Article ID: CBB001202082

“Inequalities of Children in Original Endowment”: How Intelligence Testing Transformed Early Special Education in a North American City School System (2013)

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There are few if any more significant events in modern educational history than the developments which have recently taken place in methods of mental measurement, Lewis Terman wrote in 1923 about the intelligence testing movement he did so much to pioneer in American schools throughout the 1920s.2 Indeed educational historians, particularly Paul Chapman, have shown that the rise of intelligence testing provoked large and relatively swift changes in public education, enabling school systems to sort and stream their students by ability on an unprecedented scale.3 By 1930, Chapman writes, both intelligence testing and ability grouping had become central features of the educational system.4 Less often talked about are the effects of intelligence testing and the concept of intelligence quotient (IQ) on early special education classes, and on the pupils who attended them.5 In fact, Terman recognized the significance of IQ testing to special education as well. In 1919, he wrote that IQ tests would help to turn the existing logic of learning problems on its head by proving that the retardation problem is exactly the reverse of what it is popularly supposed to be.6 By the early twentieth century special education classes (a term that came into wide usage only later in the twentieth century) of many different types could be found in North America's large, urban school districts. While special classes for children with physical disabilities and impairments, behavioral difficulties, and chronic illnesses, were important features of early special education as well, this article focuses on the most common type of special class, the auxiliary class for children with intellectual disabilities and learning difficulties.7 The article examines the significant and wide-ranging changes that the rise of IQ testing and the new science of IQ brought to auxiliary classes in the public schools of Toronto, Ontario, during the 1920s. This article contributes to and extends existing scholarship on special education and IQ testing in Canadian and American schools. It adds to work by Marvin Lazerson, Barry Franklin, Robert Osgood, Ann Marie Ryan, and others, which explores IQ testing's effects on the tracking of children with intellectual disabilities and learning difficulties and on the identification and selection of pupils for special classes.8 Like Barry Franklin, I use pupil records as sources. Student record data and other evidence from Toronto suggest that IQ testing, and categories of intellectual disability that IQ testers helped to construct, played more significant roles in the selection of students for special classes in city schools in the 1920s than historians such as Franklin and Ryan have previously argued.9 But IQ testing's influence on special education was not limited to sorting and selecting students for special classes. We can begin to see IQ testing's truly wide-reaching influence on special education when we also weigh its effects on ideas about learning difficulties, its effects on special class curriculum and instruction, and its effects on the school experiences of special class pupils. Consequently, this article explores areas of early special education that the rise of IQ testing in the 1920s helped to transform, but that historians have yet to explore in depth. The new science of IQ, I argue, had a significant impact on the views of educationists---that is, educational experts, administrators, teachers, and principals---leading them to reinterpret the nature and causes of young people's learning problems and to construct new and different categories of educational disability. These shifting ideas about learning problems, and new categories of educational disability, such as so-called subnormality, contributed to discernible changes in the organization of auxiliary classes in Toronto's schools. Wide-scale IQ testing of special class pupils, I further contend, created what I am calling the testing moment, a new and important experience for schoolchildren with intellectual disabilities and learning difficulties. The testing moment, which I am able to examine through student records, is a fascinating window on children's interactions with adults in schools and in special education programs specifically, both underexplored areas in the historiography on childhood, education, and disability in North America.10 Some of the student records I use contain children's IQ scores and few even contain a brief (quarter-page) summary description of the IQ examination, called a Psychological Examination Report.11 Finally, I look at curriculum and pedagogy in special education. I argue that with the rise of IQ, instruction in Toronto's auxiliary classes became more specifically tailored to what the science of IQ appeared to tell educators about auxiliary class pupils' unique learning capacities and educational needs.

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Authors & Contributors
Petrick, Elizabeth
Booth, Katie
Nair, Aparna
Porter, James Wynter
Serpico, Davide
Palter, David
Concepts
Intelligence tests
Intelligence
Disability technology
Disabilities; disability; accessibility
Education
Psychology
Time Periods
20th century, early
20th century, late
19th century
20th century
18th century
Modern
Places
United States
France
California (U.S.)
Morocco
India
Great Britain
Institutions
Genetics Society of America
Stanford University
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