Race and Education

Under the rubric of biological determinism, there has been a long, and rather arduous, tradition that argues that social and economic roles in society accurately reflect the innate construction of people. This type of determinism holds that intelligence may be racially biased, and although psychologists have come a long way from the days of scientifically "proving" that certain races were of superior intelligence to others, many believe that there is still a contemporary bias in the testing and presentation of research materials on ethnic cultures and families (Gould, 1981). This has particularly become endemic in the ranking and reification of intelligence testing. Following this, it is natural to quantify certain aspects of testing, so that some groups are superior, and others inferior. In an early comment, the famous Black orator Booker T. Washington commented,

For my race, one of its dangers is that it may grow impatient and feel that it can get upon its feet by artificial and superficial efforts rather than by the slower but surer process which means one step at a time through all the constructive grades of industrial, mental, moral, and social development which all races have had to follow that have become independent and strong (Washington, 1904, p. 245).

This paper will begin by giving a brief historical overview of ethnic differences in American history and the trends in current testing dealing with ethnic families. It will focus on four primary groups; Bl

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individual capacities, especially when dealing with ethnic families. This new research also shows that an appropriate assessment of ethnic families requires an understanding of the constraints that govern access to a person's knowledge and regulate the deployment of both the conceptual and reasoning processes (MillerJones, 1989). For Blacks, the stratification system in America has seriously biased the types and interpretations of quantitative psychological testing. When the variables are combined between parental economic and educational situations, several comparisons are evident. First, there is a greater association of occupational status and parents' education with children's intelligence testing between Whites, but the social milieu shows the strongest correlation among Blacks. Secondly, the standardized measures of family status are considerably more intercorrelated among Whites than Blacks. In other words, status consistency is lower among Blacks, and shows that any use of socioeconomic indices will not accurately affect the status of Blacks under testing. Although this data does show that there is considerable intelligence score differentiation between Whites and Blacks, it further points to the fact that race may

Category: Psychology - R