Mental Testing and the Expansion of Educational Opportunity

Abstract

Ever since Arthur Jensen touched off the so-called controversy with his famous 1969 article in the Harvard Educational Review, most spokesmen for the educational aspirations of minorities and the lower classes have been highly critical of mental testing. Jensen's determination that 80 per? cent of the variability in IQ scores was due to innate, genetic factors and his suggestion that little could be done to increase a person's IQ substantially raised fears that support for compensatory education programs, such as Head Start, would be undermined. Consequently, critics began to challenge the assumptions of the testing profession and to explore the harmful effects of testing in the schools, concluding that these instruments restricted the educational opportunities of minority and underprivileged students.1 Numerous studies of the history of mental measurement in America, conducted in the wake of the Jensen controversy, came to the same conclusion. Historians have described how school systems quickly adopted intelligence testing in the 1920s in order to facilitate the establishment of tracking systems, and how the elitist, racialist, and hereditarian beliefs of the founders of the testing profession?H. H. Goddard, Lewis Terman, Robert Yerkes, and Carl Brigham?provided legitimacy to the underrepresentation of immigrants, blacks, and the poor in the upper tracks. They have also pointed out that a number of Americans were quick to attack the views of the testers and to charge that intelligence testing unjustifiably discriminated against minority and lower-class children.2