The Bell Curve Redux, Or Why We Should Give Up On Poor Kids

Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, has been writing a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal Opinion page. Like The Bell Curve, they make me profoundly sad. And pissed off.

The Bell Curve, if you've blocked it out, was a 1994 book, written by Murray and Richard Hernstein, about the relationship between IQ and success in life. The book controversially claimed that intelligence distribution among the races is unequal, with Asians having the highest IQs and blacks having the lowest. "Hey," they said, "don't get mad at us. This is science." Of course many of their researchers have ties to a group that is invested in finding such a link between race and intelligence.

Isn't it the hallmark of scientific inquiry that the outcome isn't decided before the research begins? The statistics on race and IQ have been called into question by a number of folks, including a Nobelist stats man.

Statistics aside, the problem with the thinking in The Bell Curve is that it gets the causality wrong. Sure, there's a high correlation between wealth, success, etc. and IQ. Don't rich people get all the breaks? They write the tests--is it any wonder that they do well on them? And anyone who thinks that a slight sociolectic change doesn't make a world of difference in understanding has never been out of his own neighborhood.

There are any number of other factors that would flip the causal relationship put forth in The Bell Curve. You don't need high g (Murray's shorthand for intelligence) to see that kids raised in stable homes where Standard Dialect is spoken, and whose parents read to them are going to--rich or poor--do better on standardized tests.

Ok, so these new articles are on IQ and education. Murray suggests that all the educational reform in the world isn't going to do a bit of good to correct for the fact that some kids just aren't able to learn as much as their peers. Fair enough. Here's what he writes:

Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.

Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.

A boy whose intellect is in the 49th percentile (which means he's smarter than 48% of everybody) is too dimwitted to have new vistas opened up to him? Really?

Does Murray understand the purpose of education?

I will say, I don't think that everyone's equal, smarts-wise. One of the hardest things for me to deal with in the classroom is the wide range of abilities. Where to aim the discussion is something I spend a lot of time thinking about: how to keep the brightest kids challenged without bewildering or alienating the kids who are having trouble keeping up. I don't always succeed. But a pretty good course of action is to ask one of the stronger students to elaborate on some point--one can do this with a hint of randomness, I think, without seeming to recognize difference. This not only gets that student to have to think through a concept patiently, it provides a slowish repetition for those people who may not have gotten it the first time around.

It's not rocket science--even someone with my g can figure it out. For Murray to say that the 49th percentile boy (dead average) can't have vistas opened up for him or to say that he himself can't understand a mathematical proof because they were shortchanged at birth is to denigrate the very function of education. The people who write and read those proofs have spent 15 years and more learning to write and read them. They weren't born knowing how. Can everyone learn it? Probably not. Does that mean that for everyone who can't currently read them, that they can't learn? Of course not.

The pleasure of making connections, of having vistas open is thrilling. And it can happen at any ability level.

But the worst part of Murray's article are the policy implications. While he acknowledges that many underfunded schools are "dreadful," he nonetheless writes:

It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.

So, poor people are dumb and all that book learnin' just messes 'em up? Poor schools underperform because the students are not educable?

I am reminded of a part of Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, in which he talks about educational disparity (including high schools which don't offer any college prep courses, but do offer Advanced Hairdressing). He writes about talking to people who argue that "throwing money at the problem" of education (a solution I don't think anyone has ever actually proposed) won't work. Kozol wonders why, if they believe that, they don't want their kids going to the poorest schools. He writes that some of these folks spends $20,000 a year to send their kids to Andover or Exeter while maintaining that there's no connection between money and the quality of the education.

To suggest that education has no capacity to elevate the human mind runs counter to both humanism and to most religious accounts of the self, which stress the importance of study and reflection.

When we spend just as much money educating the poor in our public schools as we do the wealthier, then we can talk innate intelligence.

Update:
I've been obsessing about Murray's argument, and the more I do the more I realize that he doesn't understand what education really means. That some education enables more education. Whatever one's standardized tests say, it's verifiably the case that learning something--anything--gives a person greater learning skills. Learning enhances the mind, even if it doesn't improve your IQ. And certain spheres of learning are complementary. Look at the effect music education has for kids--it correlates to increased math scores. That's not something one is born with--that is using education not just to funnel info into people, but to make them better thinkers and more able learners.

Education isn't just about information. It's about how to think. It makes our minds more elastic, more critical, more able to synthesize what we know. How does someone not get that?