“Half of All Children Are Below Average”

Such are the words of Charles Murray. Actually, what he said was:

“Half of all children are below average, and teachers can do only so much for them.”

Most of us who work in education cringe upon hearing such a statement. And not because of a need to be politically correct. We want to believe that teachers can make difference in the life of a child. But Murray is not really contesting that thought, he is focused in on the limitations of innate intelligence. Murray in fact sides with those who believe educators are getting a bad rap. States Murray, “Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range of problems in American life.”

Last week I mentioned my interest in the recent materials published on D-EdReckoning. Of particular interest were the discussions around IQ scores and student learning. Contrast the discussions from that site with the following words of Charles Murray.

“Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is 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. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.

We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.”

Murray goes on to state that we do not know how to raise intelligence. In stating so he uses that be all and end all of measurement sticks, the standard IQ test.

Notes Murray, “On the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP’s “basic achievement” score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.”

Murray goes on to tackle the major premise in No Child Left Behind Act, that educators just need to try harder and they will be able to educate everyone. Murray does state that American schools can be improved, in fact he calls many inner city school ‘dreadful.’ But Murray goes on to add, even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.

Now head back to D-EdReckoning who posture on their site, “We don’t know what a good K-12 education system is because we’ve never seen one operating. A good education system is one that is capable of educating almost every child.”

I might guess that Murray would simply respond at this point with a question of his own, “What do you mean by ‘educating almost every child’?”