Contributions of the Progressive Era in Question: The Roots of Mental Testing

Running head: CONTRIBUTIONS IN QUESTION 1

Contributions of the Progressive Era in Question: The Roots

of Mental Testing

Scott Kabel

University of Buffalo

Edit: 11/19/2015

CONTRIBUTIONS IN QUESTION 2

Introduction

In Tradition and Reform, Arthur Applebee (1974) traces the

development of English education curriculum from the inchoate

state of morality primers of the 1600s to, by the time of the

book’s publication, the language arts as a matured field with

several developed sub-disciplines. His final chapter consists of

a series of admonishments for the discipline informed by

reflecting on the past. The final reflective portion carries this

heading: “Sequence in the study of English must derive from

psychological rather than logical principles” (Applebee, 1974, p.

253). In this assertion, not only does Applebee refer to a valid

principal, but he also mentions a topic and refers obliquely to a

time period that deserve close consideration.

Of the entire volume, Applebee dedicates a single chapter to

the historical shift from pedagogical folklore to “science.” It

describes the “scientific management” of American education, the

institutionalizing of efficiency, “objectivity,” and scientific

inquiry as they relate to instruction. Deep in the background is

the substantiation of psychology as a scientific discipline,

particularly in relation to child development. The characters and


forces that uniquely catalyzed this shift, however, namely mental

testers and the mental testing movement, are afforded two

(separated) paragraphs. Granted, Applebee’s main concern is

tracing English education curriculum development; however, it is

difficult to overestimate the effects the roots of mental testing

has had on American education and our collective conception of

the mind. Conceived by eugenicists who would gain credibility as

the first modern psychologists and supported by the social and

industrial elites who required a witless workforce, mental tests

and their implications provide a space to question the

possibilities of American education and the potential of its

students.

A Shift Toward the Mental

Political and social forces during the Progressive Era

initiated a shift in education from interacting with students on

the basis of experience or exposure to interacting on the basis

of ability. At least some cause of this important change can be

traced to mental testing. To get a sense of the timing (and


therefore potential cause) of this shift, one can consider a

change in definition of the word retardation. When Leonard Ayres

published his widely-cited volume Laggard in Our Schools in 1909, a

massive and thorough study of widespread retardation in large

U.S. cities, such as New York and Cleveland, he defined the term

“as referring to the pupil who is above the normal age for his

grade” (Ayres, 1909, p. 7). In contrast to today’s common usage,

no negative connotation was attached. Johanson-Sebera and Wilkins

(2010) describe the descent of the common perception of the

“feebleminded” between 1900 and 1940, roughly the period of the

Progressive Era and strong eugenic activity, when “individuals

with intellectual disabilities began to be perceived as a burden

and menace to society” (Johanson-Sebera & Wilkins, 2010, p. 48).

By feigning scientific objectivity, mental tests validated

eugenicist sentiment and precipitated the dividing and corralling

of students into ability groups. In other words, mental tests

facilitated a collective change in perception and values.

An indicator that change education-wise was taking place

during the 1920s is the staggering amount of mental tests sold.

Lagemann (2000) recounts the process: After the successful mass


mental testing of American World War I soldiers, mental testers

were allocated substantial private funds “to develop a National

Intelligence Test for children in grades three through eight”

(Lagemann, 2000, p. 92). Lewis Terman, a leader in the mental

testing cadre,

developed an intelligence test known as the Terman

Group Test for grades seven through twelve as well as

the Stanford Achievement Test for students in all

grades. … During the first ten years of distribution,

for example, the Terman Group Test sold 775,000 copies,

which, according to Paul Chapman’s study of the Terman

Tests, meant that nearly one-fifth of all U.S. high

school students took the test. … Terman also developed

achievement tests, which also sold well. For example,

the Stanford Achievement Test, which was first

published in 1922, had annual sales of 1,500,000 by

1925. (Lagemann, 2000, pp. 92-93)

Testing has only become more popular over time, though

achievement testing, as opposed to intelligence testing, has

become standard fare in American schools. The ACTs and SATs are


the premiere college entrance exams; and according to the website

of the controlling body of the SATs, the College Board, the SATs

are administered to over 2 million students in the U.S. annually

(Neukrug & Fawcett, 2010; “Why Take the SAT”). The Compass

Education Group, a test preparation company, surveyed 91 prominent

American colleges and universities, including all Ive League

universities. All consider ACT or SAT scores for admission

(Sawyer, 2014).

Though there is certainly an important distinction between

intelligence tests and achievement tests in name—“[a]chievement

tests can help measure educational attainments, but some

indicators of academic potential are also needed. ...

Intelligence tests are the most promising and most useful

instruments of measurement in this area” (Hughson, 1964, p. 106)—

two brief observations illustrate their relationship.

First, the form and function of achievement tests have

changed to fit modern mentalization (my term), leaving

achievement tests as intelligence-test stand-ins for the masses.

In the 19th century, the mind was conceptualized as a muscle. “To

a large extent, the belief that the mind was in fact, or at least


like, a muscle provided the backdrop for a regime in school of

monotonous drill, harsh discipline and mindless verbatim

recitation” (Kliebard, 1995, p.5). Because the emphasis of

schooling up to the point of the college entrance exam emphasized

rote learning, the exam was designed to test rote learning. Meant

to project a student’s fitness for his first year of college, the

exam was, essentially, a measure of how much mental “heavy

lifting” a student had already done. Inherent is the belief that

education can affect the capability of the mind, which was not a

position favored by the early mental testers and will be

discussed later. By contrast, the SAT, as an example of modern

achievement tests, purportedly measures “critical thinking and

problem-solving skills” (Neukrug & Fawcett, 2010, p. 129). In

other words, the SAT seeks to measure what a student’s mind can

do as an indication of what it will be able to do. This is a very

different metric. The old version evaluates experience, while the

new version evaluates ability. Participating in a scholarly

debate with Julius Yourman in 1964 just before New York City

schools decided to replace intelligence testing with achievement

testing, Arthur Hughson makes this apt observation:


In place of intelligence tests, the use of achievement

testing and teacher judgment for classifying pupils is

proposed. This seems very much like substituting handful

for ounces and pounds and span for the more exact

measure of inches and feet. (Hughson, 1964, p. 106)

In other words, both measures provide the same information

regarding the student: mental ability. One is simply supposedly

more precise than the other. By testing for ability, which is

treated as potential, the SAT touches down in the domain of

intelligence testing.

To understand the connection between tests common today to

those of the Progressive Era is not the most crucial of

objectives at this point, however. As will become apparent later,

it is a shift in conception that eugenicists could exploit. A

student’s performance on a test would be interpreted as a stable

value rather than a product of time, exposure and effort,

allowing for the student to become a trackable object.

The second observation carries more sinister implications:

outcomes of both early mental tests and current achievement tests


show parallel racial and socio-economic disparities. As Masear

(2004) states,

The College Board’s own reports attest to the effects

of socioeconomic status on students’ SAT scores, which

rise in lock-step with family income and parental

education (College Board Online, 1998). By the same

token, with the exception of Asian-Americans, today’s

SAT scores mirror the same racial hierarchy established

by Terman’s earliest IQ tests, with whites scoring the

highest, followed by Native Americans, Mexican-

Americans, and African-Americans. (Masear, 2004, p.

138)

While my hope is that more recent revisions of the SAT have moved

to rectify this problem, in reality these tests are (or were)

producing results they were originally designed to produce.

Lewis Terman and IQ Test Bias

Lewis Terman is considered the strongest force in

popularizing intelligence testing in America. He adapted the

Binet-Simon and created what would become the premier IQ test,

the Stanford-Binet. According to Gersh (1981), “[the Standford-


Binet] has served as the basis for other such tests, the sign of

a "good" test being a high correlation of scores with the

Stanford-Binet” (p. 33). However, to understand the controversy

that would later envelope mental testing, it is helpful to read

two paragraphs of one of Terman’s (1916) early test

standardization studies, which, incidentally, included only

Whites in the sample. Here he is describing non-Whites:

Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least

inherent in the family stocks from which they come ...

The fact that one meets this type (IQ 70-80) with such

extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans and

negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question

of racial differences in mental traits will have to be

taken up anew and by experimental methods. The writer

predicts that when this is done there will be

discovered enormously significant racial differences

which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental

culture.

Children of this group should be segregated in

special classes and be given instruction which is


concrete and practical. They cannot master

abstractions, but they can often be made efficient

workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no

possibility at present of convincing society that they

should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a

eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem

because of their unusually prolific breeding. (as cited

in Gersh, 1981, p. 42)

To the 21st century democratic ear, these observations are

shocking. The effects these biases had on test results are clear

with a brief look at Terman’s most famous and extensive project,

Genetic Studies of Genius: Mental and Physical Traits of a Thousand Gifted Children

(1925). Terman’s aim was to collect and study genius subjects. In

1910 and with private funding, he and his assistants scoured

major cities in California for bright youth, testing them upon

recommendations from their teachers. Those who scored in the top

10% on his intelligence test were accepted and analyzed, a group

amassing to 1,444 by 1924. Terman collected about 16 data points

for each child, including a number of IQ and achievement tests

written by himself; parent, teacher, and field worker


observations; demographic, ancestral, and economic information;

and even reading logs.

Despite such rich data collection measures, Terman’s

analyses are debatable. Jolly (2008), summarizing the study and

its results, writes that “[t]his initial demographic data yielded

a population that was White, middle class, and with parents

holding advanced schooling when compared to the average

population, and an overrepresentation of children of Jewish

heritage” (Jolly, 2008, p. 30). Rather than considering the fact

that mainly White teachers would have been recommending students

(i.e. teachers may have had a biased view of which students

seemed intelligent) or questioning whether cultural bias was

built into his tests—he normed his tests exclusively with White

subjects—Terman reinforced his prejudice. He “attributed this as

'indirect evidence that the heredity of our gifted subjects is

much superior to that of the average individual'" (p. 30).

Likewise, rather than considering patterns of inherited social,

cultural, and economic privilege and advantage, Terman believed

he had found “evidence to support Galton’s theory of the

heritability of genius” when several of his test subjects’


families identified “relatives who were Presidents or Vice-

Presidents of the United States, writers, generals, statesmen,

and Supreme Court justices” (p. 30). Finally, subjects in his

study reported varying household incomes, with some living in

what Terman considered poverty, lending credence to his position

that “the causal factor lies in original endowment rather than in

environmental influences.” Jolly (2008), however, provides

important outside data: “The yearly mean income was $4,705 and

the median income was $3,333, with 35.3% of the families

reporting an income below $2,500. However, this was well above

the reported average annual salary of $1,236 in 1925,” allowing

some room for social class to be a significant factor in the

study (p. 29). In this dubious fashion, “Terman provided

scientific confirmation for the nativism and prejudice of many

Americans” (Chapman, 1981, p. 705). As early as Terman,

indications of cultural and class bias in testing were evident.

Multiple scholars before and after Terman’s study have

produced evidence that differences in innate intellectual

capability between people groups are negligible when controlling

for affluence, educational exposure, and cultural norms—see Gersh


(1981) and Franklin (2007) for examples. Recall that, not

coincidentally, the same concerns about class and race bias in

intelligence tests has been voice about achievement tests in

recent years, including the SATs. Boaler (2003) and Fraire (2014)

shed light on this point.

Eugenics

Terman was just one among many leaders in psychology and

education during the Progressive Era who shared a troubling

belief in eugenics, the intent to control the genetic efficacy of

the human population by selective breeding and sterilization.

“Some eugenics groups existed in the late 1800's, but growth

was hampered by lack of knowledge concerning the mechanisms of

heredity” (Gersh, 1981, p. 11). Prior to 1910 only intuition and

pseudoscientific practices like phrenology and brain weighing

supported eugenic theory (Mumford & Smith, 1938). With “the

rediscovery of Mendel's works, in 1900, and the discovery of

genes, shortly after,” biological determinism experienced a

rebirth (Gersh, 1981, p. 11). “[Biological determinism] holds

that shared behavioral norms, and the social and economic

differences between human groups, races, classes, and sexes,


arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and society is in this

sense a reflection of biology” (Silverberg, 2008 p. 14). There is

evidence that such a perspective reaches back to the foundations

of Western civilization.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates claims that in order for a

society to function properly, each citizen “should be educated

and assigned by merit to one of three classes: Rulers [or

Guardians], auxiliaries, and craftsmen” (cited in Silverberg,

2008, p. 14). Plato himself believed in social division based on

mental capacities as they were lived out in society.

Stratification was understood to be natural and even necessary

for the health of the state. Goodey (2011) describes four levels

for reincarnation set forth in Plato’s Timaeus as “merited by

certain types of intellect and behavior” (Goodey, 2011, p. 18).

Aristotle was less inclined to sort people into social

strata based on intellect. After all, in Aristotle’s thinking,

the human intellect is what separates man from beast. However,

later interpreters have taken license with Aristotle’s work on

the issue of slavery. Aristotle makes reference to “slaves by

nature.” Goodey takes pains to make it clear that “[Aristotle]


does not discuss the slave mind or indeed superior and inferior

intellects at all” in his works (p. 26). “His concept of slavery

was largely economic,” an interpretation that would stand through

at least 500 years of commentary (p. 26). “Only later—in fact,

when their own contemporaries began enslaving people—did they

start to assume that Aristotle was making natural intellectual

capacity and incapacity the basis of people’s political status”

(Goodey, 2011, pp. 26-27). Such a shift in conception, as history

shows has devilish implications.

“From the later Middle Ages the Politics was often cited

to justify contemporary forms of discrimination. Juan

Ginés de Sepúlveda used it to justify the enslavement

of first-nation South Americans, who he said were

“slaves by nature.” North American anti-abolitionist

intellectuals used it to justify slavery in the

Confederate states. (Goodey, 2011, pp. 25-26)

Most notably, the Nazis similarly coopted a misinterpretation of

Aristotle. The general distortion allowed these groups in power

to claim that “by true natural slavery, then, [Aristotle] must

have meant a small ‘feeble-minded’ group, people with ‘the


psychology of the childlike adult.’ … He was not, it is said,

justifying the enslavement of foreigners, but simply talking

about ‘a few people’ who really are ‘naturally deficient,’ the

‘backward individual[s] in any society’” (p. 26).

Biological determinism in this warped form was espoused by

several of the founders of the measurement movement and champions

of mental testing. In fact, many men most commonly mentioned in

histories of the period were staunch eugenicists. Among the

members of the first formal eugenics group were “David Starr

Jordan, the Section chairman and chancellor of Stanford

University; Alexander Graham Bell; Vernon Kellogg, a Stanford

biologist; William E. Castle and C. B. Davenport, both Harvard

biologists” (Gersh, 1981, p. 12). Later members included several

of the most active mental testers, including Henry Goddard and

Robert Yerkes, as well as the important educationalist E. L.

Thorndike.

Another prominent educationist of the day, G. Stanley Hall

once claimed that “’[t]here are certain safeguards which

democracy must more and more recognize and make effective. The

first of these is eugenics.’ He believed that non-Whites were


evolutionally inferior to Whites, being ‘the children and

adolescents of the human race’” (Gersh, 1981, p. 16).

Under the prompting of stand-out figures like Hall and with

substantial injections of private funding, the eugenics agenda

gathered momentum. Among the financial supporters of eugenics

were industrial and philanthropic elites, represented by, for

example, “the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institute,

Ford Motor Company, U. S. Steel Company, Aetna Life Insurance,

Metropolitan Life Insurance, and National Cash Register” (Gersh,

1981, p. 16). Soon chapters, committees, and associations were

sprouting up around the country, gaining leadership from the

likes of James Cattell and Lewis Terman.

As their influence grew after a successful testing regime

for American soldiers during World War I, eugenicists made

political waves. Gersh (1981) writes that “[d]uring the post-war

period the Eugenics Record Office was instrumental in the passage

of anti-immigration legislation, in 1924; in the extension of

sterilization laws and laws forbiding [sic] marriage between

certain types of individuals throughout more than half of the

United States” (Gersh, 1981, pp. 130-131), along with “reductions


in money spent on black schools, and support for legal

segregation” (p. 102).

All told, it is almost impossible to overestimate the impact

these figures have had on the shape of American psychology (the

collective American psyche and psychology as a discipline) and

education. Cattell and Hall, for instance, founded the American

Psychological Association. Several other eugenicists cycled

through its presidency, including Robert Yerkes, Joseph Jastrow,

Carl Seashore, John B. Watson, E. L. Thorndike, and Lewis Terman.

As already mentioned, several of the most important

educationalists of their era, Hall and Thorndike, for instance,

were eugenicists. They would be the collective impetus behind the

adoption of mental testing and other significant changes in

education.

Social Currents Affecting Schools

Eugenicists and their tools arrived in the nick of time. The

potential value of mental testing to schools of that era is self-

evident when considering social dynamos of the day.

Industrialization was reinventing the American experience,

drawing workers to city factories. “Cities like Chicago grew


enormously over that period, with that city reaching a million in

population by 1900, a growth of about tenfold in forty years”

(Kliebard, 1995, p. 4). During a slightly shifted forty years

(1880-1920), “the population of the United States doubled … due

in large measure to the arrival of 14 million immigrants” (p. 4).

The confluence of urbanization and immigration posed

challenges particularly in schools. According to Herbst (1996),

“between 1890 and 1920 enrollment of teenagers into secondary

schools increased by over 700 percent, from about 200,000 to over

1.5 million” (as cited in Silverberg, p. 17). Incidentally,

compulsory education laws for children, introduced to combat

child labor and truancy and would later prove to mitigate

educational inequity, also contributed to the institutional

population boom (Provasnik, 2006; Stainburn, 2014).

Leonard Ayres’ previously-mentioned text, Laggards in Our

Schools, was, essentially, meant to make sense of the educational

chaos. A few of his observations are alarming: “For each 1000

pupils in the first grade we find only 263 in the eighth and only

56 in the fourth year of the high school. These figures represent

average conditions in our city schools” (Ayres, 1909, p. 14).


Ayres believed that the major predictor of student attrition was

retardation. Retardation, using Ayres’ definition stated above,

was endemic: “in the lower grades, before the process of

elimination [attrition] enters to remove the badly retarded

children, the average progress of the pupils is at the rate of

eight grades in ten years” (p. 5). The proposed and observed

causes of “retardation” were numerous:

some of the more prominent were the constant influx of

non-English speaking children, the enrolling of

children in the first grade at a comparatively advanced

age, the slow progress of children on account of

physical defects or weaknesses, inefficient teaching,

unsuitable courses of study, and the shifting of

children from school to school by reason of the

frequent changes of residence of their families.

(Ayres, 1909, p. 1)

Clarifying further, he writes that “[t]here are few children who

pass through the schools without losing a term, a year, or more

in the course of their studies. They may not be wholly to blame


for it; sickness or change of residence may account for it in

part. (Ayres, 1909, p. 11)

Ayres actually provides a refreshing, balanced perspective

on the problem of retardation. Luther Gulick, in the book’s

introduction, demonstrates this:

The most significant of the findings of the

investigation are:

(1) That the most important causes of retardation

of school children can be removed;

(2) That the old-fashioned virtues of regularity

of attendance and faithfulness are major

elements of success;

(3) That some cities are already accomplishing

excellent results by measures that can be

adopted by all;

(4) That relatively few children are so defective

as to prevent success in school or in life.

(Ayres, 1909, p. xv)

In other words, the evidence Ayres brought to the scholarly

community projected a hopeful reality: the capability of the


students was not the problem, but rather their attendance and

their motivation. He recognized that students in classes full of

younger classmates would be more likely to drop out and to cause

more problems for teachers. At the same time, however, evidence

suggested that groups of foreigners did perform differently in

school, the Italians doing the worst and the Germans doing the

best, surprisingly outdoing the native-born Whites. Yet,

maintaining an evidence-based optimism, he found that “[w]herever

studies have been made of the progress of children through the

grades, it has been found that ignorance of the English language

does not constitute a serious handicap (p. 116). Ultimately, his

solution for the educational woes of the nation was to “have

better compulsory attendance laws and better provision for their

enforcement” (p. 7)

Far from the race-based genetic fatalism of the eugenicists

and the general foment of the day, Ayres believed that challenges

schools faced could be solved and were being solved. He writes

that

[t]here is another thing that has been proved; namely,

that these conditions which have been discussed are


neither of recent origin nor are they growing worse.

Conditions are slowly improving in most places but not

in all and not rapidly. They are not improving so

rapidly that we have any grounds for feeling that if

let alone they will care for themselves. (p. 7)

While, again, optimistic, whether this opinion could be supported

by the experience of teachers throughout the country is

debatable. The success of mental testing due to eugenicist fervor

and influence suggests the popular opinion of the day.

An Agenda Governed by Fear

E. P. Cubberly, a prominent eugenicist and educator also

writing in 1909, took a very different stance from that of

Ayres’:

These southern and eastern Europeans are of a very

different type from the north Europeans who preceded

them. Illiterate, docile, lacking in self-reliance and

initiative, and not possessing the Anglo-Teutonic

conception of law, order, and government, their coming

has served to dilute tremendously our national stock,


and to corrupt our civic life (as cited in Silverberg,

2008, p. 21).

Behind this statement are “deep-seated fears of racial mixing and

a decline in American intelligence” (Masear, 2004, p. 5). It is

little surprise that Franklin Bobbitt and the Social Efficiency

Educators stepped in. Along with Frederick Taylor and the

Scientific Management group, they worked to apply a factory-like

approach to education, championing efficiency and standardization

in schools that were drowning in diversity and desks (Kliebard,

1995). In light of that era’s societal dynamics, it appears a

rational action—that is if the goal was to prepare all students,

particularly the “new immigrants,” to neatly assimilate into the

America of the “old immigrants.”

To many—not eugenicists alone—these recently arrived

immigrants were a perceived threat. According to Dinnerstein and

Reimers (1975), for instance,

The workingmen's organizations were usually the first

to become alarmed because immigrants came from

countries that had a lower standard of living and these

new immigrants were willing to work for less. The fact


that they were "cheap labor" made them welcome to

employers, but, not to organized labor. (as cited in

Silverberg, 2008, p. 11)

However, Gersh (1981) argues convincingly that the

maintenance of a cheap workforce, despite misgivings of native

laborers, was exactly the motive behind elites financing

eugenicist efforts. As industry and the promises of the American

dream drew workers to cities, at least two explanations for

economic disparity between the classes had to be contended with.

“One, which increasing numbers of workers and agricultural

laborers adhered to, was that the upper classes were exploiting

the lower classes” (Gersh, 1981, p. 13). Such sentiment led to

unionization and political action on the part of the working

class, thus challenging the social grip of the powerful and

threatening to upset long-existing hierarchies. The second

explanation was more palatable and, perhaps, more morally

satisfactory to the elites: “those who were not doing well were

incapable of doing so, for biological reasons” (p. 14). In other

words, according to Gersh, “The elite was forced by economic and

political circumstances, to support eugenics” (p. 14). Even


compulsory education, however motivated by humanitarian ideals of

certain individuals, is up for scrutiny under this class view.

Katz argues that compulsory education was, at its inception,

anti-democratic, an enactment of top-down policy. “The function

of government,” Katz states tongue-in-cheek, “is to lead and to

educate, not to acquiesce in public whims” (Katz, 1987, p. 52).

It is his position that “[i]ndustrialists explicitly recognized

that the school served as a means of disciplining the work force"

(as cited in Gersh, 1981, p. 148). The argument here is not that

the elites consciously conspired to suppress the working class.

Rather, so social Darwinian theory would suggest, the elites—

genetically superior by all accounts—were managing to survive by

supporting those causes that, as Sutherland (1985) observed,

“constituted no challenge to the existing social structure;

rather, it tended to endorse it” (as cited in Burnett, 1985, p.

55). Eugenics and its outgrowth of mental testing were, in other

words, worth supporting—by the tens of millions.

Tracking

As previously stated, the potential value of mental testing

to schools of the Progressive Era is clear, though their value to


the elites would be revealed soon as well. Booming with diverse

student populations, schools needed a method of sorting students

into ability groups in order to differentiate teaching. Chapman

(1981) analyzed the historical California school district records

to understand the role that intelligence testing played in

differentiation.

The City of Oakland, for instance, in 1911 utilized

intelligence tests to sift out the “’subnormal’ children—‘the

absent, the tardy, the sickly, the unruly, the liars, thieves and

cowards"—freeing up teachers to work with the “normal” children

(Chapman, 1981, p. 706). Oakland diversified greatly by 1915,

offering a variety of school programs to the variedly performing

student population, including “kindergartens, intermediate

schools, and several high schools including a vocational school a

technical school, two comprehensive schools, and a "university"

school exclusively for college preparatory work (p. 706). Some

students were funneled into college, some into the blue collar

workforce.

Virgil Dickson, Oakland’s Terman-trained director of the

Department of Research, implemented mental testing avidly. Though


Dickson believed that the intelligence test was “not an

‘infallible guide' but merely an 'important tool’ which could be

‘used to advantage’ in the study and placement of groups and

individuals,” results of the widespread examination “confirmed

Dickson's belief that many students were failing because they

‘had inherent mental tendencies that make the ordinary course of

study either impossible or impractical of attainment'” (p. 707).

As a result of Dickson’s work, the whole city was functioning on

a three-track system by 1922, tracking “bright, average, and slow

students” (p. 708). Chapman makes it clear that those who

collectively tested most regularly on the bottom were immigrants,

Italians in particular. Such results would have validated common

prejudices of the day, per Cubberly’s comment.

Various cities approached the use of mental testing

differently. Palo Alto took a career preparation tack,

encouraging student into tracks for which they were purportedly

innately endowed. Referring to the early years of mental testing

in San Jose, Chapman writes that, "armed with intelligence test

scores, school persons classified students by ability, one result

of which appears to have been a tracking system that helped to


separate immigrants and native-born Americans" (p. 709). As a

result, despite some educators’ good intentions, differentiated

education in the form of tracking was a conscious or unconscious

tool in the oppression of racial and ethnic groups and the

creation or maintenance of social stratification.

Mental tests in the role of school sorters have been often

seen as controversial ever since—perhaps as controversial as

tracking became widespread; Oakes’ (1987) abstract declared

tracking to be “nearly ubiquitious” (Oakes, 1987). Green (1974),

for instance, writing presumably to African American mothers in

the popular women’s magazine Ebony, warned these mothers against

allowing their children to be tested by schools. His statement is

unequivocal: "when educators and the testing industry pretend

that tests can accurately measure intelligence, they are allowing

many children to be sentenced to a life without opportunity" (p.

72).

Kelly (2007) provides a brief discussion on the possibly

divergent nature of tracking. There is evidence that tracking can

create or exacerbate achievement gaps, which may have to do with

differences in curricular content or teacher-student perceptions,


among other factors. Furthermore, it can be argued that even

current tracking can dictate career outcomes—this is apparent in

the case of vocational schooling. Here, it would seem the

aforementioned priorities of the elite have been actualized.

However, according to Kelly, the evidence is quite mixed and

appears to be school-dependent.

Despite these more recent mixed findings, a firestorm of

reaction against tracking in the early 1990s led schools to look

for other options, which is unsurprising given texts like Beyond

Tracking (1995), edited by Pool and Page. Wasting no time, the

final section of the opening chapter, written by Jomills Braddock

and Robert Slavin, opens with this ringing and initially staccato

statement:

Tracking is ineffective. It is harmful to many

students. It inhibits development of interracial

respect, understanding, and friendship. It undermines

democratic values and contributes to a stratified

society. There are effective and practical

alternatives. Tracking must end. (Braddock & Slavin,

1995, pp. 15-16)


A text by the same name and edited by Jeannie Oakes, who herself

was a vocal critic of tracking in the 1980s and 1990s, and Marisa

Saunders, published in 2008, indicates the stage of American

education currently—something of a limbo, searching for fair and

equal educational solutions in a climate of competition and

globalization (Oakes & Saunders, 2008).

Conclusion

In a relatively short period of time, thirty to forty years,

groundbreaking developments occurred surrounding American

education. Not least among these were the validation of

psychology as a science and the restructuring of schools based on

a fresh concept of mind and cutting eduge testing tools. However,

upon closer investigation, the progress seen in these areas

becomes suspect. Even Applebee’s parting admonishment, that

“sequence in the study of English must derive from psychological

rather than logical principles,” takes on new dimensions. With a

more critical historical understanding of the roots of a

“scientific” psychology, one is left to wonder exactly whose

psychology is to be used as the metric. Is it eugenicist

psychology, which as at least one foundational purpose aimed


detect (even create) and validate historical prejudice? Is it

elitist psychology, which seemed to cause instinctive action so

as to maintain the survival of class stratification? Is it mental

testing psychology, which has seemed to cause the abandoning of

experience and exposure for the specter innate ability?

A brief study of the contributions of eugenics, elite money,

and a particular notion of the mind is a reminder that what

exists today is an inheritance from yesterday. It is the

opportunity—perhaps obligation—of the present generation to

accept or reject the inheritance. When truth is inherited, it is

the right of the beneficiary to ask, “Is this true?” As the myth

of objectivity concerning, in this case, the nature of the mind

and the science of psychology in relation to education is

replaced by perspective, we may ask, for instance, is it true

that stable and innate mental ability exists? Is it true that

intelligence tests actually measure intelligence? These and other

important questions have and are being taken up by capable

individuals. My hope is that they are being taken up with a

substantial portion of Ayres’ optimism.



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Contributions of the Progressive Era in Question: The Roots of Mental Testing

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