Robert Sternberg has studied intelligence for many years. In this interview by Scientific American, Sternberg decries the new era of standardized testing.
At last weekend’s annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston, Cornell University psychologist Robert Sternberg sounded an alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society. Sternberg, who has studied intelligence and intelligence testing for decades, is well known for his “triarchic theory of intelligence,” which identifies three kinds of smarts: the analytic type reflected in IQ scores; practical intelligence, which is more relevant for real-life problem solving; and creativity. Sternberg offered his views in a lecture associated with receiving a William James Fellow Award from the APS for his lifetime contributions to psychology. He explained his concerns to Scientific American.
The interview begins like this:
In your talk, you said that IQ tests and college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT are essentially selecting and rewarding “smart fools”—people who have a certain kind of intelligence but not the kind that can help our society make progress against our biggest challenges. What are these tests getting wrong?
Tests like the SAT, ACT, the GRE—what I call the alphabet tests—are reasonably good measures of academic kinds of knowledge, plus general intelligence and related skills. They are highly correlated with IQ tests and they predict a lot of things in life: academic performance to some extent, salary, level of job you will reach to a minor extent—but they are very limited. What I suggested in my talk today is that they may actually be hurting us. Our overemphasis on narrow academic skills—the kinds that get you high grades in school—can be a bad thing for several reasons. You end up with people who are good at taking tests and fiddling with phones and computers, and those are good skills but they are not tantamount to the skills we need to make the world a better place.
What evidence do you see of this harm?
IQ rose 30 points in the 20th century around the world, and in the U.S. that increase is continuing. That’s huge; that’s two standard deviations, which is like the difference between an average IQ of 100 and a gifted IQ of 130. We should be happy about this but the question I ask is: If you look at the problems we have in the world today—climate change, income disparities in this country that probably rival or exceed those of the gilded age, pollution, violence, a political situation that many of us never could have imaged—one wonders, what about all those IQ points? Why aren’t they helping?
What I argue is that intelligence that’s not modulated and moderated by creativity, common sense and wisdom is not such a positive thing to have. What it leads to is people who are very good at advancing themselves, often at other people’s expense. We may not just be selecting the wrong people, we may be developing an incomplete set of skills—and we need to look at things that will make the world a better place.
Do we know how to cultivate wisdom?
Yes we do. A whole bunch of my colleagues and I study wisdom. Wisdom is about using your abilities and knowledge not just for your own selfish ends and for people like you. It’s about using them to help achieve a common good by balancing your own interests with other people’s and with high-order interests through the infusion of positive ethical values.
You know, it’s easy to think of smart people but it’s really hard to think of wise people. I think a reason is that we don’t try to develop wisdom in our schools. And we don’t test for it, so there’s no incentive for schools to pay attention.
The rest of the interview is worth reading. These days, we have a lot of very smart people acting very selfishly and ignoring the common good. We could use a lot more common sense, creativity, wisdom, decency, and concern for others.
Smithsonian Magazine recently ran a piece, based on studies, to explain how fake news damages our ability to reason.
How Fake News Breaks Your Brain
Short attention spans and a deluge of rapid-fire articles on social media form a recipe for fake news epidemics
How Fake News Breaks Your Brain
Short attention spans and a deluge of rapid-fire articles on social media form a recipe for fake news epidemics
a new study published this week in the journal Nature Human Behaviour shows that the limitations of the human brain are also to blame. When people are overloaded with new information, they tend to rely on less-than-ideal coping mechanisms to distinguish good from bad, and end up privileging popularity over quality, the study suggests. It’s this lethal combination of data saturation and short, stretched attention spans that can enable fake news to spread so effectively.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-fake-news-breaks-your-brain-180963894/
Gates is a prime example of a “smart fool.” Obviously he is skilled with computers, but his ventures beyond that sphere have been flawed and lacking in basic understanding of issues. Computers have contributed to the rating and ranking mania which is one of the things computers do best. Computers are only as good as the person that programs them. If they are programmed to notice some data and disregard others, they can churn out erroneous results as in the case of VAM. Gates should stay in his lane, but his wallet and hubris are bigger than his talent.
Students that do not fit the norm often get misunderstood with systems that rate and rank. I saw this at work in my many years as an ESL teacher. My students were mostly very under educated, but they were generally not disabled. I always had to advocate for them when it came time to assign students to particular programs as it was often assumed they had “problems.” I believe like Howard Gardner that intelligence can take many forms. I learned more about my students from observing them than from standardized tests. I could see who was a good problem solver, who was resilient, who had leadership skills, who was a planner, who was a doer, who was a helper, who was creative, who was kind and who was withdrawn or angry, etc. This type of information was more useful to me than any bubble test.
There are several tests the measure the intelligence and academic level of students. We have to stop solely relying on standardized tests to teach us about each student. As you said, you learn each student and their strengths/weaknesses by observation and interaction. No state test can inform you about a student’s wisdom or creativity.
As teachers, we need students’ wisdom and creativity to collide with the state standards, so that students are exploring, discovering, synthesizing and applying this information to real world problems. We need to step away from the paper-pencil and allow students to look at social issues and how they affect them and their future.
This especially holds true for our ESL students. These students are not always fully able to communicate their knowledge in English as these tests require. Accommodations on state tests are not beneficial if the students cannot read the test or comprehend the text. I tested a student this year on a standardized test, and even though I read each question aloud, he did not understand. This is why we must provide various opportunities for our students to adequately demonstrate their intelligence, wisdom, and creativity in a safe place such as the classroom.
Hmm… I’ll venture a comment before I read the book. Maybe “wisdom” is not explicit enough. The question, I think, is how to develop young people with values that challenge the selfishness that dominates current politics and the drive to make a difference in the world.
The reason Sternberg decries standardized testing is because his theory lacks empirical support. Like Howard Gardner’s nonsense about multiple intelligences — and the unfortunate race among educators to embrace the completely unfounded notion of “learning styles,” which is pure bunk — this specious reasoning appeals on a gut level but turns out to be merely a convenient way of avoiding accountability. Aha! You can’t prove me wrong! General intelligence (g) correlates quite closely to all kinds of performance measures, and there’s no reason to suspect that those with lower levels of it somehow possess all this untapped creativity and common sense, much less “wisdom.” Was Obama wise while in office? Is George Will or Charles Krauthammer? Geez, talk about your rabbit holes this could lead to if we tried to systematically implement it. I would suggest that if Sternberg’s in search of smart fools, he first look in the mirror.
Tracy,
I disagree. Our society is awash in very successful people who did not have high test scores.
There are many definitions of success.
Think sports, think arts, even entrepreneurship.
We would be a very limited society indeed if only those with high scores succeeded.
The fact that you readily acknowledge that many people excel across many walks of life WITHOUT high test scores seems to undermine your argument, doesn’t it? While I have all kinds of issues with how it’s currently being implemented — mainly involving the online administration of these tests (and their disruption of class time) and the apparent redundancy of many of them — standardized testing has been with us for decades. And yet … “our society is awash in very successful people who did not have high test scores.” So why’s it such a bugaboo?
Tracy, would you bar people from the olympics unless they had high SAT scores?
Tracy- It is a bugaboo because these tests tend to favor the types of skills common to middle class Americans. Students that are different such as the poor, the foreign, the learning disabled, even to some extent the female may be misjudged. By the way, males score higher on the SAT, but female students do better in college. These tests are not without flaws. When these tests are attached to high stakes, they can deny some students opportunities, close schools or even fire teachers. It is more important for us to teach young people than to pigeonhole them. Some students are late bloomers, and early decisions about their so called potential can put them on a track of lower opportunities. As someone that worked with culturally different populations, I think we need to look a many more factors than just standardized tests.
The SAT measures family income with great accuracy.
Good gracious, Diane: Why in the world would I measure Olympics hopefuls with an SAT? I’d just as soon try to hammer a nail with a nail file. Actually, I’d use a standardized test everyone can agree on: A stop watch to time them as they run 100 meters.
And as far as SAT measuring family income: It failed miserably in my case, but I’m an anecdote. More generally, why in the world would you think that brighter people wouldn’t make more money, broadly speaking?
Tracy, every standardized test measures family income. Some not-rich kids are outliers. Some poor kids are outliers.
But with uncanny accuracy, standardized tests reflect family income.
Check out the chart the College Board publishes every year. Higher income=higher scores. Lowest income=lowest scores.
I think it’s telling that you refused to engage my question. Why would you think more cognitively gifted individuals would NOT become more wealthy? That’s a very common-sense question, if you ask me … to borrow from Sternberg’s conception of intelligence. You claim that the SAT measures family income with great accuracy. But you cannot deny that that’s an artifact of something ELSE that it’s measuring — the underlying cognitive differences in the relative wealth groups.
Well, Tracy, I think it’s telling that you have so far refused to provide empirical support for anything that you have said, yet you demand this of others.
Look in a mirror.
What if Tracy looked in a mirror and saw Trump?
Wouldn’t surprise me in the least, Lloyd.
Quote: “Why would you think more cognitively gifted individuals would NOT become more wealthy?”
There are a number of people (can’t guess how many) who believe that obtaining wealth is not a major goal in life. Having enough to live adequately and engage in the enjoyment of their pursuits of life become more important. Example: Some might become highly spiritual while other go into professions that help others but don’t reward with dollars.
Zorba and Lloyd: I’m not your research boy. Go ahead and pretend, like an ostrich, the facts can be ignored. And for the record: I did not vote for Trump. Did you vote for Hillary?
Carolmalaysia: You’re losing sight of the forest for the trees. Why would you expect a greater number of lower-cognitive individuals to be predisposed towards eschewing wealth accumulation?
“greater number of lower-cognitive individuals”
You’re putting too much emphasis on the greatness of wealth. Not wanting it as a life goal does not mean one is a ‘lower-cognitive individual’. It means they have the ability to see what is important in life. Wealth accumulation is not.
This emphasis on the accumulation of wealth is causing the destruction of society by those who think of “ME, MY and MYSELF” only. Trump, who has no values except accumulation of wealth, is a prime example.
Yes, Trump proves the lack of correlation between wealth and knowledge, wealth and character, wealth and spirit. Add in his mento Roy Cohn, and a few Mafia bosses, Russian oligarchs, and you have a pretty fair sample.
Tracy claims that SAT is “measuring …the underlying cognitive differences in the relative wealth groups” and indicates that that conclusion follows from the correlation between student SAT scores and the income of their families.
Perhaps Tracy would be so kind as to provide a link to studies which demonstrate this (ie, studies that rule out other possible explanations for the Correlation between SAT scores and family income)
This may be another case for which , as she previously said, she does not need a study to show the obvious.
But this train of logic is not obvious to some of us. I for one do not see how the mere correlation between SAT and family income proves that SAT “[measures] underlying cognitive differences in the relative wealth groups”
There are critical missing steps in the logic.
Trump and the Mafia prove that great riches do not always translate into character or intelligence
Poet, Tracy doesn’t “do” links. He expects us to do his research for him.
Which, of course, leads many of us to the conclusion that he is pulling most of his pronouncements out of his @ss.
Does this “Tracy” have an @ss? The Alt-Right media machine also uses robots (automatic programs) to send out its lies, conspiracy theories, and propaganda to spread doubt about fact-based reality.
Carol Malaysia
Are you familiar with the case of Russian mathematician Grigori Perleman?
He perfectly illustrates your point.
The term “cognitively gifted ” does not even come close to doing Perleman justice. He has solved some of the most difficult mathematical problems — ones that many of the world’s best mathematicians of the last 100 years tried and failed to solve, the Poincare Conjecture being the most prominent.
Perleman was awarded the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize( the Fields Medal,which includes money) as well as a millennium Prize of 1 million dollars for his proof of the Poincare Conjecture.
Yet, despite his poverty, he declined both awards, saying that “I am not interested in money or fame. I don’t wish to be on display like an animal at the zoo”
“Are you familiar with the case of Russian mathematician Grigori Perleman?”
No, I’m not familiar with him. Thank you for the wonderful illustration that money by itself isn’t a worthy goal in life.
Because the poet asked nicely:
For starters, “the existence of an overall positive correlation between intelligence and socioeconomic success is beyond question.” http://www.emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Intelligence-and-socioeconomic-success-A-meta-analytic-review-of-longitudinal-research.pdf
Now, I know that SAT scores do not EXACTLY measure cognitive ability, but that’s not what I was arguing. (If I wanted to join Mensa, I’d have to forward that group my GRE scores.)
A little further down in one of his posts (and on subsequent posts elsewhere), the poet gets a little less friendly and falsely implies that I’m a virtual idiot when it comes to studies. This is out of context, in that my claim was about a very narrow question — whether AP classes offer more rigorous curricula than honors- or regular-level classes. I stand by that claim, and would laugh out loud at anyone who wants to put forth a “study” claiming otherwise. I do not believe they exist anyway. The poet, however, does seem unduly convinced of the sanctity of all studies (that support his position, of course). For further reading, I’ll point him here: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/08/14/almost-no-education-research-replicated-new-article-shows
Tracy
No one has denied that there is a correlation between SAT and family income. Certainly not I.
But your conclusion that “SAT is measuring the underlying cognitive differences in the reative wealth groups” simpy does not follow from the given correlation.
There are many possible (alternative) explanations for why SAT scores correlate with family income which have nothing to do with underlying cognitive differences in the relative wealth groups. A whole menu of educational resources are available to families with money that are not available to families without and it is certainly no great intellectual leap to think that these might impact SAT scores and actually explain the differences in average scores of the different wealth groups.
But the only way one can possobly know if and how the different factors affect scores is to attempt to separate out the various factors — no easy task.
That’s why I asked for links to studies that rule out those possibilities.
Which you have again failed to do.
Amount and kind of available educational resources is related to how much money a family has.
What “empirical support” does standardized testing have?
I think looking to teach wisdom via our education system is a naive, and possibly foolish venture. Standardized testing is not the problem. Foolish, uninformed reactions to testing is the problem. We all know this, but it goes on anyway. Talk about a lack of wisdom.
Gary,
Somehow we became the greatest nation in the world before the mass imposition of standardized testing by GW Bush and NCLB. It is not necessary. It is always used badly because it is designed to used badly. Somehow our best private schools do very well without it.
Sternberg decries standardized testing because it doesn’t measure what’s important: it measures what is easy. In his final response he asserts that he remains hopeful that we might be able to “..teach people to think for themselves and how what they do affects others” which he views as a “no-lose proposition.” If this things CAN be taught and tested, what DO we have to lose by moving in that direction?
Some things are of great value even if they can’t be tested.
Those things we treasure most cannot be measured: how much do I love you?
Answer: as deep as the ocean, as high as the sky.
Or, you could place Sternberg’s piece– an argument for more measures to round things out– within the current context, which over-uses & misuses stdzd test scores. Traditionally, stdzd test scores were used as one of several measures to compare schools w/n a state & across the nation– not as the single measure of a school, and never as a measure of teacher performance. For the most part, they are still used by colleges as only one of several indicators of college achievement potential. Research shows that they are not intended nor capable of singly accounting for the value of a school or student’s achievement, but merely as a rough statistical indicator. Yet today their proliferation and the stakes attached to them have caused an over-emphasis on fact regurgitation and questionable breakdown of holistic abilities into computer-testable skill-bites.
Sorry, Tracy, you’re wrong about ‘learning styles’.
I long ago couldn’t understand why I disliked algebra but loved geometry (do they even teach it, now?). The reason was that I thought in pictures, not letters. I could see that the end of the proposal was correct, given the initial situation and the only thing I had to do was to pick a bunch of theorems in between that got me to that end. It allowed for a diversity of paths.
Many people do not think in a spatial manner. This doesn’t mean that they’re ‘stupid’, it simply means that they (through either ‘nature’ or ‘nurture’) do not process information in the same way as I do. Thus, as a teacher, I had to search for that path which would allow the particular student to comprehend and organize. It was fascinating to watch that process, almost unique to a particular student, work its magic. When I could help, it gave me a pleasure that money could never replace.
As you might have surmised, I was a ‘science and math’ teacher. The two are almost diametrically opposed. Science is inductive, Math is pure deduction. I always found that the most inventive and creative work was done by my ‘physics for artists’ course (actually called ‘Physics C’, a pejorative that I refused to use). I loved those classes, and eventually over half of my ‘teaching load’ was directed their way.
You may also be surprised to know that I have science degrees in astronomy and physics, and that I worked in biochemistry for a few years (teaching a bit of physical biochemistry to medical students) before deciding to ‘bolt’ and get the education credits (graduate level) necessary to become ‘certified’ to teach at the Secondary level. I thought college and graduate students were too set in their ways, too ‘adult’ to really be open to a different vision.
So, I chose the age group I thought I could influence the most. As it turned out, my students probably taught me more than I taught them, particularly those ‘Physics C’ students, as well as a few in ‘remedial Math’ (I never liked teaching Math because I, like the ancient Greeks, thought of math as an imperfect tool, not even close to truth unless it conformed to the observable. But, my students clearly didn’t like it either, since they had failed to pass at other levels, so we had something in common!). The ‘remedial math’ kids stick in my mind because we did so well, despite (or perhaps because of) my understanding that I didn’t think Math was all that perfect, but rather like a chess game.
However, in particular, I learned from those “Physics C” students how they thought, how they viewed the world and, believe me, I learned a lot about ‘learning styles’. Only after understanding their thinking could I try to speak to them in their own personal language. Long ago people understood that the “arts and sciences” had much in common. We have forgotten that. Often, now, engineering (deductive) and science (inductive) are conflated. This is simply not the case.
I do not think that forcing a ‘universal language’, or rewarding a single ‘learning style’, is at all advantageous to society. The unique ways of looking at the world as exemplified by my students make the world richer. It is the natural order.
“These days, we have a lot of very smart people acting very selfishly and ignoring the common good.”
I keep thinking about the private elite schools that produce our leaders. How many care about the rest of society? There doesn’t seem to be very many or things would look better. How many in Congress attended elite schools and are now completely satisfied to destroy the health care for the poor so that the wealthy can get more money in tax breaks?
Whatever happened to creativity and compassion?
It would be interesting to examine the backgrounds and education of the GOP members in Congress and see how they were shaped. Education, religion.
Why limit this exercise to Republicans? Politicians from BOTH sides of the aisle are complicit in our current education debacle, for example. I’m afraid that we would find that ALL politicians today have more in common than they have differences.
The fact that IQ (as gauged by tests ) rose 30 points during the twentieth century indicates something critical about the whole IQ issue.
I”ll let those who love the tests figure out what that something is.
I’ll give them a little hint: it isn’t that the “innate” intelligence of Americans and others increased.
What is IQ?
IQ is what IQ tests measure.
Yes, you are correct. The “innate” intelligence of Americans has not increased.
What is measured by these tests may have increased, but that says nothing about actual intelligence.
The last election implies that IQ is not intelligence.
An IQ test consists of a number of tasks measuring various measures of intelligence including short-term memory, analytical thinking, mathematical ability and spatial recognition. Like all IQ tests, it does not attempt to measure the amount of information you have learned but rather your capacity to learn.
In addition, the so-called IQ test does not measure social intelligent or motivation. Social intelligence has been deemed by studies to be more important than IQ as defined above in the 1st paragraph because without that, discipline, and motivation, it doesn’t matter what your capacity to learn is. What happens when an individual doesn’t use that capacity? Social intelligence, discipline, and motivation with beat IQ repeatedly.
Social intelligence is the capability to effectively navigate and negotiate complex social relationships and environments. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey believes that it is social intelligence, rather than quantitative intelligence, that defines humans. I agree.
Trump clearly lacks social intelligence and IQ because his analytical thinking doesn’t exist. He is a psychopath and a malignant narcissist and this cancels out analytical thinking. It also cancels out social intelligence.
“The last election implies that IQ is not intelligence.”
The same could be said for the preceding half-dozen or so elections as well. I mean, who in the hell could believe ANYONE would vote for Nancy Pelosi?
This gets to what’s so very wrong about Sternberg’s perspective. For every EXTREMELY intelligent analyst and critic of, say, Obama, I can identify an EXTREMELY intelligent analyst to criticize Bush or Reagan. Where does that get us?
IQ sounds more like Idiocy Quotient. It best represents the characteristics of #45(a.k.a. Insane Clown) and his Clown Clones in the White House.
If we opened up Trump’s head, we would not find a brain. We would find a cesspool that needs to be emptied.
Would climb on board a plane being piloted by someone with an IQ of 80? Or go under the knife of a surgeon with an IQ of 79? If you claim you would, I’ll have someone who believes in such things say a prayer for you. Really, do you think it’s just a coincidence that, say, the average IQ of engineers is markedly higher than elementary teachers?
Tracy85, would you want our country to be run by a racist, anti-Semitic, mysoginistic, anti-Muslim, thin-skinned, narcissistic, lying bully who cheats his contractors and workmen out of their pay, blusters and threatens people, goes off half-cocked if he is criticized at all, and uses the office of the Presidency to enrich his family?
But that’s what we are stuck with.
Having ethics is at least as important as having a higher IQ.
Funny someone is defending the legitimacy of standardized test to claim that high IQ leads to high intelligence, and then flip-flops it when s/he is challenged. Never-mind the absurdity of equalizing the literacy of teens who have a lot of room for growing maturity and tolerance with quality of a full grown-up adult.
This discussion has been missing Duane, who would have pointed out that all these tests measure nothing. I agree with our new poet laureate. The fact of increase on the IQ test seems on the face of it to suggest that the g referred to by Tracey in an above post is of questionable worth. I am not so,sure, as Sternberg suggests, that IQ is any ref election of analytical intelligence. Nonwithstanding his experience in this field, and my own poor reflection, I would caution all of us to look closely at any measure of man. Stephen Jay Gould wrote beautifully years ago about the pitfalls of this occupation.
Great article! Thanks for sharing. My take:
Dr. Sternberg didn’t say so explicitly, but the kind of tribalism that sets todays ethical standards comes from “cultures” that celebrate “outlaws” and anti-establishment behavior. Voters knew that Donald Trump was a misogynist who cheated on his wife, a ruthless businessman who viewed cheating on his taxes as a shrewd business move, and an anti-intellectual who loved “the uneducated” and despised the “intellectual elites”. The tribal cultures that hold Mr. Trump in high esteem, the tribal evangelical culture, and the tribal gun culture ultimately elected a man who opposed the rule of law and the establishment. And Dr. Sternberg sees this tribalism as a by-product of our test culture that places a premium on teaching individual test-taking skills at the expense of “teaching good values and good ethics and good citizenship”.
I concur with Dr. Sternberg. What gets tested gets taught, and we have ignored testing for the complicated and relatively difficult to measure inter-personal and intra-personal skills that lead to “good values and good ethics and good citizenship”. Instead our schools have placed a premium on the relatively inexpensive and easy to measure analytic skills associated with reading and arithmetic. We haven’t taught the important skills and we are witnessing the by-product when those who do not possess the skills needed to thrive in our new economy band together in tribes with like-minded world views.
In a world that increasingly operates in echo chambers and a world where “choice” may result in children focusing even more on test-taking skills and attending schools with fellow tribal members, it may be difficult to encourage the kind of curriculum Dr. Sternberg espouses… a curriculum that values creative, independent thinking that “defies the crowd and defies the Zeitgeist”. We face an uphill battle in getting back to common ground where all of our citizens agree on what constitutes “good values and good ethics and good citizenship”… and “choice” will ultimately make that uphill battle even steeper!
Beautifully stated.
When you say “what get tested gets taught…” Do you not indict all testing? Does that not suggest that all of our testing, teacher testing, standardized testing, all of it, gets in the way of producing people who really learn?
I believe that it does. It explains why some of the people you refer to as tribal homeschool their kids. It explains why some people go somewhere almost every night to a restaurant that sponsors a trivia contest. It suggests that Sternberg has a point. Your pointing out how this leads to a tribalism of sort is very enlightening.
This sounds good except….
This mis-use of standardized testing and teaching to the test is a more recent phenomenon. It wasn’t the youngest voters who elected Trump.
Trump’s core support was among voters who are older and whose education was before standardized testing became the measure of all.
I agree with critics of the test-taking culture but is Sternberg talking about that culture from 40 years ago or today?
Thank you for providing me some food for thought… and while I can’t speak for Dr. Sternberg, I can share my take on the roots of the “test-taking culture”… I’m 70 years old… and in the OK and PA public schools I attended in the 50s and 60s standardized tests were one of the bases (if not the PRIMARY basis) for assigning students to homogeneously groupings… “Back in the day” they were mostly used for sorting STUDENTS (as opposed to SCHOOLS)… and many of my classmates in JHS who were relegated to the “low sections” weren’t around when I graduated… Moreover, PSATs and SATs were routinely used to determine which non-legacy students got to attend “elite” colleges… I also worked as an administrator in public education from 1975 through 2011 where I witnessed a movement to use tests to identify the “gifted and talented” students, a notion I could not support because it ultimately identified a large segment as “UN-gifted and UN-talented”
My thought: those kids shunted aside in the 1960s and 70s and the so-called “UN-gifted and UN-talented” are the “core support” for Mr. Trump… Mr. Trump’s opposition to “liberal elites” resonates with them because it was the “elites” who designed and administered the tests that made them feel like second class citizens throughout their education.
Wgersen,
I graduated from public high school in Houston in 1956. We never took standardized tests except for silly ones that claimed to predict our future occupation. No stakes attached.
Then there was Sputnik… and we had to outdo the USSR, especially in math and science
I was out of high school a few months before Sputnik. No pressure for math and science. Fine by me. I loved lit and history.
Large segment labelled as “Un- gifted and un-talented”
You got that right.
It’s kind of funny. When I was teaching, the kids in my classes who had been identified as “gifted” often (not always but often) had big heads and tended to be hardest to deal with. If you didnt call on them whenever they raised their hand to offer an answer, they sulked.
I suspect that some of these grew up to be the David Colemans of the world, who believe they are not only gifted but actually a “gift” to humanity — largely because they have been told as much by their parents and everyone else since they were 4 years old.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
More college graduates voted for Hillary than for Trump.
Trump’s support came from white people without college degrees (although many of them are still doing very well financially).
Did they vote for Trump because they resented being called less smart in high school than those “elites” as shown by their performance on standardized tests?
Or did their performance on standardized tests 30 or 40 years ago reflect their inability to think critically about issues in a way that would allow them to understand that there is something terribly wrong with Trump? Perhaps people that see no value in higher education or “book learning” would be drawn to Trump.
Frankly, I think trying to make a sweeping statement about standardized tests and the tribalist culture that Trump and his supporters believe in doesn’t fit the facts.