Educability-and-Group-Differences-1973-by-Arthur-Robert-Jensen

Accentuated Environmental Inequalities 245
Group Non-verbal Verbal
White 54-1 53-2
Negro 43-4 45-4
Indian 53-0 47-8
Puerto Rican 45-8 44-9
Mexican-American 50-1 46-5
Orientals 56-6 51-6
Thus, the Indian-Negro difference in a host of environmental
factors is in just the opposite direction to the differences in mean
performance on tests of non-verbal and verbal intelligence, reading
comprehension, and maths achievement.
Attempts to explain away these striking findings of the Coleman
Report have invoked the ideas of unrepresentative sampling of the
Indian population, effects of the racial composition of the school,
and differences in motivation, self-concept, and educational aspiration
between Negroes and Indians. For example, Bodmer and
Cavalli-Sforza (1970, p. 27) write: ‘According to the Coleman
report, however, American Indians typically go to schools where
whites are in the majority, which is not the case for most of the
schools attended by black children.’ Several comments about this
statement are in order. It was pointed out earlier that Negro
children in this study are about 1 SD below Indian children on the
non-verbal test in the first grade. Since racial composition of the
school per se has not been shown by the Coleman study or any
other study to be related to achievement, it is most unlikely that
the effect of racial composition of the school will have had
sufficient effect by first grade to account for 1 SD IQ difference.2
Moreover, Coleman et al. (1966, p. 40) report that 48 percent of
the Indians in the first-grade sample were in schools in wrhich the
majority of pupils were Indians. If this argument of Bodmer and
Cavalli-Sforza carried any conviction, we should predict that in
the case where Negroes attend schools which have a majority of
white pupils, they should do as wrell as Indians in similar circumstances.
The Coleman Report provides the conditions for examining
this hypothesis (pp. 40 and 243). At the twelfth grade, 92
percent of non-metropolitan North and West Negroes attend
schools in which Negroes are in a minority; 91 percent of all