Number of words: 1,120

I saw from my schedule that I taught five periods to four different groups– a seventh-grade B class, which I had twice, an eighth-grade B class, a ninthgrade D class, and a seventh-grade H class. Nothing had been mentioned in the meeting about a system of classification involving A’s and B’s, but inquiry around the coffee tables in the teachers’ room had informed me that the kids were all rated A (high) to H (low) and placed in classrooms together accordingly. The ratings were made on the basis of IQ tests, standardized achievement tests, and, on occasion, faculty recommendation. Added to this imposing number of groups were a couple of classes which were supposed to be retarded and were naturally taught in the basement. I didn’t know this detail until later on in the year, but I mention it now to complete the student body.

It is this kind of classification, based on this kind of testing, which seems to me the perfect example of the kind of thing that continually goes on in a school, and for which there is no reasonable explanation. Talking just to any teacher, as I did that year, you can hear a perfectly plausible lecture to the effect that IQ (or Mental Maturity, as it now goes) tests are not particularly valid under the best of conditions–that is, their validity is only general. You can’t say, for example, that a child who scores 120 is any more capable than one who scores 116, 112, or anything above, say, 100. The Achievement Tests, which hope to measure what the child has actually learned in school, rather than what he may be capable of learning, have results equally hazardous of interpretation. If they tend to place a seventh-grade child at grade level 7.6, has that child actually learned more than the 7.1 or 6.9 child, and has he learned less than the 7.9 or the 8.21 Does one take tests well and another badly? Did one spend the sixth grade being drilled on punctuation and another writing science-fiction stories? Does one like to read? Was one ill when map-reading was going on? Did he have ringworm? Was he in Juvenile Hall? The questions are endless and also nonsensical, presenting you with a perfect (William) Jamesian confrontation but not, of course, much good for anything else.

Under the best of conditions, your teacher will say, not very valid. Not a description of much that is real, given any particular kid. You’ll hear about something called “middle-class” values–that is, the tests are based on them- -and that apparently means the middle-class kids can read and are used to following printed instructions. Even the “nonverbal” part of the test you have to read, since it’s all still printed on paper, including of course the lengthy, repetitive and pretentious instructions. What about good old GW? Not so middle class by a long shot, not to mention verbally adequate. Most teachers, I say, will give you that kind of talk, yet at the same time you’ll probably find, in that teacher’s grade book, alongside the names, the scores–116, 113, 118, 111, 115, like that –making it about a B class at GW. Come report-card time the teacher will be worrying about so-and-so whose IQ is at the bottom of her point spread and yet is doing a work. Like a gambler worrying about his own point spread when it doesn’t work out, she may suspect a fix. In her class the 119’s should be making A’s, and the ill’s should do C work. It’s a comfort, I suppose, that surprisingly often these grade and IQ ratios worked out just right and no one had to worry about it.

The administration knows all of this too, of course. In fact, it is from the administrators that the teacher learns to disparage the scores. This may be the answer to the teacher part of the mystery. It is the kind of subject teachers quote administrators on, but rarely act upon unless forced to, because they know really that the administrator, whatever else he may be, isn’t a teacher, doesn’t give out grades, doesn’t deal with thirty or forty kids at a time, so once you get in the classroom that administration talk doesn’t count. What you need is something to back you up if you’re in trouble, and perhaps the scores will do it.

But what about the administration, then? There are, of course, some quite good arguments for homogeneous grouping by ability, supposing you can get a valid way to discover this ability in the first place. (There are some equally good ones against any kind of ability grouping too, I should add.) It doesn’t seem unreasonable, though, for an administrator, somewhat sophisticated about testing, to want to take his school population and divide it up into a couple of categories, calling them privately X and Y, or Giants, Yankees and Dodgers if he likes. But for an administrator (knowledgeable and sophisticated) to administer these tests in large groups to the population of GW and from the results to carve himself out eight different ability groups, and to separate them in different classrooms and call them A to H, seemed to me incredible.

Consider the likely range of total scores involved. I’ll place the cutoff point in IQ scores at 75. Below that and it’s down in the basement. (This point varies; I seem to remember it was actually 79, but I can’t be sure.) For the highs, let’s say 135; there isn’t any large group of students above that level in any school, and in any case it’s not significant because the A group includes the greatest range of scores, being everything above a certain point.

So that at best you have a total of 60 points to be divided by eight, giving each division a range of 7.5 points! In practice, given the much larger point spread of the A-group kids, the division included a smaller range of points– 5.5 to 6 points each.

But the administration has just been telling us at the faculty meeting– subject: testing–that 7.5 points is meaningless in group testing as a standard by which to judge individual ability! The traveling psychologist is brought in from downtown to give us all the reasons I’ve mentioned and more besides. He’s very convincing. A resource person from State adds his sociological piece about environment and social conditions, without mentioning, of course, The Word. (We teachers, black and white, stare into space and don’t mention it either.) All right so why the A to H, then? What the hell? 

Excerpted from pages 17-21 of ‘The way it spozed to be’ by James Herndon