a rephrasing of the key points we are exploring regarding...

A Rephrasing of the Key Points We are Exploring Regarding Social Class and Educational Outcomes

1. The stories we tell ourselves about how things came to be this way influence how we learn, and they also influence how we teach. This is a significant factor for all human beings regardless of whether we are students or teachers.

2. We are not all “the same,”* though we sometimes make that assumption because it is comfortable, based on surface similarities.

3. Or, we may say, “Oh, yuck. You aren’t like me!” When in fact, “they” are just like us in their fundamental humanity, their hopes, fears, and aspirations. However, we often don’t like to think this is true, and will deny our similarities until we are blue in our faces.

© Gayle M. Turner 2015-2016

Background topics behind the discussion of high-stakes testing:

1. Cultural capital2. Stephen Jay Gould on IQ.3. Intelligence as a quality, not a quantity.4. The bell curve and a “normal distribution”.5. Is there a unitary thing in the head called “intelligence”?5. IQ: correlation v causality

a. Positive and negative correlations

© Gayle M. Turner 2015

The fundamental, underlying question for us today: What does it mean to be “well prepared”? In this case, well-prepared or “ready” for school?

•At five or six, for kindergarten or first grade?•At seventeen, eighteen or nineteen for a four year college?


Cultural Capital

Definition:

Children are not simply socialized into the values of society as a whole. Rather, they are socialized into the culture that corresponds to their class and, in Bourdieu's terms, this set of cultural experiences, values, beliefs and so forth represents a form of "cultural capital.”

That is, cultural capital is a set of values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, experiences and so forth that equip people for their life in society. These values, beliefs, norms, attitudes, and experiences translate into social resources, or, lack thereof.


Dr. Turner’s Thesis:

Education is a fundamentally moral enterprise.1

1 You are, of course, not required to agree with my thesis, but you must understand and have a critical analysis of it, as you must also with all the perspectives, theses, and educational concepts presented to you in this class.


Education is about relationships between people, hence moral in the most basic sense.

How do we treat each other in school?


Is there a unitary thing in the head called “intelligence”?

Intelligence testing as used in most of our schools indicates that this is our basic belief. It is the one belief on the part of teachers most feared by Alfred Binet, the originator of IQ testing (1857-1911).


Example test page from the Army Beta test, 1918


“Intelligence is a quality, not a quantity.”

What does this mean to you?


What it meant to others at the time...


IQ tests and the social agenda of their advocates roused critics right from the start. To the journalist Walter Lippmann, the intelligence-testers were "the Psychological Battalion of Death," seizing unparalleled power over every child's future. Lippmann and Terman dueled in the pages of the New Republic in 1922 and 1923. "I hate the impudence of a claim that in 50 minutes you can judge and classify a human being's predestined fitness in life," Lippmann wrote. "I hate the sense of superiority which it creates, and the sense of inferiority which it imposes." [...] Though he could never match Lippmann's eloquence, in the end Terman won the war: intelligence testing continued to spread. By the 1930s, kids with high IQs were being sent into more challenging classes to prepare for high-earning jobs or college, while low scorers got less demanding coursework, reduced expectations and dimmer job prospects.

Mitchell Leslie, in the Stanford Magazine, July/August, 2000. Stanford was the academic home of Louis Terman.


It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the (first) World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological [IQ] tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.

-- W. E. B. Du Bois, 1940. As quoted in Robert V. Guthrie, Even the Rat Was White: A Historical View of Psychology (2nd edition) (Boston: Allyn &Bacon,1998), p. 55.


IQ (intelligence quotient)

The importance of understanding the difference between “correlation” and “causality.”

The hookworm example from 1918 (Gould pp. 247-248)


Charles Spearman (1863-1945) observed that children's test scores on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated subjects in school were positively correlated.

His observation led him to posit the existence of something he called “general mental ability,” or g.

In Spearman’s work, g is what underlies and shapes human cognitive performance. His postulate has broad support in the field of intelligence research, where it is known as the “g theory.”


Spearman felt that the tests from which his g had emerged "had no place in schools" because they "deflected" teachers', pupils', parents' and politicians' attention from the business of education which, as the Latin root of the word implies, should be concerned with "drawing out" whatever talents a student may have.1


1. Source: Wikipedia article on Spearman. I don’t know the actual source of the quotation, but am looking for it!

Alfred Binet and the Dangers of “reification”:

Factor analysis, despite its status as pure deductive mathematics, was invented in a social context, and for definite reasons. And, though its mathematical basis is unassailable, its persistent use as a device for learning about the physical structure of intellect has been mired in deep conceptual errors from the start. The principal error...[is] reification--in this case, the notion that such a nebulous, socially defined concept as intelligence might be identified as a “thing” with a locus in the brain and a definite degree of heritability--and that it might be measured as a single number, thus permitting a unilinear ranking of people according to the amount of it they possess.

Stephen Jay Gould, in The Mismeasure of Man


The Case of Sir Cyril Burt

• Data fabrication

• An intense belief that intelligence is inherited influencing the experiment to the point of fraud. (Gould pp. 264-265, and the conclusion reached by Burt’s authorized biographer, Leslie Hearnshaw )


Positive v. Negative Correlations


Positive Correlation:

or:


Negative Correlation:


Dark blue is less than one standard deviation from the mean. For the normal distribution, this accounts for about 68% of the set (dark blue), while two standard deviations from the mean (medium and dark blue) account for about 95%, and three standard deviations (light, medium,and dark blue) account for about 99.7%.

Image Source: Wikipedia

The Normal Distribution Curve


Ask yourself: “What is the intent of this test?” Is it• a test for achievement?• a test for ability?

What’s the difference?


“This year’s budget includes some funding for planning efforts associated with possibly providing compensation to persons sterilized by the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program (HB 20). In North Carolina, more than 7,600 people were sterilized between 1929 and 1978 by the state’s Eugenics Sterilization Program. Some of the victims of the program were disabled or mentally disabled, but others were victimized simply because they were poor or black.”

Source, The Raleigh Report of August 31, 2009, from the office of Representative Cullie Tarleton, North Carolina House of Representatives, House District 93, Ashe and Watauga Counties.

NC Legislature

© Gayle M. Turner 2014

“Against Their Will: North Carolina’s Sterilization

Program,” Winston-Salem Journal (+interactive timeline 1948, Gamble, part 3 multimedia)

Nial’s Story


“There is need for special education among the lower-class Negro groups, since it is here that fertility is highest and mental defect more prevalent.”— NC Eugenics program notes, as quoted in Sterilization in North Carolina, Moya Woodside, University of North Carolina Press

Examples of Cultural Capital in the form of Examples of Dialects and Accents

1.Southern Appalachian Mountain Dialect Origin and Example2. African American English Dialect Origins and Example


What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances. The characteristics that ruin a man in one class made him eminent in another.

Introductory Essay, Major Barbara George Bernard Shaw


Smoky Mountain English also uses special combinations of helping verbs — can, could, may, might, must, ought to, shall, should, will, and would. Speakers of many rural dialects may use more than one modal verb together with another, usually to mark a particular speaker’s frame of mind. The most frequent double modal combination is formed with might and the verb could, as in “If it quits raining, you might could go.” In this sentence, the speaker is indicating that if conditions are right, then the action in the future may be able to take place. Although this use may create some confusion for those who are not native users of this construction and who are unfamiliar with it, these verb combinations express possibility or probability in English that is not otherwise available through a simple construction. Double modals such as might would, would might, may could, and even such interesting combinations as might should ought to are used to nuance meanings in subtle ways.


The verb particle “done” is also used in significant ways. In the sentence, “She done gone there already,” the verb form done is combined with a past verb form to emphasize the fact that an action has already been completed. Completive done is used quite frequently in Smoky Mountain English, but it is also found in other rural varieties of American English and in African American English as well. The form liketa also has a special meaning in Smoky Mountain English. In the sentence, “It was so cold on our camping trip last night, we liketa froze to death,” the speaker using this construction to indicate a narrowly averted action — real or imagined; the campers knew they weren’t literally going to freeze to death, but they were still worried that they would. Dialects may often use unique words and phrases to represent aspects of verb tense that standard English cannot express as succinctly.


Examples of Dialects and Accents

1.Cratis Williams on Southern Appalachian Mountain Dialect Origin and Example2.African American English Dialect Origins and Example


a rephrasing of the key points we are exploring regarding...

Documents