Entry Testing and the Overrepresentation of Romani ... - UR Research

R22PITFALLS AND BIASTAXONOMY OF “INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY”Children are typically administered intellectual ability tests (IQ tests) during the process of assessment forintellectual disability. Almost all countries use the following categories of the American Association of Intellectualand Developmental Disabilities, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR, and the InternationalClassification of Diseases-10 when labeling children: 6Profound: IQ below 20 Severe: IQ 20—34Moderate: IQ 35—49 Mild: IQ 50—70However, these labels, while used internationally to sort people and sometimes to stream them into segregatedinstitutional settings, are social constructions. In the United States, in exploring the overrepresentation of childrenof color in special education programs for children with the label of mild mental retardation, Mercer (1973) andthe President’s Committee on Mental Retardation (1969) discussed the “six-hour retarded child.” This is a child,usually poor and/or of color, who is considered to be “retarded” while in school, but who is considered to be “normal”and perhaps even a high achiever in his or her family and community, such that the disability label conferred bythe school has no function outside of the school. By the 1960s in the United States, the practice of labeling AfricanAmerican children with mild mental retardation (“feeblemindedness”) became an “embarrassment” to the governmentin the midst of the Cold War and parents became increasingly active to demand services and opportunitiesfor their children who were labeled mentally retarded (Biklen, personal communication July 12, 2006). By 1973,the definition of mental retardation was revised, from an IQ of 85 to 70. With a signature, tens of thousands ofindividuals were “cured” of mental retardation.While the Ministries of Education in the region stop just short of asserting that social or cultural disadvantage ishereditary, family background is repeatedly targeted as the cause of a child’s school failure. In much the sameway that Goddard asserted a causal relationship between feeblemindedness and social vice in the early twentiethcenturyUnited States, sociologists in the United States in the late 1960s attributed school achievement not toheredity, but to family and social background. Thus, Moynihan (1965) posited that the breakdown of African Americanfamily, which he in large part attributed to historical and structural injustice, was the cause of the breakdown ofAfrican American culture in the United States. Similarly, Coleman (1966) explored the correlations of poor AfricanAmerican children’s low school achievement, and attributed it primarily to the family and the sociocultural milieuin which the child lived, using the presence of a set of encyclopedias in the home as one of his indicators of6 At different times in history this taxonomy has been known as “idiot,” “moron,” “imbecile,” and “feebleminded.” This taxonomy calls to mindthe United States of the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries’ ideas on feeblemindedness and degeneracy (Trent 1994).Goddard linked feeblemindedness and social vice to heredity; scientists, educators, and society increasingly began to view persons identifiedas morons, idiots, or “moral imbeciles” as being drains on society’s resources (as discussed in Gould 1995; and Trent 1994). Feeblemindednesswas considered to be both a social burden and a social menace (Trent 1994).