Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id558500591
The army mental tests had proven beyond any scientific doubt that, like the American Negroes, the Italians and Jews were genetically ineducable. It would be a waste of good money to even attempt to try and give these born morons and imbeciles a good Anglo-Saxon education, let alone admit them into our fine medical, law, and engineering graduate schools.
In 1926, Brigham used this work to develop the Scholastic Aptitude Test, or SAT, for the College Board. The first SAT was administered to high-school students that year.
id558500593
Brigham recanted his racist, eugenics-based findings four years later. He even went so far as to publish a formal retraction of A Study of American Intelligence, saying that the findings were, “without foundation,” and that the “study with its entire hypothetical superstructure of racial differences collapses completely
id558500706
sort human populations by deeming high-scorers as valued and deserving of opportunity, and by deeming low-scorers as unvalued and undeserving of opportunity.
✏️ Not a great thing when you think about the humanity of it
🔗 View Highlight
id558501734
it is important to remember that the SAT is designed to sort and stratify human populations. The SAT is a norm-referenced test. This means its primary purpose is to sort and rank students in comparison to each other — establishing a “norm” for performance and demarcating who is above and below this norm.
id558501739
produce a “bell curve” of test scores,
id558501755
bell-curve assumption built into the SAT extends directly from the eugenics movement: It presumes that intelligence is naturally distributed across human populations unequally.
id558501771
the SAT is required to produce inequality, not equality. In a racist, capitalist system, that the SAT unequally stratifies human populations by race and class should come as no surprise.
id558503192
This myth of meritocracy serves a dual ideological purpose for capitalism. It denies the existence of structural issues like racism, economic exploitation, or patriarchy as sources of inequality, and instead posits that the issue is about individual effort
id558503275
In turn, the myth then gets used to justify existing socioeconomic inequalities.
id558504086
none of these is systemic. Instead, the problem is that individuals are making poor individual choices and just not working hard enough to get ahead.
id558504852
Why doesn’t the richest country in world history have higher education available and accessible to all students?” Or, “How we can meet the needs of all students, instead of advocating for solutions that serve only a tiny minority of students?”