Porter, James Wynter (Author)
Waller, John C. (Advisor)
This dissertation analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-World War II US, from 1945-1965. I examine how “intelligence”—as an idea about human difference—was constructed in this period in response to a shifting complex of social and scientific pressures and moreover, how it functioned through policy to regulate educational opportunity. This was a period dense with events that rapidly transformed the educational landscape, including the fitful early years of desegregation following Brown v. Board, the Sputnik Crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Such rapid transformations readily evoked the ordering principle of “intelligence.” While exploring larger Cold War/Civil Rights contexts, my research focuses on specific networks of collaboration between ETS, the National Education Association (NEA), Eisenhower administration architects of the NDEA, and James Bryant Conant, via his widely disseminated study of US public high schools, The American High School Today. These actors formed a largely sub rosa collaboration that worked to the political and financial advantage of the NEA and ETS. As well, they positioned The American High School Today as a seemingly independent, scientifically objective endorsement of the NDEA. To wit, The American High School Today and the NDEA both pressed—yet without observable affiliation—the need to identify “highly able” high school students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the sciences, math and foreign languages. While the NDEA contained broad and neutrally stated initiatives addressed to these aims, The American High School Today followed six months later mapping well-defined, naturalized thresholds of individual intelligence to proposed sequences of ability-tracked science, math and foreign language curriculum. This collaboration propelled the subsequent explosion of a new strain of discourse across a range of national media and popular literatures that worked to construct the category of the “academically talented” and “gifted” child, and advocate for this student’s access to select curricula in the public schools. Furthermore, while calls to identify and selectively educate high “intelligence” drew explicit justification from the Sputnik Crisis and the science race with the Soviets, I find that white anxieties about “race”—and, specifically, desegregation following Brown v. Board—were a powerful tacit driver.
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Article
Ellis, Jason;
(2013)
“Inequalities of Children in Original Endowment”: How Intelligence Testing Transformed Early Special Education in a North American City School System
(/isis/citation/CBB001202082/)
Thesis
Seay, Cameron W.;
(2004)
Intelligence Assessment of the American Negro, 1913--1945: A Socio-Cultural Recapitulation
(/isis/citation/CBB001561877/)
Book
White, John;
(2006)
Intelligence, Destiny, and Education: The Ideological Roots of Intelligence Testing
(/isis/citation/CBB000774262/)
Article
Kim, D. Y.;
(2014)
Effects of Physics on Development of Optometry in the United States from the Late 19th to the Mid 20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001422425/)
Article
Ann Marie Ryan;
(2019)
Catholic Minds/Bodies–Souls: Catholic Schools and Eugenic Inspired Educational Reforms in the United States, 1915–1952
(/isis/citation/CBB756510954/)
Thesis
David Alan Varel;
(2015)
Race, Class, and Socialization: Allison Davis and Twentieth-century American Social Thought
(/isis/citation/CBB664780930/)
Article
Susanne Schregel;
(2020)
‘The Intelligent and the Rest’: British Mensa and the Contested Status of High Intelligence
(/isis/citation/CBB475498822/)
Book
Elisabetta Cicciola;
(2019)
La scoperta dell'intelligenza: Alfred Binet e la storia del primo test
(/isis/citation/CBB900165796/)
Book
Hegarty, Peter;
(2013)
Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men
(/isis/citation/CBB001213145/)
Book
Michael E. Staub;
(2018)
The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve
(/isis/citation/CBB502233822/)
Book
Carson, John;
(2007)
The Measure of Merit: Talents, Intelligence, and Inequality in the French and American Republics, 1750--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000741522/)
Thesis
Christopher Mendoza;
(2017)
A Needs Assessment for Hillview Middle School's STEM Education Program
(/isis/citation/CBB921621397/)
Article
Bucciarelli, Louis L.;
Drew, David C.;
(Fall 2015)
On MOOCs
(/isis/citation/CBB827953033/)
Article
Reich, Justin;
(Fall 2016)
Engineering the Science of Learning
(/isis/citation/CBB787483221/)
Book
York, State University of New;
(1986)
The State University of New York: The new liberal arts: Curriculum in transition: Papers presented at conferences and workshops at State University of New York campuses
(/isis/citation/CBB001180657/)
Article
Griffiths, Rebecca J.;
Maron, Nancy L.;
(Fall 2016)
Open Educational Resources: Nearing an Inflection Point for Adoption?
(/isis/citation/CBB603608998/)
Book
Catherine Malabou;
(2019)
Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains
(/isis/citation/CBB862832155/)
Article
Annette Mülberger;
(2017)
Mental Association: Testing Individual Differences Before Binet
(/isis/citation/CBB594534377/)
Chapter
Sutherland, Gillian;
(1981)
Measuring intelligence: English local education authorities and mental testing, 1919-1939
(/isis/citation/CBB000009469/)
Article
Sutherland, Gillian;
(1977)
The magic of measurement: Mental testing and English education, 1900-1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000025307/)
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