Black IQ's

DESPITE APPEARANCES, Arthur Jensen's forthcoming article on race and heredity is not simply a revival of the 1930's genre of racist propaganda cloaked in scientific jargon. The Harvard Education Review article is less evil and more dangerous than that. It is a calm and eloquent statement of a very old hypothesis on the roles of environment and gene structure in determining all human intelligence. The hypothesis has implications for racial differences in intelligence, which opens it to attack on moral grounds, but arguing against it solely on an ideological basis would leave it unanswered on its own terms.

Jensen's piece signals a shifting tide in scholarship on education, and the tide was bound to shove Jensen's position into the forefront sooner or later. It is just as well, therefore, that Jensen's article has put the debate in the open, so that social scientists can meet its arguments head-on. Dealing with such a document as a piece of scholarship may sound disgustingly cool-headed, but the approach has the advantage of outlining the real educational alternatives which blacks face in their movement for equality and independence.

Though Jensen's work deals with subject matter far broader than the racial issue, his review of the genetic influence on intelligence was apparently triggered by developments in urban education. Recent discoveries have severely jolted scholars of urban school systems. Academics spent the last decade arguing that improving the environment of black children with infusions of money and material would bring them up to educational parity with whites. Out of this academic barrage emerged the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, which has poured billions of dollars into compensatory education for the disadvantaged in urban schools. Now, four years later, the results are trickling in, and they constitute a near disaster for backers of the environmental approach to urban school problems. "There's no place in the country," says one Ed School researcher about compensatory education, where you can say, 'Look, it's worked.'"

These developments have forced students of ghetto education to re-examine their assumptions. Some are sticking with compensatory education and looking for elements in the ghetto school environment which they might have overlooked in their previous efforts. Others are looking for totally new perspectives, or--in Jensen's case--making new cases for old ones.

ONLY AN EXPERT in statistics, biology, psychology, and education could adequately explain and criticize Jensen's piece, but even the layman can see some glaring intuitive and scientific problems. Jensen's scientific argument turns around two concepts derived from genetics: genotype and phenotype. Genotype refers to an individual's genetic makeup, his fixed gene structure. Phenotype means the mesh of physical traits which actually characterize an individual at any point in time--a combination of genetic and environmental influences.

Working with these concepts, Jensen tries to construct a formula for measuring the relative strengths of gene structure and environment in determining phenotypes. He comes up with a statistical measure for "heretability"--a term which refers to the proportion of individual differences which are attributable to genetic influences. As Jensen takes pains to make clear, the concept of heretability has no meaning when applied to an individual. One can state that gene structure accounts for 80 per cent of the difference in observed heights of all white males in the U.S. But one cannot say that gene structure accounts for eight of the ten inches of different in height between Jim and Ben. Like most statistical measures, heretability states a probability, not a certainty.

Jensen goes on to review many studies on the IQ's of different members of the same families and conclude that heretability explains 75 per cent of the observed differences in all human intelligence (as measured by traditional tests). The other 25 per cent is determined by environmental factors.

In developing his argument, Jensen, makes some notable contributions to educational thought -- contributions which almost all the respondents (environmentalists solicited by the Harvard Education Review to criticize Jensen's piece) praised and accepted. Jensen disposes first of the concept of the "average child," the assumption that all children are essentially alike in the way they learn and in what they learn best. This notion, that kids are like so many dolls from the same assembly line, is responsible for much of the curricular and instructional rigidity that has crippled both black and white education in this country. Jensen's emphasis on the genetic differences between individuals leads him to emphasize diversity and flexibility in education, in a way surprisingly similar to black militants and a growing number of white environmentalists.

Jensen also makes elaborately clear the built-in bias of traditional intelligence tests, and their inadequacies as measures of intellectual ability in the twentieth century. Intelligence tests, he points out, grew out of formal European education at the turn of the century and have remained essentially unchanged since.

DESPITE THESE contributions, however, Jensen's analysis seems to go dangerously astray at some points; this is nowhere more obvious than in his treatment of racial differences. Jensen, it should be noted, explicitly rejects the notion that anyone should make policy on the hypothesis that genetic factors are primarily responsible for differences in achievement. The first reason, he admits, is that we have no studies dealing with the heretability of characteristics within racial groups. "Our knowledge of the heretability of intelligence in different racial and cultural groups," he admits, "is nil." Jensen goes on to affirm that he raises the entire question only in the interests of scientific inquiry.

The fact is, however, that Jensen does prejudge the issue. He has looked at the data on compensatory education, and taken the most pessimistic of positions. "Compensatory education has been tried," his opening line proclaims, "and it has apparently failed." He also intimates that his genetic hypothesis seems the most likely successor to the environmentalist argument. "The preponderance of evidence," he intones, "is, in my opinion less consistent with a strictly environmental hypothesis than with a genetic hypothesis. . . ."

Taken together, these statements are simply irresponsible. The compensatory position is not discredited, for the same reason his analysis is flawed. first of all, the notion of heretability as a quantity separable from environmental influence is at best questionable. The interaction between gene structure and environment is a complex one, and Jensen has not sufficiently isolated one factor from the other. He argues, for instance, that environment operates as a threshhold variable in affecting development. Below a certain minimum threshhold of environmental benefits, the genetic potential of an individual does not develop, and cannot be considered an important variable in determining IQ. But Jensen never quantifies the threshhold level. He merely indicates, somewhat arbitrarily, that minority-group students are not below it. They very well might be.

There is some evidence, in fact, that far from counteracting the debilitating effects of ghetto environments, present ghetto classrooms may add to them. A recent study by Robert Rosenthal, a Harvard psychologist, and Lenore Jacobsen, a San Francisco school principal, has indicated that teacher expectations for pupils may be a key variable in determining achievement. If this is true, a ghetto teacher's low expectations for her black students could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

LOW EXPECTATIONS are particularly insidious when they are coupled with the institution of "tracking" or ability grouping. Most urban schools group children according to ability as soon as they enter first grade. It doesn't take much imagination to figure out who gets placed in the low ability groups. The net effect is that the majority of black pupil are doomed to under-achieving at age six. The "poorer" first grade students cover less material than their "brighter" peers, supposedly because they are unable to handle as much.

But some of Rosenthal's most interesting data indicates that even if students in less advanced tracks show exceptional ability, teachers often refuse to recognize it or reward it, and instead find fault with the student's behavior, or attitude, or something. In this kind of environment, infusion of books and visual aids can hardly produce much effect on the achievement of disadvantaged students.

It is also not clear that it would really make much difference if somehow genetic distinctions did exist between white and black minds. As one of Jenson's respondents--psychologist Lee J. Cronbach of Stanford--puts it:

The genetic populations we call races no doubt have different distributions of whatever genes influences psychological processes. We are in no position to guess, however, which pools are "inferior." Such a comparison is not meaningful, except in terms of the probability that the member of the group will be able to cope in some specific way with some specific challenge, after he has developed for a specified period in some specified environment.

In fact, whatever, genetic differences exist may be nothing more than the artificial products of oppression by a dominant society. Jensen himself admits that assortative mating--marrying at one's own level of mental ability--tends to raise the general level of intelligence by inbreeding genes which produce success. If social circumstances prevented a group's members from choosing their own marriage partners, or prevented the valuing of intelligence, environmental factors could have artificially depressed the natural level of intelligence in the group's population. Relieving those oppressive circumstances would, of course, permit readaptation and a return to parity.

In short, no one really knows whether the minds of blacks and whites are genetically different. If they are, the words "inferior" and "superior" have no meaning when applied to such differences, and the differences say nothing about the potential intelligence of the two groups. And finally, the differences themselves could change or disappear over time.

The Jensen article is not an evil document. It is just mistaken. Having its arguments out in the open is better than having them swishing around in the back of people's minds.