Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (7 page)

When White adults have not thought about their own racial identity, it is difficult for them to respond to the identity-development needs of either White children or children of color. Consequently, it becomes very important to engage teachers around these issues in pre-service preparation and in ongoing professional development. The intergenerational transmission of incomplete and distorted identity stories is a problem that we must address at the level of teacher preparation—and for the thousands of teachers already in the classroom, as part of ongoing professional development, a conversation that I will elaborate on in
Chapter 2
. The need is particularly pressing for White teachers, who represent the vast majority of the public school educators in the United States, but it applies to all teachers. We cannot assume that teachers of color are confident in their abilities to talk about these issues as well. None of us can teach what we haven’t learned ourselves. The good news is that those who have engaged in a process of examining their own racial or ethnic identity, and who feel affirmed in it, are more likely to be respectful of the self-definition that others claim, and are much more effective working in multiracial settings. It is these members of our society who can help us move beyond the regressive state of our current educational system, and move us forward into the twenty-first century with hope.

As part of a program sponsored by the National Staff Development Council, an organization committed to ensuring success for all students through staff development and school improvement, I had the opportunity to dialogue with colleagues from around the country about some of the challenges associated with what I call antiracist professional development for educators. One man expressed his frustration that many school districts only wanted to talk about closing the “achievement gap,” usually defined as a disparity in school performance between White students and students of color (particularly Black and Latino students) as evidenced by standardized test scores and overall grade point averages. The decision makers he described did not want to invest resources of time or money in any larger conversations about race in schools. How, he asked, could he persuade them to support antiracist professional development?

I replied: You have to help them see how unexamined racial attitudes can negatively impact student performance, and how a willingness to break the silence about the impact of race in schools as part of a program of antiracist professional development can improve achievement.
You have to connect the dots
. At a time when America is fixated myopically on test-score disparities yet making little progress on eliminating them, we all need to see the connections between notions of race and intelligence in America’s classrooms, the academic achievement of underperforming students of color, and the benefit of antiracist professional development. Connecting those dots is my project in this chapter.

We must always begin by acknowledging the social and historical context in which we operate. That context shapes in powerful ways how we think and act. One important dimension of that context is the fact that American schools were never designed to educate everyone. We often talk about the importance of an educated citizenry for a successful democracy, and I certainly agree that such a citizenry is necessary. However, when our democracy was being established, only White male landowners could vote. The educated citizenry that our founding fathers had in mind did not include many of the people who will read this essay. White women were not allowed to vote until 1920. The Constitution originally defined enslaved Africans as equivalent to three-fifths of a person without the rights of citizenship, and in slaveholding states it was illegal to educate them. The right to vote was hard-won, and not guaranteed for African Americans until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, less than a lifetime ago. As I have argued, the history of desegregation of the public schools during the 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent resegregation of schools in the 1980s and 1990s following key Supreme Court decisions make evident that race still matters in schools.
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From the beginning, American constructions of race and class have determined who had access to education, and to a large degree those constructions still shape how we think about who can benefit from it.

Additionally, American constructions of intelligence, closely interwoven with our notions of race and class, have shaped how we think about who can benefit from education. Historically, our schools have been structured to identify those with high potential and those without, and to sort them accordingly. Fundamentally, that is the purpose of ability grouping, also known as tracking, a well-established practice in schools across the country. Although today I often hear educators and politicians alike emphasize the idea that all children can and must learn at a high level, I sometimes wonder if they really believe their own rhetoric. If they do, such thinking represents a recent shift in ideology that still is not reflected in the organizational structure of most schools. Tracking persists. The technological demands of the information age make greater levels of academic achievement and postsecondary education a necessity, but our schools still reflect the assumptions of the industrial age, when the majority of students were expected to enter the world of work performing routinized tasks, rather than pursue advanced education and professions requiring critical analysis or creative thinking. The idea of widespread access to a college education is a relatively new concept in our society, and we have never provided the necessary preparation in a widespread way. No wonder we find it hard to do now.

If we are really serious about creating learning environments that foster high levels of achievement for all of our students, irrespective of race and class, we have to examine and challenge a fundamental notion central to the educational process—the notion of intelligence. The concept of intelligence as an inborn attribute that determines one’s capacity to learn is an idea firmly embedded in our society and our educational system.
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And who can question that some people seem to process information faster than others? We see evidence of that all around us, every day. I do not question that there may be individual variation in the speed of our neural synapses. The question we might ask is, How fast is fast enough? The social psychologist and educator Jeff Howard has argued that if you have learned to speak your native language by the age of three (a task of considerable cognitive complexity), then you have all the synaptic speed you need to be successful in school. The key to your success in school is not inborn ability, but rather effective effort produced in the context of high expectations.
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But this idea that most of us are
smart enough
to achieve at a high level in school runs counter to our long-standing practice of testing and sorting. So where did the idea of testing and sorting come from—and what does it have to do with race?

To answer that question, we need to go back to the introduction of the idea of intelligence as something that could be quantified and measured using standardized tests. Alfred Binet, a French psychologist, is credited with inventing the first intelligence test in 1905, though that was not his stated intention. He was commissioned by the French minister of public education to develop techniques for identifying children who might need special educational services. The test he created was intended to be administered individually, and he was very specific about how his new measure should be used. He believed that intelligence was too multidimensional to capture with a single number or score, and he worried that the use of his test would lead to inappropriate labeling of children. Binet insisted that the test he created should
not
be used as a general device for ranking all students—but should only be used for the
limited
purpose of identifying children whose poor performance might indicate a need for special education, those who today might be classified as mildly retarded or perhaps having specific learning disabilities. The aim of testing, he said, should be to identify children in order to help them improve, not to place labels on them which in themselves could become limiting.
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However, as Stephen Jay Gould documents in his classic text,
The Mismeasure of Man
, all of Binet’s caveats were disregarded when his test was imported to America. The misuse of his and other tests was fueled by two ideas that were actively embraced by leading American psychologists in the early twentieth century. The first is the idea of reification—the assumption that test scores represent a single, measurable characteristic of brain functioning called general intelligence. The second is the idea of hereditarianism, the assumption that intelligence, as measured by tests, is largely inherited, and thus independent of major environmental differences between racial and ethnic groups in our society. Perhaps not surprisingly, the hereditarian theory of intelligence grew in popularity in America at a time of extreme nationalism during the early twentieth century, a time when a wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe was taking place. Two prominent psychologists, Henry Herbert Goddard and Lewis M. Terman, played pivotal roles in the spread of these ideas.
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Goddard is sometimes called the father of intelligence testing because he first translated Binet’s test into English and introduced it into the United States. His interest was inspired by his work as the director of an institution in New Jersey called the Vineland Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys. He enjoyed his work with the students there and became very interested in both the causes of mental deficiency and the teaching methods employed by the instructors. His research facility at the school has been described as the first laboratory for the scientific study of mentally retarded persons. In Goddard’s day, there were three categories of mental deficiency: idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded.

Idiots and imbeciles (language considered offensive today) were what we would now identify as severely or moderately retarded individuals. Those who could not develop full speech and had a mental age below three were considered idiots, and those with a mental age between three and seven who could not master written language were considered imbeciles, categories relatively easy to identify. Goddard’s interest in testing was sparked by his concern about identifying those who were what he called “high-grade defectives” or “morons,” people who could function in society but who were “feeble-minded.” In his view, such people were a menace because they threatened to weaken the gene pool of American intelligence.
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Goddard was the first popularizer of the Binet test in America; he believed that the test was perfect for identifying the feeble-minded, but unlike Binet, his goal was not to help these individuals perform better in school. Goddard considered the test scores as measures of a single, innate entity, and his goal was to identify the mentally deficient, then segregate them and keep them from having children, in order to prevent the demise of American society. Clearly he was a believer in eugenics, though he acknowledged that widespread sterilization of people of low intelligence was impractical.
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He was not alone in his concern about the threat that such individuals posed, however.

By the end of the nineteenth century, American concern about immigration was growing, fueled by fears that a large percentage of the new arrivals were mentally deficient. In 1882 the United States Congress passed a law prohibiting people believed to be mentally defective from passing through the Ellis Island checkpoint. Enforcing this law proved to be difficult, because as many as five thousand immigrants needed to be inspected each day. In 1910 Goddard was among those invited to Ellis Island to investigate how the screening process might be expedited. In 1912 he returned to the island, accompanied by two specially trained assistants. The procedure he developed was a two-step process. One assistant would visually screen for suspected mental defectives as the immigrants passed through the checkpoint. These individuals would then proceed to another location, where the other assistant would assess them with a variety of performance measures and a revised version of the Binet test. Goddard believed that trained inspectors could be more accurate than the Ellis Island physicians; the key to their success was expertise developed through experience.
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In 1913 Goddard wrote:

Among those tested according to the procedures utilized by Goddard and his staff in 1912, 83 percent of the Jews, 80 percent of the Hungarians, 79 percent of the Italians, and 87 percent of the Russians were identified as “feeble-minded.” The number of immigrants who were deported increased dramatically as a result of Goddard’s new screening measures.
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Even Goddard was surprised that these percentages were so high, but the data did not lead him—as it should have—to conclude that there was a problem with his assessment procedure. He resolved, instead, that the United States was now scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as the immigrant populations were concerned. In 1917 he wrote, “We cannot escape the general conclusion that these immigrants were of surprisingly low intelligence….We are now getting the poorest of each race.”
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However, by 1928 Goddard had changed his mind about the value of those individuals that his procedures had determined were of limited intelligence. He wrote: “They do a great deal of work that no one else will do….There is an immense amount of drudgery to be done, an immense amount of work for which we do not wish to pay enough to secure more intelligent workers….May it be that possibly the moron has his place.”
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