“Rather than marshaling support for policies to address these problems, adopting a brain-based, essentialist argument for anti-poverty family support programs not only bred disillusionment about these types of programs but also ran the risk of pathologizing poor families. Policymakers asked ‘what is wrong with poor children’ and their families, rather than considering the many ways our policies were failing them.

This approach also helped fuel a renewed and ugly debate on race and intelligence. Scientists began poring over IQ and achievement test results to argue that compensatory education had tried and failed. Some argued the data showed that intelligence was primarily hereditary and that the (perceived) gap in intelligence between racial groups was because of an essential difference between them. This nature-nurture debate raged on, with figures such as Charles Murray publishing books in the 1990s on racial differences in aptitude, providing scholarly fodder for white supremacists and undermining political support for anti-poverty interventions.”