In 1929, my mother took me to the Nebraska State Fair for a physical examination.  In those last pre-Crash days, the state had a healthy baby contest.  I won a ribbon, down-pointed only for looking open-mouthed and not very intelligent.  I long supposed it an ordinary competition, like Cornhusker football or Aksarben racing, but came to admire the State Department of Health for cleverly providing free examinations for babies of the poor managing to get to Lincoln.

Reading Steven Selden's Inheriting Shame¹,  I realized another possible motive.  At the Kansas Free Fair in Topeka the same year, the American Eugenics Society displayed racist posters including one that said:  "Every 15 seconds $100.00 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity" (p 25).  Had my father's store been several miles south, in Kansas, my examination might have been a step toward future distinction of who should be encouraged and discouraged--or disallowed--from propagating.  Maybe it was anyway.  Eugenicists such as Carl Brigham claimed, according to Selden (p 109) that "American ethnic diversity was a threat to national welfare" and cast their hereditarian prescriptions in racial terms.

My mother was proud of her Nantucket ancestors and started me, with charted descendent lines of Tristram Coffin, on a lifetime search down the family tree. We tended to avoid off-island marriages.  I had to go back 25 generations to find someone as odd as a Catholic.

So perhaps it wasn't by accident I was fascinated by psychometrics.  I liked winning.  I liked wordplay.  One way toward winning is to invent the game.  For my Masters thesis, I developed a quantitative aptitude test, which was used by a small number of graduate schools of education deciding who should be admitted for advanced study.  I sat uncomprehending and open-mouthed through most of my psychometrics class at Princeton, but my professor scored only 95% when he took my test.  I looked forward to a career of teaching others how to discriminate between the more and less talented.

Brigham was one of the founders of psychometrics.  With others, he analyzed the scores of the World War I Alpha intelligence test, used by the Army to decide who, regardless of heredity and wealth, should be sent to officer's training.  Those of Northern European heritage as a group did better than those from farther South.  I have always felt Nebraskans superior to Kansans.

As with the SAT fifty years later, it was widely presumed that if a test predicted which candidates would do well in later classes, it would also identify who would succeed in science, business, government and social service.   Brigham and the early psychometrics were proud of their validity studies, although they concentrated on criteria of school performance and not on the fields of battle, industry, and nurturance.

Academic success has long been held sacred.  One of my mentors pointed with pride at a fellow Nebraskan, Leta Hollingworth of Teachers College Columbia, an early advocate of gifted education.  Professor Hollingworth said, "Modern biology has shown that human beings cannot improve the qualities of their species, nor permanently reduce its miseries, by education, philanthropy, surgery or legislation" (Selden p 198).  It was her contention that society should concentrate on schooling the children of able parents, with tests used to identify a few who could rise above their heredities.

The claim was similar to the social engineering argument of James Conant in turning university admissions offices toward the intelligence quotient, later called scholastic aptitude, for selection of students.  But, as Nicholas Lemann  points out in The Big Test, those who scored high and availed themselves of scholarships did not, as Conant promised, turn their lives toward public service but used their subsidized education to avail their families of the good life.  Another instance of Northern Europeans winning by inventing the game.

I have admired the ingenuity of many teachers of the gifted.  And I have been dismayed by the poor engagement of fast learners, and slow learners as well, in many a classroom.  Gifted teachers and special education teachers especially have maintained commitments to the individualized learning plan.

Differentiation, tracking, unethical?  No.  I have at times sided with Brigham and Hollingworth, feeling that those who would vie with the teacher for control of the classroom should be tracked out of it.  Oh, not denied an education but separated.  Separate but equal.

Did I say that?  What do I believe?  I believe every child should have educational opportunities based on need, readiness and appetite.  Parents and the state should be served too, not by standards and conformity, but by uniqueness and engagement.

There are lots of special groups.  At Arizona State's RACE 2000 conference recently, Ed Gordon said his son told him, "It's those seven bad doods that society needs to give its best to."  Not because we, like the eugenicists, fear them but because they are our children and because they have in their deviance revealed a talent.  Have we no use for nonconformity?

But a mother of twins asks a teacher, "Why did you teach Sammy how a camera works and not Sally?"  The teacher assures that Sally needed to work on her math.  And the mother says, "It isn't fair for you to give your better self to one than another."

Every effort to customize, to deal with the uniqueness of a human being, results in discrimination.  We know no way to teach separately and equal.  Yet we know no way to do right and treat all the same.  Together we must be at our most ingenious best to devise the meaning of equality, partly because it must mean special blessings for those who haven't invented the game.  Neither tests, nor heredities, nor unfinished assignments justify privileging one child over another, one family over another, one race over another.  Would that we would honor diversity and equal rights, and had the intelligence to write a considerate curriculum.