Articles and Book Chapters by Jim W Porter
History of Science, 2020
This article investigates National Defense Education Act and National Defense Education Act-relat... more This article investigates National Defense Education Act and National Defense Education Act-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of guidance counselors, an emergent profession that was to play an instrumental role in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelligence” or academic “ability”. In analyzing this mid-century push for more guidance counseling in schools, this article will first explore a foundational argument for the fairness of intelligence testing made by Educational Testing Service psychometrician William Turnbull in 1951, and then later taken up and employed by other National Defense Education Act-era advocates of testing and grouping. Secondly, this analysis will proceed to National Defense Education Act expert testimony, examining here assertions of the necessity of guidance counseling in schools, and an emergent and shared vision articulating the role guidance counseling was supposed to play in school life. A pattern or structure to this vision emerges here. According to its advocates, guidance counseling would not only inform the self-understanding of the measured individual, but it would also work to condition the ideology of individual intelligence across numerous layers of social life around the student: through peer group, through teachers and school administrators, and finally through home, family, and the wider community.
Multiethnica, 2018
While primarily concerned with developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the... more While primarily concerned with developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the historiography of IQ and intelligence testing in the first half of the 20th century, indicating as it does so an emergent emphasis on the individualization of “intelligence” in the Stanford/Iowa IQ debates of the 1930s. Given the character and tendency of the trend that emerges, I propose a model for understanding these developments: one which situates conceptions of racial and individual ”intelligence” as entangled and co-evolving ideologies. With this historiographical model in place I turn to evidence from National Defense Education Act (NDEA)
hearings and related NDEA-era texts. These documents demonstrate that NDEA reforms attempted to rehabilitate testing as fair and “race”-neutral, and were further structured around the logics of individual “ability.” While NDEA reforms asserted that such individualization of educational opportunity was a scientifically objective, “race”-neutral process, discourse analysis reveals that it was instead profoundly entangled with the logics of “race” and a history — indeed a present — from which it imagined it had cut itself loose.
Isis, 2017
Abstract: This essay investigates the emergence of a profusion of lay and specialist
literature ... more Abstract: This essay investigates the emergence of a profusion of lay and specialist
literature in the late 1950s United States advocating on behalf of “gifted”
and “academically talented” students. This call to reform schools around individual
differences in “intelligence” was associated in its moment with the Sputnik
crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The
essay demonstrates, however, that the emergence of intensified interest in education
for the “academically talented” was actually closely coterminous with
Brown v. Board of Education and should also be understood in the context of early
efforts to desegregate the public schools. It holds that a closer look at the NDEA—
and a supporting body of literature working in tandem with it—reveals continuities
in psychometric conceptions of “intelligence” and testing from the interwar
period into the post–World War II era. This essay thus makes contributions to the
historiographies of the Cold War, civil rights, psychometrics, and education in
the 1950s.
A Companion to the History of American Science, 2015
We should not forget the power of the laboratory itself to shape a discipline and perpetuate cert... more We should not forget the power of the laboratory itself to shape a discipline and perpetuate certain ways of knowing. Labs are assemblages of equipment and trained personnel, coordinated in specific ways to ask very particular questions of the world. They attract funding (to the lab and the university), if the lab produces reliable results; and this selective process in turn shapes the sorts of future questions that can be reliably asked and answered. In this way labs exercise both a catalytic and normalizing function over the field (Kuhn, 1996, 23-42). They garner funds and grow the profession but also direct research with increasing inertia in particular directions. They inherit their ways of working from other practitioners past and present (mentors, colleagues and competitors), and are moreover symbols of the growth and power of the discipline (Capshew, 1992, 132). And while laboratories seem on the one hand to be the pinnacle of objective science--highly controlled, hermetically closed spaces, magic-carpet-fact-generators that float above the din and disorder of culture—they in fact import whole worldviews and systems of assumptions that become a tacit part of their everyday functioning. Latour has remarked in this regard that “no one can say where the laboratory is and where the society is” (Latour, 1983, 154). For this reason--the porous boundaries between lab and society--we also should not fail to take note of how psychology’s rapid emergence as a laboratory science in the US coincided with a particularly volatile period of industrial growth and urbanization in US history known as the Progressive Era.
Thus psychology was emerging as a laboratory science in the United States right when the cultural value of science and the scientific expert were dramatically on the rise. Psychologists felt they could offer powerful solutions to many of these social problems, but first they had to complete the reformation of psychology itself. Psychology had to be pried once and for all from the hands of philosophy and allowed to stand confidently alongside biology, chemistry and physics as a natural science in its own right. But making psychology amenable to laboratory study meant turning away from the more subjective, noetic qualities of mind, and instead focusing on the quantifiable, observable aspects of behavior.
Interview with Richard McCann, 2010
Richard McCann came to MSU in March of 2009 as the judge of the English Department’s annual Creat... more Richard McCann came to MSU in March of 2009 as the judge of the English Department’s annual Creative Writing Awards. On his visit he worked with creative writing students and gave a reading from his current work-in-progress, The Resurrectionist, a memoir about his experience as a liver transplant patient. Richard McCann’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Best American Essays, and his collection of short stories, Mother of Sorrows, won the John C. Zacharis/Ploughshares Award in 2005. Ghost Letters, a collection of his poetry, won the Beatrice Hawley and Capricorn Awards. This transcript is from an interview conducted by Jim Porter, a former student of McCann’s.
Dissertation by Jim W Porter
This dissertation analyzes debates about intelligence and
educational opportunity in the post-Wor... more 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.
Grants, Fellowships and Awards by Jim W Porter
Conference Presentations by Jim W Porter
KEY FINDINGS:
Between 1956 and 1959 James Bryant Conant conducted what he argued was an independe... more KEY FINDINGS:
Between 1956 and 1959 James Bryant Conant conducted what he argued was an independent and scientific analysis of U.S. public high schools. Published in 1959 as The American High School Today, Conant’s study strongly recommended the rational reordering of American high schools around presumed individual differences in intelligence, and the placement of high I.Q students in more academically rigorous science, math and foreign language classes. My analysis of documents related to the production of this study reveal that “intelligence” (or “aptitude,” “I.Q.”) served as more than just a scientific measure of individual worth. It also functioned as a political trope that was used to resolve a Cold War crisis in public education in the late 1950s, bridging as it did so divides between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and ‘federal/national’ and ‘local/provincial.’ My analysis also discovers that The American High School Today should be viewed less as Conant’s “personal study” and rather the result of networks of collaboration that joined Conant, The Educational Testing Service, The National Education Association, The Carnegie Corporation and Eisenhower administration architects of the National Defense Education Act. Furthermore, I closely examine how this sub rosa network actors produced a veritable explosion of discourse across a range of media and literatures that worked to construct new educationally operationalizable categories of person: the “gifted” and “academically talented” student.
Chiefly these new public and scientific conversation about “intelligence” proposed that the “gifted” and “academically talented” were a natural category of person who were particularly well suited for the study of the sciences and mathematics. Moreover, this new discourse proposed that “giftedness” and “academic talent” were currently largely unrecognized as a distinct human category and that gifted and talented individuals were overlooked neglected as a result. Conant and many others held that this alleged invisibility of the gifted and their resultant neglect posed a great risk to the gifted themselves as individuals (this was often depicted as the potential for atrophy of talent, isolation, maladjustment or psychological damage), and a great risk to the nation, to our technological and cultural progress and to our national security. Yes, the idea of the “giftedness” is indeed an old one, but it was repurposed in ways very specific to this time period, and it was reimpressed at this historical moment with striking force and visibility upon the national imagination. As this category of person was reinvested with belief, it was also systematized and made actionable in an educational setting in a way and to a degree it never had been before. Given the cultural bias of these tests and the narrow, essentialist underlying conception of intelligence that supported their use, I argue that this dramatically reinvigorated interest in educating the “gifted” and “academically talented” amounted to a repositioning and “safeguarding” of whiteness in response to desegregation, mandated four years earlier by Brown v. Board.
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW:
This NSF and NAEd/Spencer foundation funded research in the history of science and the history of education analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-WWII US, from 1945-1960. Specifically, my research question asks how “intelligence” as an idea (or really a contested set of ideas) was constructed and redefined in this period in response to a shifting complex of social, cultural and scientific pressures. Further, I am interested in how these evolving constructions of intelligence functioned to regulate educational opportunity. Thus my analysis addresses: 1) the theorization of intelligence within psychology, 2) continuities between psychological theory, federal-level legislation, and school-place testing and ability grouping, and 3) the influence of broader Cold War/Civil Rights-era cultural contexts on all these developments.
My analysis presumes that whatever “intelligence” is, it is not simply an ahistorical or organically determined given, but rather a nexus of assumptions, practices and performances that shape-shift over time in response to cultural exigencies. This analytical position denaturalizes “intelligence” and allows us to see how beliefs about intelligence serve as powerful but under-examined regulators of status and opportunity in our culture. To this point, I argue that--in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities and in the context of an emerging Civil Rights movement--when group identifiers like race, class and to some extent gender came under mounting scrutiny as constructed and potentially discriminatory categories—“intelligence” rather assumed a kind of objectivity as a valid, measurable identifier of natural capability. Intelligence tests were the technological products of a new scientific psychology, and what they measured was presumed, more widely than ever before, to fairly mark an individual’s place in the social order. In this sense, and in the context of a post-World War II meritocracy, I argue that “intelligence” should be viewed as a culturally constructed category in its own right, on par with and functioning in dynamic relation to other highly salient categories of cultural analysis like race, class, or gender. Clearly, deeply entrenched beliefs about race, class, and gender still powerfully shaped constructions of what intelligence was, who was likely to be perceived as intelligent and in what ways, but now more than ever before, measured “intelligence”—a set of numbers one bore through one’s school years like both a prophecy and a kind of personal essence—asserted itself as another primary marker of worth.
This dissertation focuses on 1) a 1958 scientific study of US public high schools conducted by James Bryant Conant known as The American High School Today, 2) on networks of collaboration (ETS, NEA, Carnegie, and architects of emergent National Defense Education Act legislation) that worked to produce this study and 3) on the study’s widespread cultural influence and policy-shaping power—in tandem with the NDEA--in relation to “academic talent” and “intelligence.” My work here extends the analyses of others who have written on Conant and Cold War education, such as Wayne Urban, Andrew Hartman, Carl Kaestle, Nicholas Lemann and Ellen Lagemann. The historiography has yet to examine numerous striking similarities between The American High School Today and specific title mandates of the National Defense Education Act. Both The American High School Today and The National Defense Education Act emerged at more or less precisely the same time. Likewise both texts argued the national need to identify “academically talented” students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the public high schools in the sciences, mathematics and foreign languages. My dissertation has taken up these issues in concert to argue that we have underestimated the influence of The American High School Today and the role this study played, in concert with the NDEA, in shaping ideas about talent, intelligence and educability.
Papers by Jim W Porter
While Primarily Concerned with Developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the... more While Primarily Concerned with Developments in the 1950s, this analysis begins by reexamining the historiography of IQ and intelligence testing in the first half of the 20th century, indicating tha ...
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Articles and Book Chapters by Jim W Porter
hearings and related NDEA-era texts. These documents demonstrate that NDEA reforms attempted to rehabilitate testing as fair and “race”-neutral, and were further structured around the logics of individual “ability.” While NDEA reforms asserted that such individualization of educational opportunity was a scientifically objective, “race”-neutral process, discourse analysis reveals that it was instead profoundly entangled with the logics of “race” and a history — indeed a present — from which it imagined it had cut itself loose.
literature in the late 1950s United States advocating on behalf of “gifted”
and “academically talented” students. This call to reform schools around individual
differences in “intelligence” was associated in its moment with the Sputnik
crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The
essay demonstrates, however, that the emergence of intensified interest in education
for the “academically talented” was actually closely coterminous with
Brown v. Board of Education and should also be understood in the context of early
efforts to desegregate the public schools. It holds that a closer look at the NDEA—
and a supporting body of literature working in tandem with it—reveals continuities
in psychometric conceptions of “intelligence” and testing from the interwar
period into the post–World War II era. This essay thus makes contributions to the
historiographies of the Cold War, civil rights, psychometrics, and education in
the 1950s.
Thus psychology was emerging as a laboratory science in the United States right when the cultural value of science and the scientific expert were dramatically on the rise. Psychologists felt they could offer powerful solutions to many of these social problems, but first they had to complete the reformation of psychology itself. Psychology had to be pried once and for all from the hands of philosophy and allowed to stand confidently alongside biology, chemistry and physics as a natural science in its own right. But making psychology amenable to laboratory study meant turning away from the more subjective, noetic qualities of mind, and instead focusing on the quantifiable, observable aspects of behavior.
Dissertation by Jim W Porter
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.
Grants, Fellowships and Awards by Jim W Porter
Conference Presentations by Jim W Porter
Between 1956 and 1959 James Bryant Conant conducted what he argued was an independent and scientific analysis of U.S. public high schools. Published in 1959 as The American High School Today, Conant’s study strongly recommended the rational reordering of American high schools around presumed individual differences in intelligence, and the placement of high I.Q students in more academically rigorous science, math and foreign language classes. My analysis of documents related to the production of this study reveal that “intelligence” (or “aptitude,” “I.Q.”) served as more than just a scientific measure of individual worth. It also functioned as a political trope that was used to resolve a Cold War crisis in public education in the late 1950s, bridging as it did so divides between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and ‘federal/national’ and ‘local/provincial.’ My analysis also discovers that The American High School Today should be viewed less as Conant’s “personal study” and rather the result of networks of collaboration that joined Conant, The Educational Testing Service, The National Education Association, The Carnegie Corporation and Eisenhower administration architects of the National Defense Education Act. Furthermore, I closely examine how this sub rosa network actors produced a veritable explosion of discourse across a range of media and literatures that worked to construct new educationally operationalizable categories of person: the “gifted” and “academically talented” student.
Chiefly these new public and scientific conversation about “intelligence” proposed that the “gifted” and “academically talented” were a natural category of person who were particularly well suited for the study of the sciences and mathematics. Moreover, this new discourse proposed that “giftedness” and “academic talent” were currently largely unrecognized as a distinct human category and that gifted and talented individuals were overlooked neglected as a result. Conant and many others held that this alleged invisibility of the gifted and their resultant neglect posed a great risk to the gifted themselves as individuals (this was often depicted as the potential for atrophy of talent, isolation, maladjustment or psychological damage), and a great risk to the nation, to our technological and cultural progress and to our national security. Yes, the idea of the “giftedness” is indeed an old one, but it was repurposed in ways very specific to this time period, and it was reimpressed at this historical moment with striking force and visibility upon the national imagination. As this category of person was reinvested with belief, it was also systematized and made actionable in an educational setting in a way and to a degree it never had been before. Given the cultural bias of these tests and the narrow, essentialist underlying conception of intelligence that supported their use, I argue that this dramatically reinvigorated interest in educating the “gifted” and “academically talented” amounted to a repositioning and “safeguarding” of whiteness in response to desegregation, mandated four years earlier by Brown v. Board.
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW:
This NSF and NAEd/Spencer foundation funded research in the history of science and the history of education analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-WWII US, from 1945-1960. Specifically, my research question asks how “intelligence” as an idea (or really a contested set of ideas) was constructed and redefined in this period in response to a shifting complex of social, cultural and scientific pressures. Further, I am interested in how these evolving constructions of intelligence functioned to regulate educational opportunity. Thus my analysis addresses: 1) the theorization of intelligence within psychology, 2) continuities between psychological theory, federal-level legislation, and school-place testing and ability grouping, and 3) the influence of broader Cold War/Civil Rights-era cultural contexts on all these developments.
My analysis presumes that whatever “intelligence” is, it is not simply an ahistorical or organically determined given, but rather a nexus of assumptions, practices and performances that shape-shift over time in response to cultural exigencies. This analytical position denaturalizes “intelligence” and allows us to see how beliefs about intelligence serve as powerful but under-examined regulators of status and opportunity in our culture. To this point, I argue that--in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities and in the context of an emerging Civil Rights movement--when group identifiers like race, class and to some extent gender came under mounting scrutiny as constructed and potentially discriminatory categories—“intelligence” rather assumed a kind of objectivity as a valid, measurable identifier of natural capability. Intelligence tests were the technological products of a new scientific psychology, and what they measured was presumed, more widely than ever before, to fairly mark an individual’s place in the social order. In this sense, and in the context of a post-World War II meritocracy, I argue that “intelligence” should be viewed as a culturally constructed category in its own right, on par with and functioning in dynamic relation to other highly salient categories of cultural analysis like race, class, or gender. Clearly, deeply entrenched beliefs about race, class, and gender still powerfully shaped constructions of what intelligence was, who was likely to be perceived as intelligent and in what ways, but now more than ever before, measured “intelligence”—a set of numbers one bore through one’s school years like both a prophecy and a kind of personal essence—asserted itself as another primary marker of worth.
This dissertation focuses on 1) a 1958 scientific study of US public high schools conducted by James Bryant Conant known as The American High School Today, 2) on networks of collaboration (ETS, NEA, Carnegie, and architects of emergent National Defense Education Act legislation) that worked to produce this study and 3) on the study’s widespread cultural influence and policy-shaping power—in tandem with the NDEA--in relation to “academic talent” and “intelligence.” My work here extends the analyses of others who have written on Conant and Cold War education, such as Wayne Urban, Andrew Hartman, Carl Kaestle, Nicholas Lemann and Ellen Lagemann. The historiography has yet to examine numerous striking similarities between The American High School Today and specific title mandates of the National Defense Education Act. Both The American High School Today and The National Defense Education Act emerged at more or less precisely the same time. Likewise both texts argued the national need to identify “academically talented” students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the public high schools in the sciences, mathematics and foreign languages. My dissertation has taken up these issues in concert to argue that we have underestimated the influence of The American High School Today and the role this study played, in concert with the NDEA, in shaping ideas about talent, intelligence and educability.
Papers by Jim W Porter
hearings and related NDEA-era texts. These documents demonstrate that NDEA reforms attempted to rehabilitate testing as fair and “race”-neutral, and were further structured around the logics of individual “ability.” While NDEA reforms asserted that such individualization of educational opportunity was a scientifically objective, “race”-neutral process, discourse analysis reveals that it was instead profoundly entangled with the logics of “race” and a history — indeed a present — from which it imagined it had cut itself loose.
literature in the late 1950s United States advocating on behalf of “gifted”
and “academically talented” students. This call to reform schools around individual
differences in “intelligence” was associated in its moment with the Sputnik
crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The
essay demonstrates, however, that the emergence of intensified interest in education
for the “academically talented” was actually closely coterminous with
Brown v. Board of Education and should also be understood in the context of early
efforts to desegregate the public schools. It holds that a closer look at the NDEA—
and a supporting body of literature working in tandem with it—reveals continuities
in psychometric conceptions of “intelligence” and testing from the interwar
period into the post–World War II era. This essay thus makes contributions to the
historiographies of the Cold War, civil rights, psychometrics, and education in
the 1950s.
Thus psychology was emerging as a laboratory science in the United States right when the cultural value of science and the scientific expert were dramatically on the rise. Psychologists felt they could offer powerful solutions to many of these social problems, but first they had to complete the reformation of psychology itself. Psychology had to be pried once and for all from the hands of philosophy and allowed to stand confidently alongside biology, chemistry and physics as a natural science in its own right. But making psychology amenable to laboratory study meant turning away from the more subjective, noetic qualities of mind, and instead focusing on the quantifiable, observable aspects of behavior.
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.
Between 1956 and 1959 James Bryant Conant conducted what he argued was an independent and scientific analysis of U.S. public high schools. Published in 1959 as The American High School Today, Conant’s study strongly recommended the rational reordering of American high schools around presumed individual differences in intelligence, and the placement of high I.Q students in more academically rigorous science, math and foreign language classes. My analysis of documents related to the production of this study reveal that “intelligence” (or “aptitude,” “I.Q.”) served as more than just a scientific measure of individual worth. It also functioned as a political trope that was used to resolve a Cold War crisis in public education in the late 1950s, bridging as it did so divides between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and ‘federal/national’ and ‘local/provincial.’ My analysis also discovers that The American High School Today should be viewed less as Conant’s “personal study” and rather the result of networks of collaboration that joined Conant, The Educational Testing Service, The National Education Association, The Carnegie Corporation and Eisenhower administration architects of the National Defense Education Act. Furthermore, I closely examine how this sub rosa network actors produced a veritable explosion of discourse across a range of media and literatures that worked to construct new educationally operationalizable categories of person: the “gifted” and “academically talented” student.
Chiefly these new public and scientific conversation about “intelligence” proposed that the “gifted” and “academically talented” were a natural category of person who were particularly well suited for the study of the sciences and mathematics. Moreover, this new discourse proposed that “giftedness” and “academic talent” were currently largely unrecognized as a distinct human category and that gifted and talented individuals were overlooked neglected as a result. Conant and many others held that this alleged invisibility of the gifted and their resultant neglect posed a great risk to the gifted themselves as individuals (this was often depicted as the potential for atrophy of talent, isolation, maladjustment or psychological damage), and a great risk to the nation, to our technological and cultural progress and to our national security. Yes, the idea of the “giftedness” is indeed an old one, but it was repurposed in ways very specific to this time period, and it was reimpressed at this historical moment with striking force and visibility upon the national imagination. As this category of person was reinvested with belief, it was also systematized and made actionable in an educational setting in a way and to a degree it never had been before. Given the cultural bias of these tests and the narrow, essentialist underlying conception of intelligence that supported their use, I argue that this dramatically reinvigorated interest in educating the “gifted” and “academically talented” amounted to a repositioning and “safeguarding” of whiteness in response to desegregation, mandated four years earlier by Brown v. Board.
BACKGROUND AND OVERVIEW:
This NSF and NAEd/Spencer foundation funded research in the history of science and the history of education analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-WWII US, from 1945-1960. Specifically, my research question asks how “intelligence” as an idea (or really a contested set of ideas) was constructed and redefined in this period in response to a shifting complex of social, cultural and scientific pressures. Further, I am interested in how these evolving constructions of intelligence functioned to regulate educational opportunity. Thus my analysis addresses: 1) the theorization of intelligence within psychology, 2) continuities between psychological theory, federal-level legislation, and school-place testing and ability grouping, and 3) the influence of broader Cold War/Civil Rights-era cultural contexts on all these developments.
My analysis presumes that whatever “intelligence” is, it is not simply an ahistorical or organically determined given, but rather a nexus of assumptions, practices and performances that shape-shift over time in response to cultural exigencies. This analytical position denaturalizes “intelligence” and allows us to see how beliefs about intelligence serve as powerful but under-examined regulators of status and opportunity in our culture. To this point, I argue that--in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities and in the context of an emerging Civil Rights movement--when group identifiers like race, class and to some extent gender came under mounting scrutiny as constructed and potentially discriminatory categories—“intelligence” rather assumed a kind of objectivity as a valid, measurable identifier of natural capability. Intelligence tests were the technological products of a new scientific psychology, and what they measured was presumed, more widely than ever before, to fairly mark an individual’s place in the social order. In this sense, and in the context of a post-World War II meritocracy, I argue that “intelligence” should be viewed as a culturally constructed category in its own right, on par with and functioning in dynamic relation to other highly salient categories of cultural analysis like race, class, or gender. Clearly, deeply entrenched beliefs about race, class, and gender still powerfully shaped constructions of what intelligence was, who was likely to be perceived as intelligent and in what ways, but now more than ever before, measured “intelligence”—a set of numbers one bore through one’s school years like both a prophecy and a kind of personal essence—asserted itself as another primary marker of worth.
This dissertation focuses on 1) a 1958 scientific study of US public high schools conducted by James Bryant Conant known as The American High School Today, 2) on networks of collaboration (ETS, NEA, Carnegie, and architects of emergent National Defense Education Act legislation) that worked to produce this study and 3) on the study’s widespread cultural influence and policy-shaping power—in tandem with the NDEA--in relation to “academic talent” and “intelligence.” My work here extends the analyses of others who have written on Conant and Cold War education, such as Wayne Urban, Andrew Hartman, Carl Kaestle, Nicholas Lemann and Ellen Lagemann. The historiography has yet to examine numerous striking similarities between The American High School Today and specific title mandates of the National Defense Education Act. Both The American High School Today and The National Defense Education Act emerged at more or less precisely the same time. Likewise both texts argued the national need to identify “academically talented” students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the public high schools in the sciences, mathematics and foreign languages. My dissertation has taken up these issues in concert to argue that we have underestimated the influence of The American High School Today and the role this study played, in concert with the NDEA, in shaping ideas about talent, intelligence and educability.