childs mother didnt work between birth and kinder- garten.   The child attended Head Start. The childs parents regularly take him to museums. The child is regularly spanked. The child frequently watches television. The childs parents read to him nearly every day. Now, two by two: Matters: The child has highly educated parents. Doesnt: The childs family is intact.     A child whose parents are highly educated typically does well in school; not much surprise there. A family with a lot of schooling tends to value schooling. Perhaps more important, parents with higher IQs tend to get more education, and IQ is strongly hereditary. But whether a childs family is intact doesnt seem to matter. Just as the earlier-cited studies show that family structure has little impact on a childs personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either. This is not to say that families ought to go around splitting up willy-nilly. It should, however, offer encouragement to the roughly twenty million American schoolchildren being raised by a single parent.     Matters: The childs parents have high socioeconomic status. Doesnt: The childs parents recently moved into a better neigh-