TV’s Good Side, Changing Faces, and Helping Hands

Teacher Magazine ’s take on education news from around the Web, Feb. 23-March 1.

In the wake of recent, assumption-shattering studies showing that fat isn’t necessarily bad for you, and that calcium supplements don’t help most women prevent bone fragility, another, equally sacrosanct truism was felled this week: the belief that TV rots kids’ brains. According to Jesse M. Shapiro, a research fellow at the University of Chicago, there was "very little difference and if anything, a slight positive advantage" in academic test scores for children who grew up watching TV at an early age , versus those who did not. He and the report’s co-author, assistant professor Matthew Gentzkow, studied data from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when some places got TV service years ahead of others, and correlated it with nationwide test scores from 1965. The report’s reception was, as could be expected, not entirely free of static. Elizabeth A. Vandewater, director of the Center for Research on Interactive Technology, Television and Children, pointed out that, regardless of TV’s purported academic benefits, the research ignored evidence that "violent [TV] content is related...