Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (8 page)

Although Goddard is credited with bringing Binet’s scale to America, it was Lewis Terman, a Stanford University professor, who brought it to American schools. Terman revised the test to create the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. The test as standardized by Terman led to the simplification of test results represented by a single number, a number we commonly refer to as IQ, or intelligence quotient. A score of 100 was established as the norm for “average” children.
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Like Goddard, Terman was an influential psychologist, and he had strongly held views about the fixed and unchanging quality of intelligence as an inherited characteristic. He was also an advocate of eugenics, and he expressed his views on the subject in a widely used textbook, published in 1916, titled
The Measurement of Intelligence
.
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He shared Goddard’s concerns about the negative impact on society by the “feeble-minded.” Terman wrote:

Although these ideas sound sinister today, these were mainstream writers and thinkers who enjoyed considerable influence in the American educational system. The Stanford-Binet test led to widespread testing in American schools, and the results were used to sort students according to their measured ability. Terman’s test gave U.S. educators the first simple, quick, cheap, and seemingly objective way to “track” students, or assign them to different course sequences according to their perceived ability.

The notion of intelligence testing was further popularized during World War I, when Robert Yerkes developed the Army mental tests, the first mass-administered intelligence test, used to screen U.S. Army recruits and determine appropriate assignments. The test was given to 1.75 million recruits.
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Like Goddard and Terman, Yerkes believed that IQ was genetically determined, even though his data suggested otherwise. For example, he continually found a relationship between performance on the intelligence tests and the amount of schooling a recruit had had. Yet Yerkes did not conclude that schooling leads to increased scores; rather, he argued that men with more innate intelligence spend more time in school. When Blacks from the North did better on the tests than southern Whites, he did not conclude that the result had to do with better access to education in the North (where education funding was much higher than in the South)—instead he argued that only the most intelligent Blacks had managed to move North. When immigrant populations did better on the tests the longer they had been in the country, he and other hereditarians did not conclude that this was the result of new learning, but that the more recent immigrants (largely from southern and eastern Europe) came from a more deficient gene pool than those who had come earlier (primarily English and northern European immigrants).
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The Army data, combined with ethnocentrism, resulted in the 1924 Restriction Act to limit immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Today we can see that the “hereditarian bias” of Terman, Goddard, Yerkes, and others blinded these researchers to interpretations of their data that made more sense than the ones they relied upon.

Today, most researchers acknowledge that heredity is one factor influencing intelligence—just as heredity influences height. But environmental factors like poor nutrition ultimately impact how tall you are (whatever your genetic makeup). It seems obvious that intelligence, which is even more multiply determined than a characteristic like height, is also impacted by environmental influences both in and out of school. Most psychologists today certainly believe this to be the case. And yet the influence of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes—eminent psychologists in their day—continues to be felt today in the assumptions that most people make about what it is that intelligence tests are measuring, and the role of heredity in determining school success.

Hereditarian assumptions are only one problem with the American understanding of intelligence. Reification is another—the idea that test scores represent a single thing in the head called “general intelligence” that can be measured by a single number. With the invention of factor analysis (a statistical procedure) in 1904 by Charles Spearman, “g” (general intelligence) was born. By taking multiple scores and manipulating them mathematically through the process known as factor analysis, you can get a single number that expresses a relationship (correlation) between the scores used. That number is called a factor. A factor is not a thing or a cause, it is a mathematical abstraction. And it is not the only mathematical conclusion possible, it is only one of the ways one might analyze data. Spearman, however, was convinced that through this process of factor analysis he had identified a single, measurable entity called intelligence.
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Spearman’s “g” was an important cornerstone in the arguments of the hereditarians. In 1937 Sir Cyril Burt, the official psychologist of the London public schools, joined the two concepts when he wrote, “This general intellectual factor, central and all-pervading, shows a further characteristic, also disclosed by testing and statistics. It appears to be inherited, or at least inborn. Neither knowledge nor practice, neither interest nor industry, will avail to increase it.”
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Burt’s name is an important one in this story, because he published influential studies of identical twins raised apart. If intelligence is determined by heredity rather than environment, then identical twins raised in different environments should still have very similar IQ scores.

Burt provided data that demonstrated just that. However, after his death in 1976, it was discovered that, in one of the great intellectual hoaxes of the century,
Burt had fabricated his data
—it was totally unreliable. His fabrications are now believed to have begun in the 1940s, after his real data was destroyed during the London blitz. However, Gould, in his in-depth review of Burt’s scholarly writing, concludes that Burt’s work was flawed from the onset because of his inability to view his own data with reasonable objectivity. “Burt’s hereditarian argument had no foundation in his empirical work (either honest or fraudulent)…it represented an a priori bias, imposed upon the studies that supposedly proved it. It also acted, through Burt’s zealous pursuit of his idée fixe, as a distorter of judgment and finally as an incitement to fraud.”
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But the fraud went undiscovered until after his death, and Burt was still publishing his articles in prestigious psychological journals as late as 1972.

Heir to Burt’s flawed intellectual legacy, Arthur Jensen wrote a controversial article published in 1969 in the
Harvard Educational Review
, in which he argued against compensatory education programs like Head Start, claiming that IQ was an inherited, fixed ability, unable to be changed by early intervention.
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Jensen based most of his argument on Burt’s data, the same data that was later discredited. A generation later, in 1994, Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray published
The Bell Curve
, making essentially the same arguments that Jensen made, rooted in the intellectual history of Goddard, Terman, and Yerkes.
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What do all of these scholars have in common, besides what we might call “bad science”? The first group was working in the early 1920s, at the height of an influx of immigrants who were different from the Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had preceded them, many of whom were politically radical and supportive of labor unions.
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Jensen was writing at the height of the civil rights movement.
The Bell Curve
authors published their book during a time of economic slowdown, concern about jobs, and growing unease among many White people about affirmative action policies. All represent a backlash against progressive movements—essentially arguing for support of the status quo, using a hereditarian argument. In essence, they argue, why change social and educational policies if the outcome is ultimately determined by our biology?

What alternatives are there to these problematic views of intelligence? The psychologist Howard Gardner is well known for his views of multiple intelligences (not just a single g factor).
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But even before Gardner, there was Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist who defined intelligence as an ongoing process of adaptation, not a fixed trait. Piaget understood intelligence as cognitive capacity that develops as a result of individuals’ active engagement with their environment, capacity that gets more complex over time as the result of individual experience.
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This idea is echoed in the work of Jeff Howard, who talks about “smart” as something someone becomes through effective effort, not an unchanging characteristic.
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It is worth reviewing the history of notions of intelligence in our effort to connect the dots of race and achievement, because I think it essential to understand both how deeply embedded a scientifically suspect idea is in our American system of education, and how inherently rooted in the racism of the eugenics movement it is.

Combine this with the long tradition of stereotypical representations of Black and Latino people in popular culture as either stupid, lazy, dangerous, hypersexual, or all of those things combined, and we have a situation in which it is very likely that Black and Latino children will enter school situations in which they are disadvantaged from the beginning by a teacher’s lowered expectations as compared to those he or she may have for the White students in the class.

This is a crucial point. I am not saying that most or many teachers are actively, consciously racist in their belief system (though of course some are). But we are all products of our culture and its history. Regardless of our own racial or ethnic backgrounds, we have all been exposed to racial stereotypes and flawed educational psychology, and unless we are consciously working to counter their influence on our behavior, it is likely that they will shape (subtly perhaps) our interactions with those who have been so stereotyped. To prevent this outcome, we need active intervention in the form of antiracist education and professional development.

The importance of teacher expectations should not be underestimated. Many readers will be familiar with the classic study conducted by Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, testing the impact of teacher expectations on student performance.
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All of the children in the study were administered a nonverbal test of intelligence, which was disguised as a test that would predict intellectual development, or “blooming.”

Approximately 20 percent of the children were chosen at random to form the experimental group. The teachers of these children were told that their scores on the test indicated that they would show surprising gains in intellectual competence during the next eight months of school. The only difference between the children in the experimental group and those in the control group was what their teachers had been told about them. At the end of the school year, eight months later, all of the children were retested with the same nonverbal measure. Overall, the children who had been identified as bloomers had done just that. They showed a significantly greater gain, known as the Pygmalion effect, than did the children of the control group. The children had risen to meet the expectations of the teacher.
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This study, and variations of it, have been replicated many times since it was first conducted in 1966, and researchers, now convinced of the power of expectations, have shifted their focus to how the teacher’s expectation is communicated. One finding that has emerged is that teachers appear to teach more content and to teach it with more warmth of affect to children for whom they have high expectations.
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A teacher’s affect and expectations can be communicated in many ways. In an interview I conducted as part of a research project on identity development among Black college students, a young Black woman taking an introductory science course at a prestigious, predominantly White institution reported her effort to seek extra help after doing poorly on an exam. When she appeared at the professor’s office door during his stated office hours, he was meeting with a young White man, in what appeared to her to be a friendly and helpful conversation. She waited her turn outside his door, but when she entered his office and began to explain her confusion, he replied, “I can’t help you.” What did he mean? Was he saying, “I can’t help you now, this is an inconvenient time,” or did he mean, “I can’t help you, you are beyond my help”? While either interpretation is a possibility, the student read his tone of voice and body language as dismissive, in contrast to what she had observed with the student before her, and interpreted his statement to mean the latter. She left his office, hurt and disappointed, only to continue to flounder in his course.

The message does not have to be so directly communicated to have a negative impact. Everyday interactions send an important message as well. Does the teacher offer a genuine smile when you enter the room? Does he or she greet you by name (and make the effort to pronounce it correctly)? Do you get called on in class when you raise your hand? If you offer a wrong or incomplete answer, does the teacher prompt you to try again or expand your response?