No Child Left Behind

I have many friends who are or were teachers, administrators or school board members and they generally complain about No Child Left Behind. The NCLB Act of 2001 is a federal law that aims to improve the performance of schools by increasing the standards of accountability. Who could argue with the need to increase educational performance in light of the ongoing dismal performance of US students on international tests?

Yet, many educators object to the specific requirements and implementation of the program. NCLB requires States to create an accountability system of assessments, graduation rates, and other indicators. Schools have to make adequate yearly progress by raising the achievement levels of subgroups of students such as African Americans, Latinos, low-income students and special education students to a state-determined level of proficiency.

NCLB requires that by the end of the 2005-2006 school year all teachers will be “highly qualified” as defined in the law. All students must be “proficient” by the end of the 2013-2014 school year.

Schools identified as needing improvement are required to provide students with the opportunity to take advantage of public school choice. Congress has appropriated a substantial increase in Title I funding to enable school districts to implement the parental choice requirements. (from Wikipedia)

I’m still searching for an objectionable provision of the law. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

In a recent series of articles in the Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 17, 18, 2007), The Bell Curve author Charles Murray described how “education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range of problems in American life,” with NCLB as a primary mechanism. Murray objects to the dirty little secret that “education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated.” Intelligence is the most significant factor yet the one that nobody mentions.

Murray begins with a truism that is nonetheless commonly denied: “Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.” The first part is a law of nature: Like the distribution of heights, weights, and athletic ability, intelligence is distributed from low to high in a bell-shaped curve with 50% below and 50% above the mean. But unlike heights and weights, there is very little one can do about basic intelligence. As Murray put it, “We do not live in Lake Wobegon.”

Furthermore, academic accomplishment is dependent on intelligence, as well as motivation, and intelligence sets the limits. Murray uses the example of a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, but getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Many of us have had similar experiences with our kids.

What about the boy sitting behind her getting a D-? His IQ is 90, at the 25th percentile? Better instruction and increased effort are not going to enable the boy to “follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity.” If the course is adequately rigorous and the grading is honest, it may not be possible to give him more than an E for effort.

Of course, we hope the boy becomes functionally literate, as that will have an effect on the jobs he can hold. “But still he will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. He is just not smart enough to do more than that.” Do we help the boy by holding up unrealistic standards? Do we really believe that the great middle class of intelligence, the 50% from 90 to 110 IQ, should take college prep courses and attend traditional colleges?

Murray points out that performance of public schools may well be reflecting the innate ability of the students. For example, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress 2005 tests, 36% of all fourth-graders were below the “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95. If the proficient level (“basic achievement”) requires the innate ability of a 96 IQ, the results are not surprising.

So, what does proficiency in NCLB mean, and what does it require? Remarkably, it appears that no one has asked what IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement scores?

Why has such an important factor been ignored in policy discussions? High intelligence is a gift, like good looks or athletic ability, and those with high IQ are not superior human beings, just lucky ones. By and large God’s gifts are distributed. Take the short, chubby, older gentleman with a 45 golf handicap: wouldn’t it be nice if he had an IQ slightly above the mean? Be fair. But political correctness and the law have made any discussion of the most important factor in educational achievement all but impossible.

The US Civil Rights Act, as interpreted in the 1971 United States Supreme Court decision Griggs v. Duke Power Co., prevent American employers from using cognitive ability tests as a controlling factor in selecting employees whenever (1) the use of the test would have a disparate impact on hiring by race and (2) where the test is not shown to be directly relevant to the job or class of jobs at issue. Since IQ tests fail the first requirement they are disallowed. Schools have largely adopted the same restriction, except in special cases. And academic rigor, or even classroom discipline, are sometimes rewarded with law suits brought by unhappy parents.

Murray is making the case for a more realistic, more practical approach to education policy. The Bell Curve set out to prove that American society has become increasingly meritocratic, wherein incomes and other positive social outcomes are distributed more and more according to intelligence and less and less according to social status. That is a trend to be applauded.

The Bell Curve evidence came largely from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, a federal project that tested over 10,000 Americans in 1980, with follow-up interviews regularly thereafter. Each participant completed an intelligence test and was then evaluated for subsequent social outcomes (high-school graduation, success in college, level of income, likelihood of being in jail, likelihood of getting divorced or being on welfare, and so forth). As a rule, a person's intelligence turned out to predict such trends rather well, and when intelligence was statistically controlled, many differences among ethnic groups vanished.

Thus, when considering education policy, whether it be No Child Left Behind, the expansion of colleges or the promotion of charter schools and vocational schools, it would be well to include all pertinent factors, most especially the intellectual capabilities of the customers.

Consider the information in the following table that pertains to education policy and expectations.


Grade .....IQ......% Pop....Pop M.....Ed. Potential........Job Potential
A........ >125........5.........15........Prof. School.......Professions, Science
B........ 110-125....20........60..........College.............Sales, Engineering
C..........90-110.....50.......150........Jr. College...........Clerical, Crafts
D..........75-90......20.......60........High School...........Trades, Service
E.......... <90........5........15.........Vocational.........simple & supervised

The first column is a model grade scale reflecting increasing information processing demands (from E to A) for appropriately rigorous school courses. The student populations expected to possess the requisite levels of ability are in the second and third columns. Thus the middle group of student abilities (90–110 IQ) should be expected to achieve a middle grade of C in legitimate courses aimed at the general population. The top 5% of the population is expected to excel and earn “A” grades while the bottom 5% should not pass such courses. Note that in America there are millions of people in each category. Is it reasonable to expect the bottom 25% of the students to perform adequately in such courses? Is it fair?

The education potential of each group is listed in the fifth column. Generally speaking, an IQ of 110 or more (25% of the population) is needed to be successful in a traditional four year college. This is a threshold, but particular disciplines (eg. engineering and most of the hard natural sciences) require much higher levels of intelligence. Yet more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college. This is a serious mismatch of expectations and reality, not to mention marketplace demand.

All the above says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of intellectual ability. As Murray points out, there has been “an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, mason --- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India.”

Many agree that the K-12 education system is failing the lower half of the intelligence distribution, preferentially inhabited by low income children and minorities (Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans). The fallacy was in ever expecting that group of kids to be able to compete or even be comfortable in a traditional college prep school setting. Far better would be to segregate the top 25% of students in classrooms and courses away from the much larger group that do not have the smarts to compete in traditional four year colleges and in high skilled occupations. For their sake, the lower 75% would be better served taking courses suited to their abilities and then moving into career programs at trade schools or community colleges.

Then when the college educated car salesman needs to paint his house, he may be able to find his former classmate who, with a crew of minimum wage workers, charges $10,000 for a weeks work. And next week the painting contractor may visit his salesman friend at the Porsche dealership.

Let us close with Murray by looking at the upper end of the IQ distribution. Do they need any help? I have several friends with kids in high school sporting averages of 4.4 or higher. Since all A’s equates to 4.0, the extra 0.4 comes from getting A’s on advanced placement courses. One friend’s daughter had a full semester of college courses finished before she graduated high school. It sounds good, but what it means is that the courses are too easy for her, even the AP courses.

Bright high school students are not being challenged, and many will find college to be a cold deluge. A recent report by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce recommends creating state board exams that students could pass at age 16 to move either on to community college or to a university-level high school curriculum. The system as constructed is failing the majority of students across the spectrum of intelligence.

If “intellectually gifted” is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force--a lot of people.

People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books we read and the television programs we watch. They invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.

The top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital, our culture healthy, our institutions secure and our nation safe. “Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.”

But we live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist. Our gifts bring along obligations to be worthy of them and the most important and most difficult to achieve is wisdom. The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. Most of all it requires recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall.

The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks including the details of grammar and syntax and of logical fallacies. The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius, and an advanced knowledge of history. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.

The gifted should be taught to be judgmental since they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks. In short, Murray is calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare elites to do their duty. I can think of only a few colleges (Chicago, Hillsdale, Dallas, Liberty, Biola, Thomas Aquinas) that serve such a purpose.

Murray’s goal here was not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. In order to make the massive changes that our educational system requires, honest and brave people will need to slay the basilisk and do the right thing.

Please do not think that my emphasis on intelligence and school performance means that I am an apologist for the teaching profession. I believe that the large majority of students underachieve in school and there is plenty of blame to go around. A system based on teacher tenure and lacking pay for performance is seriously flawed. However, the students and their parents must shoulder the major portion of the burden and the blame.

The right to a free education comes with responsibilities: To behave in class, to respect your teacher and classmates, pay attention in class, to do your homework and study. These are listed in order of importance and should be non-negotiable, but in many schools the poor teacher cannot even rely on the first priority. School boards, principals, teachers, mayors, PTAs and parents must stand up and demand discipline even if it means fighting parent-initiated lawsuits, the government and the ACLU.

Finally, the schools need to start again to teach what is important and worry less about student’s self esteem. In 1989 the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued a report that influenced a generation of teachers to “let children explore their own solutions to problems, write and draw pictures about math, and use tools like the calculator at the same time they learn algorithms.” Consequently, only 50% of 10th graders pass the math part of state assessment tests and our students get slaughtered in international competitions. Fuzzy math, following the last fad called “new math,” has crippled students by de-emphasizing basic drills and memorization in favor of allowing children to find their own ways to solve problems. A back-to-basics movement in math and reading (phonics) is imperative.