and father are not only proficient in English but spend their weekends broadening their childs cultural horizons by taking him to     museums? Sorry. Culture cramming may be a foundational belief of obsessive parenting, but the ECLS data show no correlation between museum visits and test scores.     Matters: The child is adopted. Doesnt: The child is regularly spanked.     There is a strong correlation-a negative one-between adoption and school test scores. Why? Studies have shown that a childs aca- demic abilities are far more influenced by the IQs of his biological parents than the IQs of his adoptive parents, and mothers who give up their children for adoption tend to have significantly lower IQs than the people who are doing the adopting. There is another expla- nation for low-achieving adoptees which, though it may seem dis- tasteful, jibes with the basic economic theory of self-interest: a woman who knows she will put her baby up for adoption may not take the same prenatal care as a woman who is keeping her baby. (Consider-at the risk of furthering the distasteful thinking-how you treat a car you own versus a car you are renting for the weekend.) But if an adopted child is prone to lower test scores, a spanked child is not. This may seem surprising-not because spanking itself is neces- sarily detrimental but because, conventionally speaking, spanking is considered an unenlightened practice. We might therefore assume that parents who spank are unenlightened in other ways. Perhaps that isnt the case at all. Or perhaps there is a different spanking story to be told. Remember, the ECLS survey included direct interviews with the childrens parents. So a parent would have to sit knee to knee with a government researcher and admit to spanking his child. This would suggest that a parent who does so is either unenlightened or-more