Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

Disadvantage: The Genetic Case 63eugenic gatekeeping’ along the border with Mexico. Molina (2006)investigates the negative public-health attitudes towards immigrants inLos Angeles: the Chinese were ‘interlopers in the land of sunshine’(p. 15), the Mexicans were ‘a diseased, charity-seeking group’ (p. 136),the Japanese were ‘ignorant, uncultured and half civilized’ (p. 57). Theywere all representative of the ‘vast masses of peasantry, degraded belowour utmost conceptions... [with] no history behind them... beaten menfrom beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle forexistence’ (Walker, 1896: 828; see also Black, 2003; Bruinius, 2006).All of this work was expedited by the rapid development of a relianceupon testing that has hardly abated since. Giordano (2005) provides anadmirable overview of the growth of educational testing, remarkingupon the racialized assumptions and underpinnings of many tests forimmigrant and black populations. The zeal for assessment, the prejudicedand ill-formed judgments that drove it and gave it its shape, andthe unfortunate consequences for those many individuals whosepotentials and achievements were never given a fair opportunity toreveal themselves these coincided with at least some scholarly concern.The famous Edwin Boring, for example, was able to point out as early as1923 that intelligence is what intelligence tests test. While Boringintended to warn against a sterile and static circularity, it is interestingto consider that the statement could also be taken as an endorsement ofthe validity of existing measures of intelligence. The journalist andinventor of the word ‘stereotype’ Walter Lippmann (1922) deservessome credit for taking on proponents of testing and subjecting theirflawed and incomplete thinking to criticisms that sound quite modern:‘intelligence’ tests are generally nothing of the kind, they can be adaptedto suit many purposes, they are not (what we would now call) ‘culturefair’,they often build upon unproven assumptions about the relativeimportance of heredity and environment, and so on (see Block &Dworkin, 1976; Giordano, 2005); Pastore (1978) provides a commentaryon Lippmann’s writings. For an excellent overview of the evolution ofintelligence testing, from Galton to Jensen, see Wickett (1990); for anhistorical consideration going back to the Greeks, Spearman’s (1937)dated but still very informative work is recommended.Louis Marshall, one of the founders of the American JewishCommittee, also pointed to the flaws in test methodology and administration,as well as to the pseudo-science, hypocrisy and racism thatunderpinned the whole enterprise. But the popular tide was running fastagainst the critics. This was, after all, an age in which one president(Harding) was popularly (but probably inaccurately) thought to be a