That name was originally intended to reflect the very positive results achieved according to its initial evaluation but upon further research the name became more of an irony as it was found that most of the data was fabricated without any evidence of the miracolous gains claimed at first.
Although this district contained only 3% of the city's population, 33% of all children who had been labeled "mentally retarded" lived there.
Mothers of children in the experimental group received education and vocational rehabilitation.The children attended an onsite Infant/Child Care program where they received a high quality educational program designed to develop language and cognitive skills.
[2] The Milwaukee Project's claimed success was celebrated in the popular media and by famous psychologists.
However, later in the project Rick Heber, the principal investigator, was discharged from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and convicted and imprisoned for large-scale abuse of federal funding for private gain.
Nevertheless, many college textbooks in psychology and education have uncritically reported the project's results.