The soft bigotry of low expectations

It’s the spring of 1964, and a school’s student body is given a standardized intelligence test: those expected to be high achievers are presented as such to their instructors.

By fall, the selected first graders have increased their I.Q. by an average of 27.4 points, compared to the 12 points achieved by their peers.

The test was an accurate predictor of success, no?

No.

The children singled out for success had originally performed across the board — low, average, high — and it was the power of expectation on the part of the teachers, the positive influence bestowed upon the purported high achievers, that drew out their potential.

It was the Pygmalion effect, ivory turned to flesh.

And now it’s 2010, and your governor, Mitch Daniels, believes that too many youngsters attend college.

“We want to see an Indiana where there is a place for every student, but not every student can go every place.”

This is the quote stressed by his office in a recent news release regarding a session with trustees of our state’s public colleges.

It’s an oft-repeated sentiment of Daniels, who only a year ago distributed copies of Charles Murray’s “Real Education” to members of the Indiana Education Roundtable — a book in which Murray states that “one of the most damaging messages of educational romanticism has been that everyone should go to college.”

The book also says an I.Q. test should be given to 6 year olds to determine whether they will go on to college or to skilled labor programs and that race is linked to intelligence.

It’s social Darwinism and pseudo-scientific racism, a belief that the lower classes are stupid, immutably so, and inferior to Murray’s cognitive elite.

This is Daniels’ beloved author, whom he touts profusely as inspiration for his economic philosophy.

As IU professor and State Rep. Vernon Smith, D-Gary, writes, such philosophy is “a throwback to 50 years ago when African-Americans and other students from economically struggling families were told they could never achieve beyond low-paying, dead-end jobs.”

Murray asserts that children from low-income households cannot be significantly assisted by even the best schools.

There is no sound scientific evidence of this — but perhaps such ideology influenced Daniels last year when he slashed $300 million from education funds.

After all, he believes teachers to be greedy and overpaid, and that public anger is directed “not just [toward] Wall Street or overpaid corporate CEOs but government employees and their unions.” In reality, about 4 percent of Americans agree that teachers are overpaid, according to a January poll by CBS news.

Daniels’ philosophy mocks the 21st Century Scholars program and scorns upward mobility.

It is the same scorn initially given to the G.I. Bill by professors and university administrators who believed “unqualified people, the most unqualified of this generation” were coming to college, as Harvard’s president contended at the time.

And yet, as Karen Chenoweth of advocacy group The Education Trust writes, “Those returning vets, once they got a higher education, provided much of the managerial and professional spine for the nation’s economy for the second half of the 20th century.”

Daniels’ pernicious ideology is both dangerous and cruel — it is, as former President George W. Bush stated in one of his few eloquent moments, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”


E-mail: celgrund@indiana.edu