Rick Heber

Richard Franz Heber (born January 12, 1932) is an American educational psychologist and expert on intellectual disability. He is known for his work on the Milwaukee Project, and for his subsequent conviction on charges of fraud and misuse of federal funds. As a result of this conviction, Heber was sentenced to a three-year term in a federal prison in Bastrop, Texas.

Early life and education Heber was born on January 12, 1932. He received his BA from the University of Arkansas in 1953. He then served as principal of the Manitoba School for Mental Deficiency for a year before enrolling at Michigan State University, where he received his master's degree in 1955. In 1957, he received his Ph.D. from George Peabody College. However, despite considerable popular media coverage of the project's purported results, few details of the project were reported in peer-reviewed journals. Soon after the project's results were first described in a brief 1972 conference presentation, its methodology was criticized by Page, who criticized it for "biased selection of treatment groups; contamination of criterion tests; and failure to specify the treatments". Kavale and Mostert concluded in 2004 that "the rather telling criticisms offered" of the project "were never really answered", despite Heber and his colleagues having numerous opportunities to do so.

Criminal conviction From January to October 1981, a series of articles were published in the Madison, Wisconsin newspaper The Capital Times revealing that Heber and his associates had inappropriately diverted research funds for personal use. Revelations from these stories included that Heber and his associate Patrick Flanagan had diverted $165,000 of such funds into their personal bank accounts, and that Heber's legal residence was in Colorado, despite the fact that he was being paid for "full-time" work in Wisconsin. According to Cecil Reynolds and Marie Almond, "It is now questionable whether the project ever actually existed as it had been described by Heber." In contrast, Kavale and Mostert noted that "The consensus was that...it was a mistake to assume that convictions for fraud in any way implied the presence of fraudulent data."