Tossing Out IQ Tests Won’t Help the Minority Children

In response to a court decision last summer, the California Department of Education issued a directive prohibiting the use of intelligence tests on black children referred for special education. The Los Angeles Unified School District goes it one better. On Dec. 19 the assistant superintendent’s office issued a bulletin directing school psychologists to refrain from the use of intelligence tests for all students referred for special education.

We have come full circle. In the effort to avoid culturally biased assessments of children, we now are discarding standardized intelligence measures altogether and replacing them with something mysteriously called “alternative procedures.” That’s a sort of clinical grab-bag that may include asking a youngster to show his ingenuity with a stack of Lego blocks, or to list all the various ways he could use a rolling pin, or how he would negotiate a small shopping errand for his mother.

Now, such investigation may be excellent in helping to determine a child’s creativity, sense of humor or appetite, but it is of extremely limited value for predicting school success or whether the child is eligible for a special-education class.

What the directive means is that we will no longer use those tests that have proved to be reasonably reliable and reasonably valid for many thousands of youngsters since the early part of this century.

It is no accident that the Binet Intelligence Test, imperfect as it may be, is still in use. Many people have tried to replace it and to create culturally fair tests, only to discover that these are even more artificial and less valid than the standardized tests that they have so forcefully reviled.

An assessment of intellectual functioning cannot be free of cultural bias, for by its very nature it must rely on recognizable pictures, ideas, symbols and, finally, words. Even non-verbal tests are culturally loaded. The child with lengthy exposure to television may have a greater advantage when asked to arrange a set of cartoon characters in a logical sequence than one who has had little TV experience. A child from the Australian bush will find the hidden treasure using a topographical map more quickly than the urban youngster who is driven everywhere she goes.

Children differ in what they know and how they learn. They differ in speed, in memory, in their ability to acquire vocabulary, to grasp abstractions and to handle visual symbols as in reading and mathematics. Some learn with astonishing ease, and some only with tortuous effort. Together, these abilities are what is called intelligence.

Imperfect as they are, tests that measure human intelligence are extremely useful for predicting success in school--not success on the street, not creative genius, not ability to be President of the United States.

It is absolutely true that these tests have in some unfortunate instances been misused, for instance, where the scores were inappropriately taken to label and consign children to dead-end programs that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. That was the fault not of the tests but of their abuse and of the mediocre so-called remedial programs.

It is also true that an inordinate number of boys and minority children end up in special-education classes. It seems to be the vogue to blame the tests rather than the complex political and socioeconomic conditions that bear on this grossly unjust phenomenon. It is easier to talk about the unfairness of IQ testing than to face the issue of unfairness of children coming into the world consigned to a life of unequal opportunity, poverty, malnutrition, drugs and neighborhood violence.

When the public school is faced with the Herculean task of educating these profoundly deprived children, it provides special-education programs--classes that are conducted in the least restrictive environments providing intensive individualized instruction, often on a one-to-one basis. These programs vary in quality; some are creative and inspired, some are woefully inadequate. Funding and teacher skills are the determining factors.

To decide on the placement of a child in a special-education class, a professional team, thoroughly familiar with the child’s functioning, is convened. The child is considered from several perspectives--medical, educational, psychological, social-emotional--to determine if there is a learning disability. That is, is there a statistically significant difference between his intellectual potential as measured by an IQ test and his actual achievement level?

When the discrepancy between intellect and achievement is substantial, a child is declared eligible--not when some disgruntled teacher simply wants him out of her class, not because the principal wants him shipped to another school, but only if there exists a specific learning disability.

Now we are told that we may not use IQ tests to establish this critical discrepancy because they allegedly discriminate against minorities. Instead, we now resort to non-standard alternative measures. Because these measures are subjective, there is great potential for serious abuse. In the absence of strictly defined eligibility criteria, it will be easier to rid the classroom of “problem” children--late bloomers, quirky learners, troublemakers--who are not intellectually deficient, but only in need of a bit more attention, patience and understanding.

And there will be nothing culturally fair about these proceedings. The child’s appearance and popularity, his politeness or lack of it, his parents’ clout, his restlessness will be the convincing factors.

Worst of all, many “quiet” children fully deserving of special-education services will not get them because their behavior isn’t delinquent enough.

By eliminating standardized intelligence tests, we are throwing out the baby with the bath water. It will not better the lot of the minority child, but will make it easier to place any child in special education, turning these classes into dumping grounds for the unwanted, with only a nod to due process.