Bell Curve

144 Cognitive Classes and Social Behavior Schooling 1 45The very concept of school failure is a modern invention. In the era ofthe one-room schoolhouse, students advanced at their own pace. Therewere no formal grade levels, no promotions to the next grade, hence noway to fail.'"Dropping out" is an even more recent concept, created by the assumptionthat it is normal to remain in school through age 17. Until recently,it wasn't typical. In 1900, the high school diploma was thepreserve of a tiny minority of American youth: The number of thosewho got one amounted to only 6 percent of the crop of potential seniorsthat year. This figure, known as the graduation ratio, is calculated as thepercentage of the 17- ear-old population.2 Perhaps even more startling,it was not until the beginning of World War I1 that the graduation ratiofirst passed the 50 percent mark. The figure shows the story from1900 to 1990."'The trendlines that overlie the data indicate two broad phases in thisninety-year history. The first phase, from 1908 until the early 1920s, fea-tured moderate expansion of high school education. It did not appearmoderate at the time-the graduation rate more than doubled from1900 to 1922-but the growth was nonetheless moderate by comparisonwith steep surge from 1922 until the beginning of World War 11.Graduation ratio80% -70% -60% -50% -40% -30% -20% -10%-In the first half of the century, thehigh school diploma becomes the normTrendlines established in ...... 192264Source: DES 1992, Tahle 95; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1975, Table H598-601This was the opening of the second growth phase, which lasted, withan interruption for World War 11, until 1964. The story since 1964 hasbeen mixed. Graduation rates stalled during the last half of the 1960sand then reversed during the 1970s. The trend since 1980 has been uncertainlyand shallowly upward. As of 1992, the graduation ratio for 17-year-olds stood at 76 percent, near the 1969 high of 77 percent. Theproportion of people who eventually graduate or get a high school equivalencycertificate now stands at about 86 percent for the population asa whole.14'Americans today take it for granted that the goal is to graduate everyoneand that a high school dropout rate is a social evil. But earlierthinkers, even those in our liberal tradition, were dubious about educatingthe entire population beyond the rudiments of literacy. Voltaire'sview that "the lower classes should be guided, not educated," was typicaluntil this ~entury.~ Even early in this century, many observers fearedthat unqualified youngsters were being educated beyond their abilities.''We must turn back the clock," one prominent educator wrote in 1936,"to take some five million boys and girls from the educational dole.""And yet when the psychometricians sought to document the fear thatthe country was trying to educate the ineducable, they found little evidencefor it. One investigator, Frank Finch, assembled all of the competentstudies of the intelligence of high school students conductedfrom 1916 (the earliest study he could find) to 1942. The mean IQ ofninth graders in these studies was 105; the mean IQ of the twelfthgraders or graduates was 107, trivially different.'" The data suggest thatthe large number of youngsters who dropped out between ninth gradeand high school graduation averaged less than 105 in IQ, but not bymuch (a calculation explained in the note).lR'Finch found no increasing trend over time in the 1Q gap betweendropouts and graduates during the early part of the century. Replicatingthe story that we described regarding the college level in Chapter 1, thefirst decades of the century saw American high school education mushroomin size without having to dip much deeper into the intellectualpool. This process could not go on forever. As the high school diplomabecame the norm, the dropouts were likely to become more self-selectedfor low IQ, and so indeed it transpired.We have not been able to determine exactly when the gap betweennongraduates and graduates began to open up. Probably it was wideningeven by the early 1940s. By the early 1950s, a study in Iowa found