I recently began reading "Measured Lies, The Bell Curve Examined", a response published in 1996 to Richard Herrnstein & Charles Murray's infamous book. Written by a group of educators and social theorists, Measured Lies dissects and destroys The Bell Curve's arguments while exposing the racism at it's core. I found particularly interesting the explanation of how The Bell Curve fits into the context of the conservative cultural and political movement; it's purpose was to provide pseudo-scientific justification for the dismantling of social democratic programs in order to "undermine the educational and economic mobility of the non-white and the poor" (and to solidify the social standing of the dominant - i.e. rich, white - cultural class). As the authors conclude in their introduction, it "is the social blueprint for the Fascist future." Scary stuff, if old hat to most of us here on Daily Kos.
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Sadly, from the perspective of a reader in 2005 it is clear that The Bell Curve represents just another point in the continuum leading up to the current state of political conservatism. But I was particularly struck by the description in Measured Lies of an education system based on Herrnstein & Murray's views:
The classroom supported by Herrnstein & Murray reduces student learning to the notion of replication rather than interpretation. Here students "know" only when they can display a decontextualized fragment of data at the bidding of a test. Assuming that the most significant aspects of school performance and cognitive activity can be quantitatively measured, the psychometric discourse discourages students and teachers from connecting their lived experience to academic knowledge. Students learn to lay aside their creative and interpretive predispositions and focus on what data will be included on the examination...In this context students are rewarded for their ability to present testmakers with what they have been taught in the exact manner it was first presented to them.
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Professional prerogative is stolen from teachers who are forced to make curricular decisions not on the basis of their professional evaluations of student needs but on the demands of a test. In this context the standardized test becomes "the tail that wags the dog," as the exam (not the teacher) determines what is taught and learned.
This seems to be a highly prescient description of the public school clasroom of today, as influenced by the No Child Left Behind legislation. So imagine my suprise when I did a Google search on the terms "no+child+left+behind+the+bell+curve"" and found repeated recent instances of conservatives claiming that NCLB is the result of the rejection of The Bell Curve's IQ hypothesis:
In the ten years since the publication of The Bell Curve, I do not think there has been a single act of public policy at the national -- nor even, so far as I am aware, at the state -- level that based itself on the reality that book describes. To the contrary, there have been acts of public policy, like NCLB, whose underlying assumptions are in flat contradiction to what Herrnstein, Murray, and legions of other researchers in the human sciences all know.
You see, NCLB requires that all students meet a minimal standard of academic proficiency by 2014. The reasoning goes: no kids failing = no bell curve - therefore the supporters of NCLB have rejected The Bell Curve. But have they really?
One of the more controversial aspects of NCLB is that schools lose funding if their standardized test scores don't improve over time. This is supposed to create an incentive for schools to improve. But Bill Maher points out the obvious:
Our Leave No Child Behind law is written like this: As a state, you get federal money for your schools, but only when you make a few things happen, mainly get test scores to go up and dropout rates to go down. How best to achieve both of those goals? By making the dumber kids disappear!
The program President Bush brags about in Houston was all about raising test scores by making almost the entire bottom half of the class drop out, and then lowering the dropout rate by putting those dropouts in phony categories like transferred or enrolled in general equivalency diploma, or GED, classes.
This sounds to me like Herrnstein & Murray's idea of a perfect education system - rather than waste precious resources on the uneducatable dumber half, just get them out of the system altogether! Bush & Co. knew darn well what had happened in Houston - hell, Molly Ivins was writing about it before Bush was even elected. Given this, it's awfully hard to believe that NCLB isn't just another example of a Bush program intended to do the opposite of what it's name suggests. Leaving certain children behind was the whole point. As Bill Maher said:
New rule: Stop believing slogans, especially the ones that come out of the White House. Slogans are not policy, and they're not truth.
Cross posted on WorldWideWebers.net