Bell Curve

426 Living Together The Leveling of American Education 42 7almost a third of a standard deviation on the ~ath."~' And yet we havejust finished demonstrating that this large change is not reflected in theaggregate national data for high school students. Which students, then,account for the SATdecline! We try to answer that question in the nextfew paragraphs, as we work our way through the most common explanationof the decline. To anticipate our conclusion, the standard explanationdoes not stand up to the data. We are left with compellingevidence of a genuine decline in the intellectual resources of our brightestyoungsters.The most familiar explanation of the great decline is that the SATwas "democratized" during the 1960s and 1970s. The pool of people takingthe test expanded dramatically, it is said, bringing in students fromdisadvantaged backgrounds who never used to consider going to college.This was a good thing, people agree, but it also meant that testscores went down-a natural consequence of breaking down the oldelites. The real problem is not falling SAT scores but the inferior educationfor the disadvantaged that leads them to have lower test scores,according to the standard account.27This common view is mistaken. To make this case requires delvinginto the details of the SAT and its population.2H To summarize a complexstory: During the 1950s and into the early 1960s) the SAT pool expandeddramatically, but scores remained steady. In the mid-1960s, scoresstarted to decline, but, by then, many state universities had become lessselective in their admissions process, often dropping the requirementthat students take SATs, and, as a result, many of the students in the middlelevel of the pool who formerly took the SAT stopped doing so. Focusingon the whites taking the SAT (thereby putting aside the effectsof the changing ethnic composition of the pool), we find that throughoutmost of the whire SAT score decline, the white SAT pool was shrinking, notexpanding. We surmise that the white population of test takers duringthis period was probably getting more exclusive socioeconomically, notless. It is virtually impossible that it was becoming more democratized inany socioeconomic sense.After 1976, when detailed background data on white test takers becomeavailable, the evidence is quite explicit. Although the size of thepool once again began to expand during the 1980s, neither parental incomenor parental education of the white test takers changed.'291 Afterfactoring in the effects of changes in the gender of the pool and changesin the difficulty of the SAT, we conclude that the aggregate real declinefrom 1963 to 1976 among whites taking the SAT was on the order ofthirty-four to forty-four points on the Verbal and fifteen to twenty-fivepoints on the Math. From 1976 to 1993, the real white losses were nomore than a few additional points on the Verbal. On the Math, whitescores improved about three or four points in real terms after changesin the pool are taken into account. Or in other words, when everythingis considered, there is reason to conclude that the size of the drop in theSAT as shown in that familiar, unsophisticated graphic with which weopened the discussion is for practical purposes the same size and shapeas the real change in the academic preparation of white college-boundSAT test takers. Neither race, class, parental education, composition ofthe pool, nor gender can explain this decline of forty-odd points on theVerbal score and twenty-odd points on the Math for the white SAT-takingpopulation during the 1960s and 1970s. For whatever reasons, duringthe 1960s America stopped doing as well intellectually by the coreof students who go to college.Rather than democratization, the decline was more probably due toleveling down, or mediocritization: adownward trend of the educationalskills of America's academically most promising youngsters toward thoseof the average student. The net drop in verbal skills was especially large,much larger than net drop in math skills. It affected even those studentswith the highest levels of cognitive ability.Does this drop represent a fall in realized intelligence as well as a dropin the quality of academic training? We assume that it does to some extentbut are unwilling to try to estimate how much of which. The SATscore decline does underscore a frustrating, perverse reality: Howeverhard it may be to raise IQ among the less talented with discrete interventions,as described in Chapter 17, it may be within the capability ofan educational system-probably with the complicity of broader socialtrends-to put a ceiling on, or actually dampen, the realized intelligenceof those with high potential.'0TRENDS IN EDUCATION 111: THE BRIGHTEST OF THEBRIGHTESTOne more piece of the puzzle needs to be put in place. The SAT populationconstitutes a sort of broad elite, encompassing but not limited tothe upper quartile of the annual national pool of cognitive ability. Whathas been happening to the scores of the narrow elite, the most gifted