese had issued a statement a few days earlier.
Laura Smith, country director at the time, recalled a decision being made that MTM should not report the case to the police. The employee, who denies the allegations, had already absconded. Meyler spent 22 minutes telling her life story, then of her work on Ebola. This was a girl who had told authorities her rape by Johnson began at 11 years old.
The language echoed what, in a email, Meyler had told a new staff member. While Garlick and Meyler attacked its anonymous sender, the WhatsApp message contained much that was true. One particularly disturbing accusation had been dismissed out of hand by Garlick. You fight and fight until you absolutely can't fight anymore.
Someone young and idealistic…someone who can experience things for the first time along with you. I'm not always kind, and I have more faults than I'd care to name. All I can promise is that I'll want you until my last breath. I just want you to be happy. And that was all he wanted. The Story of a Murderer. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing. But they are two entirely different questions. The post is long enough as it is. And answering the second question would require a deep-dive into economic and political philosophy.
Questions of taxation, political feasibility, and weighing moral values against each other. And it can be something entirely different. For one thing, one of the reasons that universal preschool has such widespread political support is that people tend to view children as innocent and, therefore, want to believe that they ultimately malleable. It can sometimes be much easier to get people to approve of public programs aimed at very young children than to support interventions for older children, in part, because people tend to believe that older children have already made their choices and are irredeemable.
Personally, I think it is worth the time and effort to find out how true these assumptions really are. Many of the studies I linked, including Deming, included cost-benefit analyses purporting to show that benefits exceeded costs at the effect sizes they found. There are a lot of other likely benefits here as well, lower crime rate is also a big deal, poor parents probably earn more if they have child care, ect. That may be overstating the benefit. Assume that Head Start achieves its result by turning marginal dropouts into marginal graduates: True, but Head Start presumably also turns median dropouts into superior dropouts, and marginal graduates into median graduates, which will both be associated with some increase in earning potential.
But, accounting for the time value of money, Head Start is still looking like a very marginal proposition and we should also be looking at other things we could be doing better. One detail I missed at first which adds a bit of plausibility to the case for preschool: This effect clearly produces more low-quality graduates. Even if you assumed that academic performance or even IQ were boosted directly, if the shapes of the distributions for the poor population and others were anything like normal distributions, boosting the inferior population to a better-but-still-inferior level would still increase the graduates proportionally more at the worse-than-average level.
The child not being at preschool also has significant oppurtunity costs, since the alternative is normally one parent being at home with them and not working.
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Which is good for the family as a whole, and probably for the child given all the well known positive outcomes of more money. Very obviously, research which is plausibly politically-biased should be scrutinized severely, but only doing this for one side just moves the problem up a level. It referred to being on the left side of the line in the provided chart, in other words, studies before the year Just to clarify for anyone who forgot: Is it worth the cost. It sorta seems like goalpost moving: In fact, the goalposts were moved for the Iraq War.
The original impetus was to protect the US from weapons of mass destruction. After we sent in the military, wasted pallets of cash, and discovered no weapons of mass destruction, we patted ourselves on the back for freeing the Iraqi people from a dictator.
Would we have spent so many lives and resources if the original goal was to depose a dictator? Similarly, I am skeptical that the arguments for programs like Head Start are causally-related to the objectives of proponents. And this goal was achieved, to a remarkable degree. It took several years longer, and about a trillion dollars more, than was originally anticipated, but it was achieved. And Iraq is a democracy, the only one in the arab world.
WMD was only one of many arguments explicitly articulated by the administration, one that feels louder in hindsight than it actually was becuase of the unexpected failure to find any meant that critics could hammer them on the point. Cass, I am a bit young to fully remember the political debates about whether we should have gone into Iraq, but my memory is that WMD was reason 1 and reason 2 was a distant second. The article you linked seems to imply that WMD was indeed the primary but not only argument going into the war, but then subsided as evidence that WMDs were there subsided.
I feel like this detracts from your point rather than supports it. I second what acymetric said. Their strategy was to pull a massive scale version of the invasion of grenada. I tend to agree with you. The original premise was that IQ variance was environmental, but big changes to environment made no difference. Head Start did not affect the birth weight.
Head Start was just disproportionately attended by kids with a low birth weight. This is probably the most interesting point not yet discussed. The mechanism for selecting against low birth weight should be discussed it also is possibly a coincidence since he looked at 30 variables and found 1 that was significant in a P-hacking sort of way.
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It seems very unlikely that pre-school could have an effect which was race-dependent in any fundamental way. Where there are observed differences in outcomes between racial groups that is presumably because race is a proxy for something else like poverty , but that relationship will be inconsistent across time and space. Might that explain the inconsistent outcomes by racial subgroups? Maybe the cultural impacts of racism and colonialism are strong enough that they last for generations after colonialism is dead and overt racism is rare my hunch says yes to at least this one.
Or maybe your just plain right: But race is also a proxy for cultural impacts. Nigerian immigrants from the 90s did not have ancestors that suffered from discrimination in America. Race is also a proxy for culture. Not all hispanics are cultural hispanics. Not all cultural hispanics are hispanic. Skin color is about the least likely attribute to have a direct effect on any but a very small set of outcomes, like skin cancer. Race is more than skin color. Lots of tan white people are darker than lots of Asians, Hispanics, even blacks. How strong is the correlation? Is it like lung cancer and smoking strong?
His opinions are not necessarily those of Mother Jones, and vice versa. But what is preschool from what age and what are the alternatives to it? And if the kids are there anyway, they might as well try to teach them something but that is kind of secondary. Only the last year, when they are 5 years old, called the school preparation year is where some more formal teaching takes place.
It is the only year that is mandatory, the earlier not. Is this the preschool in the US sense, is this what Scott is writing about? What is actually being done there? Here it is stuff like improving speech and speech understanding abilities, teamwork abilities etc. What is the alternative to preschool in the Scott sense? Sounds like bad socialization, no relationship with other kids and losing much of the workforce.
Be in a kind of daycare or kindergarten but learn nothing, just play all day? Sounds like a waste of time. Why shock kids with school being totally different than daycare instead of having a gradual transition? I think in the US what they call pre-school is systemtically teaching things to 3 and 4-year-olds. These are not at all agreed upon, as I understand. It may, for example, be better to learn socializing from the grown-ups, since they are the ones who actually can socialize in a polite, pro-social manner.
There are suggestive differences in child cortisol levels between daycare and no daycare days, for example. Feeling safe can plausibly be connected to good life outcomes. Plus we cannot deny that children had plenty of relationships with other kids before daycare became widespread, so daycare is not necessary for that. I suppose the one most important benefit of daycare is letting the mothers go to work. Aside from that, playing all day is probably not waste of time, play is how young kids naturally learn, right?
At least in mathematics, per Benezet formal education before sixth grade is completely unnecessary at best and may be actively depressing population adult outcomes. So, yeah, fractions for toddlers are probably not a great idea. And yet if we are on a holiday after 2 days she says she wants to. Just like how she is screaming every evening she does not want to take a bath, and then enjoys it so much she does not want to get out.
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She has a weird love-hate relationship with a classmate. She sometimes says he bullies her, name-calling, and yet always looking for him and wants to play together. But I know that a bit of aggressive behavior is not alien from her either whe she is tearing at her mothers breasts at full force, it is really hard for her to stay principled and not slap her , so I asked the boys parents and yeah there were some complaints about she bullying him as well.
Preschool is something offered before that, usually from years of age, and is not required and generally not free. The no-preschool scenario for low income families usually mean that the mother or other family members often grandparents take care of the kid. Sometimes the kid goes to a community or church-based daycare center, but I think this is less common.
So, as Scott and Kelsey have both mentioned in their articles, the effects of preschool in the US may be related to providing any kind of consistent childcare environment, as well as giving the mothers better employment options. Any formal education preschools provide is probably irrelevant. Also, this is a tangential point, companies in the US are only required to offer 12 weeks of maternity leave, and this is often unpaid, especially for low paying jobs.
This is a weird reply. Also, not sure that female developers are the most relevant to a discussion more focused on low income childcare options. Most websites in the world are still programmed in PHP and Asp. In the comfy mediocre tepid company I work at, the average company, we are considering rewriting Asp. Elitist was probably a bit of a loaded word to use there…but your position definitely does not apply to the majority of coding jobs available out there which I think is what nameless1 was getting at.
I get job offers from the US with much higher pretax and basically 2x as much posttax pay. I admit I think mostly conservative about this: Matters more for single moms, but looking my above numbers… well at least it does not encourage family breakups much. Another thing is really that you cannot leave a kid in a kindergarten for 9 hours. So one parent will have a part time, hour job and pick them up at Due to social, biological or whatever reasons, the typical gender role is here the old one: A good number of double income families get around this by having one parent start work early and get out early and one parent start work late and get out late.
I suspect that a large majority of 2-income households do not have that kind of flexibility with their work hours. You guys could just Google an empirical question like that. Most sources I just came across in 2 minutes of searching indicate that between 27 and 30 percent of workers in the United States have access to flex time. As a parent, I can tell you that a lot of us address this issue by making use of after-school programs.
About half of the 2 income families that I know do this. You only need one flexible schedule, the person working drops off and the one who works starts between 7 and 8 picks up. This is hard in an office if the office hours are 9 to But this is precisely why my wife is orienting herself towards logistics. Warehouses tend to be early birds, sending trucks out at 5: Now there are people who get ready in 10 minutes in the morning. We are not that kind of people. More like 90 minutes with several coffees and phone browsing.
And if it takes a hour to load the truck she would get up a 2: One couple I know both work for the same large company, one is a manager in the warehouse, and is a manager in procurement. The first is at work before 6am, the other at work until 6pm, neither needs flex time to make it work. Daycare and preschool are separated by how many formal activities there are. Preschool has a few formal activities. Daycare has informal activities. Not completely sure about this next bit, but I think preschool also has a higher adult-to-child ratio than daycare.
Meaning more individualized attention, which has always been shown to increase outcomes for students. Regarding the Mother Jones chart: I feel like their sensationalist headline is not sensationalist enough:. And by even further extension, all research from any field that was not preregistered? If science was a factory, seeing this chart should make the foreman stop all conveyor belts because of production defects. Drug research is different from drug approval. Drug approval is based on research, but it is preregistered and the analysis is performed by the FDA. No, not at all. To list just a few criticisms: The post sample size is k, so 4 times the pre sample size.
This suggests a very simple explanation, namely that the pre results have a file drawer problem, coupled with the statistical necessity of anything significant in small samples being an overestimate. Head to table S2, and find e.
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Couple things come to mind: If this is really that expensive, expect lots of similar studies which went unpublished. Does not raise confidence this is honest reporting. Do they mention that in their discussion? No, instead they treat it as gospel that there was a decrease around despite the fact that this is only true for one of their DVs namely primary endpoint and not true for the other.
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The aim is usually to show non-inferiority to warfarin the standard drug for a couple of outcomes and to show improvement over warfarin on some of those outcomes. Warfarin itself trades off bleeding versus thrombi, and so a better drug can lower either while keeping the other constant. Yet you only get one primary endpoint, and depending on which you pick the pre-registered trial is either null or not. We all believed, prior to reading the study, that forcing scientists to pre-register their studies keeps them honest and that file drawering and p-hacking are a thing we get less of with pre-registration.
So, obvious things being obvious, what we really want to know is how strong the effect is. This study, in isolation, is a poor guide to that question, for reasons given above. Want to dig into the research when I get some free time later. But just want to say that very few people could do what you do, Scott. Admit a mea culpa, make a serious effort going through the research in an unbiased way, get yelled at by a bunch of people on the Internet, calmly and charitably pay attention to their points, double the effort to dig into the research, still remain unbiased and open-minded, without any other expectation other than getting yelled at by people on the Internet some more.
Pre-school and daycare programs seem to me to be aimed at two problems primarily, that have little to do with educational outcomes, that are not mentioned much, if at all, in the literature. I feel as though these are the actual reasons that we, as a society, push for Head Start and other pre-school programs.
We also seem reluctant to talk plainly about these goals, with the exception of some quite recent Democrat pushes for daycare. Anyone else get a similar impression? People thought early childhood education could make smarter adults, but no, not really, but it maybe can make better socially adapted adults. On the other hand, if the goal was life outcomes, and education was a means, then they can drop education and not change direction.
Even thinking that was the best method to achieve their goal did not tie them to that method. Bear in mind that Head Start was rolled out to the poorest communities in the US, rather than a random sampling. Since very few year-olds were receiving education at the time, if education was the only criteria, they could all benefit equally. It appears that the consensus was closer to my 2 above, in that case. I can think of a lot of other secret reasons people might have for promoting these programs. I think, as Conrad added, that there was a genuine belief that education was effective, and could be provided by this program.
Hence a question — how much was the program designed around education, and how much around these other reasons? The Terrible Awful Truth view: Just having a support network of extended family and friends can achieve that, even if you are renting or whatever. Totally agree, I think a more robust metric for home quality would be useful, outside just income. I grew up in a rural area where average incomes were really low, but lots of people owned the houses they lived in and were multigenerational. They do well compared to children in similar demographics who do not go to Head Start.
The regress to the mean happens during mandatory education elementary school , when there is no control group of kids sitting at home anymore. So, your argument is that the return to mean is not regression so much as the rest of the cohort catching up to them? The question is what is the difference between 13 years of treatment and years? If the answer is nothing then the extra 2 years did nothing. It may be wrong, but it may also be correct, especially depending on how you define the goals of preschool.
If 3 K turns out to have the same overall benefits as 1, then 1 is just adding expense for no reason. Let the kids go play!
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The More Likely Mundane Truth view: The environmental choices accumulate into set of experiences and skills. I always bristle when people claim, say, that 6 hours of Fortnite a day is not harming their children. The benefits of Fortnite must be asymptotic. Or TV, provided your kids are not being targeted with advertising to make them feel inadequate or unhappy. The tool which is not bad itself can be horribly bad for your kids.