For example, in the applied policy realm Lewis consulted in the development of the Head Start Program in the USA (Rigdon 1988), which has been criticized retrospectively as an attempt to ‘take inner-city preschoolers who live in lead-painted, ratinfested tenements without steady heat or hot water, and metamorphose them into bright-eyed, upper- middle-class overachievers’ (Bourgois 1995, p. 325).