You have to admire the honesty of these comments written by a science teacher in Washington. These comments are from her blog for January 17, which I will quote below, wholesale. Much of her comments are coming from the Wall Street Journal, but I wasn't sure what was her own thought and what was quoted. Nevertheless, this is dead on. Boldface is mine.


Intelligence in the Classroom

The opinion page from the Wall Street Journal has a headline that, at first, made me chuckle: Half of All Children Are Below Average. Hey, there's some real news. Half are below average? Gosh, I bet half of them are below the median, too. But reading further gave me pause to think a bit more about the unfortunately titled article.

Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.

What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question.

We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.

The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder--the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement.

This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence . . .

To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence.

That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: 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.

Certainly gives some pause for thought, doesn't it?

The thing we have refused to do is say to the parent of low intelligence children. "Your daughter, your son has below average intelligence and we should point her/him in directions that will allow a wonderful life that is not based on academic prowess." Everything we know says that no child left behind is bogus. I was left behind when we all went out for a sprint at recess. Others were left behind when we balanced equations in chemistry, others when we sang a song. It's okay. We need alternative education for many in the bottom of the bell curve.