Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality

Higher Education in America

Gary A. Berg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317103141
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing upon quantitative data gathered from the U.S. Census and U.S. Department of Education, as well as interviews with students from a variety of socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, Low-Income Students and the Perpetuation of Inequality examines the question of who really benefits from public higher education. It engages with questions of social capital, opportunity, funding and access to education, presenting a rich discussion of social mobility, the value of college education and the impact of education upon the redistribution of income. A thorough exploration of the real impact of college on American society, this volume will appeal to social scientists with interests in education, social capital, social stratification, class and social mobility.

Chapter 1
Prepared for Failure

This chapter argues that the American educational system has a long history of perpetuating inequality in explicit and subtle ways through the academic preparation of low-income students and standardized testing. According to the proponents of eugenics, in an argument that has been made for two centuries, people are poor simply because they are intellectually less gifted and deserving. Surprisingly, there is a long history of support for the eugenics movement and the belief in racial genetic superiority in America which continues today in books like The Bell Curve and, more subtly perhaps, in our enacted public policies that affect the disadvantaged. What few recognize is that the SAT test was originally designed by someone who believed, at least in the early part of his life, in the inferiority of low-income and racial minority groups. In A Study of American Intelligence the Princeton psychologist Carl Brigham claimed the inferiority of minority groups through the use of a test given to military personnel (Brigham, 1923). On the practical administrative level, the SAT as used first by the Ivy League colleges was motivated by a desire to restrict undesirable low-income students. This history of intelligence testing in America is the starting point for understanding how the educational system, at times intentionally, has perpetuated low rates of college attendance for children from poor families.

Additionally, the reliance on class-based forms of language proficiency and the limited availability of increasingly important Advanced Placement courses is also reviewed in this chapter. The more subtle forms of insufficient psychological and social preparation, a legacy of disadvantaged families, add an even more intricate obstacle for students. Finally, the chapter ends with the perspective of two faculty members experienced in teaching low-income students which reveal the forms insufficient preparation take, including the important general lack of worldliness. Taken together I present a case for understanding the philosophical and cultural attitudes behind educational policies impacting children from low-income families, and the specific mechanisms that work to perpetuate inequality.

The Intelligence of Low-Income Students is Questioned

Eugenics

There is a long history of looking at the genetic basis for intelligence and the consistent attempt to link disappointing performance of the poor in school to low intelligence. The notion of biological determinism holds that social and economic differences between groups are inherited, and position in society is a reflection of biology (Gould, 1981). Classical accounts of social mobility point out the natural tendency in human behavior to create leaders and followers: “Any organized social group whatever, once it is organized, is inevitably stratified to some degree” (Sorokin, 1959, p. 15). This analysis also leads to the notion that societies often become more, rather than less, economically unequal as they advance. Overall, economists looking at social mobility throughout the history of civilizations typically use terms such as “trend-less” and “fluctuating” to depict a lack of clear patterns. An early twentieth century sociologist saw social institutions as functioning to place individuals within the social hierarchy: “These institutions, such as the family, army, church, school, political, professional and occupational organizations are not only a channel of social circulation but are at the same time, the ‘sieves’ which test and sift, select and distribute the individuals within different social strata or positions” (Sorokin, 1959, p. 183).

In this context, schools are social elevators going to different floors based on the political structure. Their primary function in modern society is as a testing, selecting, and distributing agency. Scholars have typically found genetics and environment as the two main determiners of class position in society, with a heated argument over which is more important. Statistically, the members of the upper classes score higher on intelligence tests, are physically taller and heavier, healthier, and live longer. On the environment side, classes seem to perpetuate their positions by maintaining their physical separateness and creating consistently positive or negative surroundings. Social mobility then occurs through luck or accident, changes in the environment, or differences of children from their genetic parents.

Francis Galton, a leader in the eugenics movement and half-cousin of Charles Darwin, in his seminal book, Hereditary Genius, looked at generations of various professions in nineteenth century England from judges, politicians, poets, painters, religious persons, Cambridge students, oarsmen, and wrestlers. His conclusion was that intelligence and talent are indisputably passed along genetically: “I feel convinced that no man can achieve a very high reputation without being gifted with very high abilities” (Galton, 1998, p. 49). E.G. Conklin, another leader in the development of thinking about human intelligence, in The Direction of Human Evolution argues that the dream of perfect equality is impossible because of natural differences: “This ideal of absolute equality has never been, and can never be, fully realized in human society—physically, intellectually, and morally—and there is no possible way in which such natural inequalities can be wholly eradicated” (Conklin, 1921, p. 100-101). Conklin points out that the essence of our natural society developed through a process of evolution leading to difference and inequality. Through his analysis, he sees that low intelligence is passed generally from parent to child, and that formal education can do little to increase basic genetic intelligence. Given this evolutionary fact about intelligence, Conklin argues that a democratic society needs to instead look at behavior of individuals in seeking out merit, but that finally differences in intelligence will tend to win out in society.

A more recent proponent of the link between genetics and intelligence, Arthur Jensen became a controversial leading figure in the intelligence debate from his academic home at the University of California, Berkeley. In his 1972 book, Genetics and Education, Jensen claimed that he found the bias against a genetic link or pattern to intelligence was so strong in America because of a social philosophy insistent upon notions of intellectual equality (Jensen, 1972). Jensen argued that the scientific facts showed a natural inequality of intelligence. Studies which looked at children from the same family raised in different households established that intelligence was constant regardless of their environment. However, unlike IQ, scholastic achievement does vary, according to Jensen: “The fact that scholastic achievement is considerably less heritable than intelligence also means that many other traits, habits, attitudes, and values enter into a child’s performance in school besides just his intelligence, and these non-cognitive factors are largely environmentally determined, mainly through influences within the child’s family” (Jensen, 1972, p. 135). In this way intelligence, but not academic performance, is inherited. This distinction made by Jensen is extremely important in looking at the use of standardized tests for university admissions purposes. For instance, we shall see in the discussion of standardized tests later in this chapter how the University of California made this same distinction in pointing out that the SAT I, like IQ tests, failed to predict subsequent academic performance in college. Nevertheless, Jensen claims that there is a resulting direct relationship between intelligence and social class: “It is well known that children’s IQs, by school age, are correlated with the socioeconomic status of their parents. This is a world-wide phenomenon and has an extensive research literature going back 70 years” (Jensen, 1972, p. 153). Additionally, Jensen found that intelligence measurements also correlated with occupational status: “In a society that values and rewards individual talent and merit, genetic factors inevitably take on considerable importance” (Jensen, 1972, p. 156). Most disturbing, Jensen finally argued that there are clear racial differences in mental ability.

One of the most controversial eugenics proponents in the United States was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley. Shockley warned of “dysgenics” or the negative evolution of the human race through the reproduction of the “genetically disadvantaged” (Shockley, 1992). Although a politically self-described liberal on social policies, he argued for a hard scientific look at the negative effects of the excessive propagation of the less intelligent. But probably the most notorious book in recent memory on the racial basis of intelligence is Herrnstein and Murray’s book The Bell Curve (Herrnstein and Murray, 1996). The authors claim intelligence is at a minimum 60 percent inherited and only 40 percent or less a result of the environment. They see differences in genes as the most important factor in predicting success in school and in life, resulting in class position. As a consequence, they doubt the “messiah” role for education, specifically that extra education for low IQ students helps significantly. According to these scholars, over time as society becomes increasingly meritocratic, those with higher IQ rates will reside in the upper-classes: “The twenty-first [century] will open on a world in which cognitive ability is the decisive dividing force” (Herrnstein and Murray, 1996, p. 25).

In addition to the eugenics movement’s focus on intelligence, some have concentrated on the moral and ethical lapses of the poor. An example of the rhetoric of this position comes from Theodore Dalrymple, a well-known British psychiatrist, who treats the poor in slum hospitals and prisons in England, and argues that poverty is caused by a dysfunctional set of values which are reinforced by society (Dalrymple, 2001). He claims that low-income families fail to take responsibility for their actions. For instance, “the knife went in” is how one murderer describes his violent act. They see life, he claims, as a series of disconnected events with no thread or pattern of meaning. So in this way, Dalrymple claims that not only are the poor less intelligent, but they are also immoral.

Perhaps the best and most cohesive argument made in rebuttal to The Bell Curve was done by a group of faculty members in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley and published in book form in 1996 as Cracking The Bell Curve Myth (Fischer, Hout, Jankowski, Lucas, Swidler and Voss, 1996). The authors argue that “g,” or general intelligence, is simply a reflection of disadvantage: “Around the world, members of disadvantaged groups usually score lower than members of advantaged groups, whatever their racial identities” (Fischer et al., 1996, p. 19). The authors point to the data showing how extremely unequal American society has become: “Groups score unequally on tests because they are unequal in society” (Fischer et al. 1996, p. 172). The poor tend to concentrate into isolated areas and schools which emphasizes their disadvantage. Why do Asians do so well? The authors submit that there is an important difference in voluntary versus involuntary immigration. Asians who have immigrated most recently to America come from middle-class backgrounds. Additionally, Asian culture emphasizes hard work. Finally, the Berkeley sociologists claim in their book, “A racial or ethnic group’s position in society determines its measured intelligence rather than vice versa” (Fischer et al., 1996, p. 173).

In sum, eugenics is not an isolated set of ideas linked to Nazi Germany, but a set of assumptions that leads to an unwillingness to take aggressive corrective action to help the poor, or worst, to further institutionally disadvantage them. This public attitude took extreme forms in the 1927 Supreme Court ruling allowing compulsory sterilization for the unfit. At elite colleges, Yale and other Ivy League schools took part in a rather bizarre eugenic scheme to take nude photographs of students in an attempt to try and document physical superiority (Oren, 1985). This practice continued into the 1960s and was an effort by these elite institutions to try to demonstrate supremacy of its students through scientific measurement. While these are extreme examples of the eugenic disposition in higher education, many of the changes in public policy at the end of the twentieth century come from a belief that there are innate intellectual differences that follow particular patterns, and that therefore improvements in favor of students from poor backgrounds will have limited impact at best.

Standardized Testing

In America, the eugenics movement can be traced to various key thinkers including Carl Brigham, who was a professor of psychology at Princeton University. In 1923 he published his important book based on Army IQ tests, A Study of American Intelligence (Brigham, 1923). Brigham had played a role in administering the army tests that came out of World War I, and his book drew on that experience. He found through his study of military personnel data to support a race hypothesis of superiority of “Nordic type” versus the “Alpine type.” Influenced by eugenics theory, Brigham outlined in clear terms the distinctions among the races:

The Nordic is constitutionally introvert, the Mediterranean constitutionally extrovert; the instinct of self-assertion is strong in the Nordic; the Alpine is introvert but not so strongly introvert as the Nordic; The Alpine has a high degree of sociability, is perhaps relatively weak in curiosity, and strong in the instinct of submission. (Brigham, 1923, p. 186)

His book argued the test scores were clear indicators of innate intelligence, and that the results proved the superior intelligence of what he called the Nordic Race. Brigham claimed that beliefs that Jews were intelligent were incorrect and that Negroes are intellectually inferior as well. Not only did Brigham make generalizations by race, but also by class: “Children from the professional, semi-professional and higher business classes have, on the whole, an hereditary endowment superior to that of children form the semi-skilled and unskilled laboring classes” (Brigham, 1923, p. 188). It is important to note here that eugenicists from the start made claims that were class based, in some cases more than race based. Most importantly, Brigham commented that recent history in America showed a dangerous pattern of “inferior peoples” immigrating to the United States: “According to all evidence available, then, American intelligence is declining, and will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial admixture becomes more and more extensive” (Brigham, 1923, p. 210). Later in life Brigham was said to have renounced his earlier views. Nevertheless, A Study of American Intelligence was used by the eugenicist Harry Laughlin in the 1924 congressional debates on immigration, and played a key role in the creation of restrictive immigration legislation which tragically impacted the flow of Jewish refugees to the United States fleeing the Holocaust. Brigham’s perhaps most significant legacy is the creation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Few realize that the SAT, the predominant measure used in college admissions, was designed by someone who believed, at least in the early part of his life, in the racial inferiority of ethnic minority and low-income groups.

The use and history of standardized testing in the United States is fascinating sociology and falls within the nature-versus-nurture debate because the initial intent of tests like the SAT was to appear to remove privilege from the evaluation of ability to perform well in college. Such standardized tests became a way for colleges to validate and defend admissions choices. Like affirmative action policies, the SAT was a quick fix for one of the obvious shortcomings of meritocracy. Nevertheless, from the start, the SAT test has proven to be culturally biased. For instance, in 1951 the Educational Testing Service (ETS) found an extremely low number of Southerners scoring well on the test (Lemann, 2000). In 1980, Ralph Nader’s organization printed a damaging report on ETS called The Reign of ETS: The Corporation that Makes up Minds (Naim, 1980). In this analysis, Nader’s group essentially claims consumer fraud by ETS in that the testing group makes assertions regarding the analysis of student ability without proper statistical support with devastating effects:

Imagine a process of evaluation where the educational and career opportunities of millions of people are significantly determined by multiple-choice examinations, which do not even purport to test their judgment, wisdom, experience, creativity, idealism, determination or stamina. (Naim, 1980, p. xiv)

Nader’s report challenges the very notion of the possibility of an instrument foretelling success in college. Citing various studies, the Nader study concludes that the SAT test predicts an applicant’s success in college only 8 to 15 percent better than a random roll of dice. Furthermore, the SAT consistently produces results of lower test scores for low-income and minority students. According to the Nader report, “ETS does not tell them that the assessment of their ‘aptitude’ is more a reflection of socio-economic status than their actual potential for future accomplishment” (Naim, 1980, p. 210). Furthermore, the report claims that the test destroys student self-confidence and is counter-productive to learning.

As early as 1960, the University of California found that the SAT was not a good predictor of performance in college. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the bias of the SAT, especially in the dreaded verbal analogies, was so clear that the University of California threatened to discontinue its use. According to a report issued by a special state-wide committee looking into the effectiveness of the SAT, the ability of the test to identify those who would perform well in college was not demonstrated: “The advantage that the SAT I is often assumed to possess—that it is effective at identifying students with strong potential who have not yet been able to demonstrate that potential—is largely a phantom, at least at the University of California” (Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools BOARS, n.d.). Indeed, the University of California found that student high school grade point average and SAT II scores were much more useful in predicting college academic success. Furthermore, the SAT II was less affected by socio-economic background, according to the study. ETS managed to reach a compromise with its largest client in revising the SAT, and the University of California in return decided to stress the SAT II tests which are based on content knowledge that students should have learned in high school (Sacks, 2007). The University of California on-going assessment of the SAT indicates a renewed awareness, or suspicion, of the use of standardized tests in college admissions altogether.

When the University of California decided that the SAT I was not a good predictor of college grades, the Ivy League schools were silent on the matter. Elite universities have for years weighed the verbal portion of the test more heavily giving students with a privileged secondary school experience a distinct advantage. Additionally, one clear statistical problem that Harvard and Yale face with the SAT is that since their grades are inflated, with an average grade point average of A- it was difficult to show how different SAT scores lead to varying success in college. This problem in evaluating critically their own students is seen in the fact that Yale University in 1992 graduated 58 percent of its class with honors (they subsequently enforced a limit of 30 percent) (Soares, 2007).

Finally, performing well on standardized tests as a goal for low-income students does not lead to equality—a study in the 1970s found that there existed nearly as much economic inequality among those who score highly on standardized tests as in the general American population (Jencks, Smith, Acland, Bane, Cohen, Gintis, Heyns, Michelson, 1972). So even if the standardized tests were fair, the larger admissions and social context overrides outstanding individual performance. Further...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Prepared for Failure
• 2 Admissions Policies Favor the Advantaged
• 3 College is More Difficult for Low-Income Students
• 4 Gender and Race are Interlocking Categories of Inequality
• 5 Case Study: Recent Immigrants to America
• 6 Erosion of the College Image
• 7 As a Group, the Poor Benefit Less from a College Degree
• 8 Conclusion: We Can Do Better
• Appendices
• References
• Index