Ignoring intelligence has consequences
By misdiagnosing the causes of academic gaps, Denver Public Schools is putting forward impossible goals
I have never encountered any children in any group who are not geniuses.
Denver Public Schools (DPS) recently sent a memo titled DPS Belief in and Commitment to Black Excellence. The memo is heavily inspired by the social justice movement. It contains references to “institutional racism,” “whiteness”, “white supremacy,” “white privilege,” and “anti-racism.” It also explicitly cites Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility.
The goals seem noble. DPS wants to ensure “no student is left behind” and “all students succeed” (emphasis mine):
“achieve our vision and ensure All students succeed”
“in our educational system we have consistently left our Black Students and Black Team Members behind”
“work to dismantle the current system which allows certain students to excel and others to perish”
The memo ends with a quote from Jamilah Pitts (emphasis mine): “In my work with schools, the question often arises around where to begin. My answer remains the same: Peel back the layers, understand and study how racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression work, identify how they impact school systems and your schools, and then respond from that place.”
(As a side note — in a country where more girls graduate from high school than boys, it is not clear how sexism operates, unless Pitts means there is discrimination against boys.)
Slogans like “no student left behind” and “ensure all students succeed” should sound familiar because they are similar to the names of laws passed in 2001 (No Child Left Behind Act) and 2015 (Every Student Succeeds Act)
However, as well-intentioned as DPS might be, such goals are unrealistic, for very simple reasons.
First, children differ in their intelligence. Second, intelligence is strongly correlated to academic success1. Smarter students learn more quickly, obtain better grades, and are more likely to obtain higher-level diplomas. Other psychological characteristics help to do well in school (such as working hard)2, but they are less important than intelligence. Unless course contents are severely watered down, some children will be left behind.
Finally, intelligence is highly inheritable3. As long as different groups have different average levels of intelligence at some point in time (for whatever reason), and that the environment does not explain 100% of the difference, these groups will continue having different levels of intelligence, at least for some generations. In turn, this will lead to differences in academic outcomes.
Intelligence tests are designed to measure intelligence and produce IQ scores that follow a Gaussian distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. In the US, major racial groups have different measured intelligence. Asians score on average about 105, whites about 100, Latinos about 90, and blacks about 854. IQ differences between blacks and whites narrowed in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but have since been stable5.
There is thus about a 20-point difference between Asians and blacks, or 1.3 standard deviation. This is a very large difference. Hoping that today’s black students can on average do as well as Asian students (“ensure all students succeed”) is a pipe dream.
We observe the same racial differences when looking at college admission tests (SAT and ACT): Asians score highest, followed by whites, Latinos, and blacks6.
Note that intelligence differences don’t preclude discrimination. But to prove discrimination (“institutional racism”), one must at the very least first take into account differences in intelligence, and show there is residual variation in academic achievement, for instance that talented black students more often receive lower grades than talented Asian students.
The quote at the beginning of this post comes from Professor Asa Grant Hilliard III. The thought that every child is a genius is comforting. It is also meaningless or false — it implies that either intelligence does not matter or that every child is extremely intelligent (that’s what “genius” means).
Likewise, the memo from DPS does not once mention differences in intelligence, and the quote from Pitts suggests studying discrimination and oppression, not intelligence and motivation.
As long as we don’t acknowledge the main reason why some students perform better than others, and why some groups of students on average perform better than others, we will keep trying to achieve unrealistic goals through ineffective means, in the process wasting resources and causing resentment.
R. T. Warne, In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, p. 170.
Ibid., pp. 184-185.
Ibid., pp. 109-110.
Ibid., p. 90.
C. Murray, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, New York: Encounter Books, 2021, p. 34.
Warne, op. cit., p. 187.
It’s important for political reasons to pretend that there are no differences in intelligence and all differences in results are due to racism. Despite what you see, all people are the same height. That Asians are rare in professional basketball is because of racism.
A courageous and important article that openly addresses a topic that is often taboo, but that we need to talk about.