Summary of Chapter Four in Diane Ravitch’s >Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform< : “IQ Testing: This Brutal Pessimism” (Seventh in a Multi-Article Series)

Key points from Chapter Four of Diane Ravitch’s Left Back:  A Century of Battles Over School Reform are as follows:

 

During World War I, psychometricians in the United States administered intelligence tests to soldiers to determine whether those serving were best fit for roles in the regular field of battle or as officers.  Both achievement tests and intelligence tests had already been developed and used in a limited number of schools.  A leader in this effort was Edward L. Thorndike of the Teachers College (Columbia University);  the assessment that he had developed tested for acuity in reading, arithmetic, spelling, handwriting, written composition, geography,  and other academic subjects.

 

In 1921, Ross Finner of the University of Minnesota declared educational problems to be amenable to solutions via the exact science of testing.  Finner was typical among psychologists of this period, and most school districts in the United States were persuaded by the results and claims based on those results made by psychometricians.  School administrators became convinced that standardized achievement and intelligence tests were more reliable than tests devised by individual teachers;  the standardized tests were also faster and easier to grade than tests that had a subjective component, including long-form essays.

 

These tests were put to use in the service of curriculum differentiation and tracking according to counselor-determined vocational destiny.  These approaches were consistent with the drive for social efficiency in an age of mass production; students were evaluated for their capacity to perform functions in the realms of business, factory, and the trades. 

 

Thorndike was among the chief proponents of testing for ability to determine intelligence, character, and skill;  and he was convinced that such ability could be thoroughly understood, controlled, and directed for the social good.  Thorndike was certain that intelligence is hereditary and immutable.  He recognized three main types of intelligence:  abstract, social, and mechanical;  his bias as to superiority was toward the abstract form of intelligence, which he regarded as best able to determine high character.  He was among those who had ready answers for critics who thought his tenets antidemocratic;  he and others in fact thought that differentiation according to ability and projected role in society best served the needs of a democracy.  He asserted that “In the long run it has paid the masses to be ruled by intelligence.”

 

The Early Days of IQ Testing

 

In the first years of the 20th century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) established the “Anthropometric Laboratory” in London, testing for reaction time and mental acuity in human subjects.  Galton was a fervent believer in the ability of the human race to improve mental capacity via astute breeding;  he held that various races and nationalities have innate characteristics, and that some were more mentally capable than others.

 

In France, Alfred Binet and his colleague Theodore Simone sought to identify mentally defective children so as to provide for the instruction most likely to serve their needs.  They devised a test featuring tasks of increasing difficulty pertinent to attention, memory, visual discrimination, imagination, and verbal fluency.  They concluded that the most important component of intelligence is judgment, involving practical sense, initiative, and adaptability.  In his book, Modern Ideas About Children (published in 1909), Binet emphasized the capacity of education to improve intelligence, rejecting the notion of intelligence as fixed and immutable;  but in the aftermath of his death in 1910, those who drew upon his work did not hew to the principle of the improvability of intelligence.

 

This was manifestly true of Henry Goddard, who was much inspired by Binet’s work but put it to the service of much more determinist applications.  Goddard was the resident director of the School for the Feebleminded in Vineland, New Jersey.  Coiner of the term, “moron,” he was deeply concerned that the feebleminded were proliferating in society and poised to do much harm.

 

In his 1912 book, The Kallikak Family, Goddard detailed the life trajectories of a man who fathered children by two women, one who was feebleminded and another who was mentally capable and from a family of high social standing.  According to Goddard’s account, which struck a resonant chord in the popular imagination, the children born of the feebleminded manifested an array of mental and moral disorders;  the children born of the woman of elevated social standing proved to be respectable and of good character.

 

Eugenics, the purported science of mental capability as distinguishable by race, had many proponents in the early decades of the 20^th century.  Among these were well-regarded professionals who sought to use eugenics for the social good;  proponents included birth control advocate Margaret Sanger;  psychologists Robert Yerkes and Walter McDougal of Harvard;  Edward L. Thorndike of Teachers College (Columbia University);  and Lewis Terman of Stanford University.  But during the 1920s, eugenics attracted racists and nativists, whose views came to be discredited by the use of eugenics by the Nazis.

 

The influence of eugenics could be seen in an emerging view that those who were determined to be mentally defective should be permanently institutionalized and sterilized.  Thirty states legalized the sterilization of people determined to be insane, feebleminded, or criminal.

 

Lewis Terman developed the Standford-Binet Intelligence Test for the measurement of a single Intelligence Quotient (I. Q.) for each individual tested.  The I. Q. score was determined by a person’s mental age, divided by actual age, and multiplied by one hundred.  In examining I. Q. scores, Terman asserted that scores in the 70s and 80s were typical for Mexicans, negroes, and those of Spanish-Indian ancestry in the American Southwest.  He lamented that there seemed to be little prospect of limiting propagation among these groups and considered the offspring of these groups likely to cause harm to society.   

 

Psychologists and the Army Tests

 

Robert Yerkes (President of the American Psychological Association and Chair of the Psychology Committee of the National Research Council) was the designer of the army tests that so inspired the movement for intelligence testing.  He designed two tests, an Alpha Test for those who were literate and a Beta Test for illiterates;  the former included arithmetic problems, analogies, synonyms, antonyms, and various information-based questions;  the latter featured tasks for the completion of incomplete drawings and the comparison of shapes.

 

Lewis Terman’s status among psychometricians was buttressed by his election in 1922 as president of the American Psychological Association.  Along with Elwood P. Cubberly, Terman edited a major textbook series published by Houghton Mifflin that envisioned a future of intelligence testing that was highly compatible with the aims of educational psychologists and administrators regarding curricular differentiation, vocational guidance, and social efficiency.  Terman became a leading designer of intelligence testing for the schools.

 

The Rockefeller Foundation bestowed a $25,000 grant to the National Research Council for adapting the army tests for administration in schools.  During 1919-1920, Terman, Yerkes, and Thorndike joined Guy M. Whipple (professor, University of Michigan) in the design of tests for grades 3-8;  by the mid-1920s, there were 75 different mental ability tests used for assessing students of all ages.  Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould has observed that anyone who constructed such an assessment was careful not to diverge from the approach espoused by Terman.   Terman’s key guiding principles were that 1) educability limits of any individual were apparent by age five or six;  2) unless those limits were used to guide programming, neither the gifted nor the dull could thrive;  and 3) one-third of students lacked the ability to perform adequately according to a commonly taught academic curriculum.  The solution was to individualize instruction or to group students homogenously;  Terman contended that the former was not practical, given the rise in enrollments, so that grouping students according to ability was the answer.  His suggested groupings were five in number:  1)  gifted;  2) bright;  3) average;  4) slow;  and 5) special. 

 

Terman recommended tracking from the sixth or seventh grade, with careful attention to I. Q. scores.  Terman’s scale to be used for academic tracking based on I. Q scores forecast vocation or profession as follows:  1) below 70 I. Q. >>>>> unskilled laborer;  2) 70-80 I. Q. >>>>> semiskilled laborer;  3) 80-100 I. Q. >>>>> skilled laborer or ordinary clerical worker;  4) 100-115 I. Q. >>>>> semiprofessional;  5) above 115 I. Q. >>>>> professional or corporate manager.  In a speech to the National Education Association is 1923, Terman blasted his critics as sentimentalists who denied the reality of individual differences, maintaining that democracy is best served by citizens who understand their roles and seek work appropriate to their ability.

 

The Political Uses of the Army Tests

 

Assessing available data, leading psychologists concluded that the average mental age among draftees in World War I was thirteen (13) or fourteen (14).  When it became known that those of Nordic origins scored much higher than those of southern and eastern European origins, the test results became fodder for racists and nationalists who sought immigration restrictions.  Eugenicists argued for immigration restrictions for southern and eastern Europeans.  Progressive sociologist Edward A. Ross, well-known as a social control theorist, asserted that based on his observations and reading of the data, eastern and southern Europeans were so inferior as to dilute the American racial stock;  furthermore, they were culturally backward and inclined toward dangerous ideologies such as anarchy and socialism. One commentator proclaimed that “We are being swamped by the off-scourge of Europe.  Those at the lower end of the intellectual scale have brought their social customs, their language, their political ideals.  They cannon assimilate our ideals…  They cannot become citizens in the highest meaning of the word.  We do not need the ignorant, the mentally feeble, the moron.”

 

In 1922, Lantrhop Stoddard in his book, The Revolt against Civilization:  The Menace of the Under Man,  asserted that almost one half of the United States population would never get beyond the mental age of 13 or 14 years.  That same year, research analyst Cornelia James Cannon wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly in which she asserted that one half of the draftees in World War I were morons and 22 percent were of even more inferior intelligence.  She read the data to show that intellectual inferiority was disproportionately found among immigrants from Poland, Italy, and Russia.  She wrote, “They are a menace that may encompass our mass destruction.”

 

A year later, Terman authored an article of his own for The Atlantic Monthly.  He asserted that the average mental age for the native-born American was 13-14 years and that for the foreign-born was less than twelve (12).  He maintained that Negroes, Italians, and Poles dominated the lower scores, while the higher scores were dominated by native-born whites and immigrants from England and Scotland.  Terman stressed the importance of race for national destiny, as did Carl C. Brigham (Princeton University professor) in his 1923 A Study of American Intelligence. 

 

Other books that added to the momentum for such assertions regarding racial stock and implications for the national destiny included Charles W. Gould’s America:  A Family Matter, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, and Willliam Z. Ripley’s Races of Europe.  Historians would come to regard Grant as the nation’s most influential racist, followed by Lanthrop Stoddard.  The latter in 1922 established the Goddard Society, along with Edward L. Thorndike and Henry F. Osborne (of the American Museum of Natural History).  

 

Carl C. Brigham’s classification of races gained much attention and induced similar categorizations;  the classifications were three in number:  Nordic (northern Europeans, notably the populations of Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, and England);  Alpine (Romania, Russia, Poland, and Austro-Hungary);  and Mediterranean (Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Greece, and Italy).  Brigham maintained that Germans were forty percent (40%) Nordic and sixty percent (60%) Alpine;  French, thirty percent (30%) Nordic, fifty-five percent (55%) Alpine; and fifteen percent (15%) Mediterranean;  Irish, thirty percent (30%) Nordic and seventy percent (70%) Mediterranean.

 

Maintaining that the purpose of school should be to select and retain the most intellectually capable students, Robert Yerkes analyzed the data as pertinent to school performance.  He concluded that among students in the relevant ages, only fifty percent (50%) were capable of performing well at a first-rate high school;  and that only ten percent (10%) were capable of pursuing a B. A. at the college level.  Yerkes found ingenious ways of reasoning away indications that student performance actually rose as the ill-regarded immigrant populations lived two decades in the United States;  and that students who persisted in their education through high school did improve results on assessments.  Yerkes argued that those who were able to persist were the most capable, so that schooling did little to improve intellectual ability or normed achievement, which depended on native intelligence.

 

Terman noted that many teachers objected to his assertion that education could not improve intellectual performance.  He ridiculed them with the statement that their reaction was nothing more than “deep-seated and blind faith that anything was possible for a child.”