Maximizing Intelligence

240 Pages·2003·14.01 MB·English

by  David Armor

MAXIMIZING
INTELLIGENCE
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MAXIMIZING
INTELLIGENCE
DAVID J. ARMOR
WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF SUSAN L. AUD
TRANSACTION PUBLISHERS
NEW BRUNSWICK (U.S.A.) AND LONDON (U.K.)
Copyright © 2003 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conven-
tions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing
from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers,
Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-
8042.
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Stan-
dard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2002075087
ISBN: 0-7658-0185-X
Printed in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Armor, David J.
Maximizing intelligence / David J. Armor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7658-0185-X (cloth)
1. Intellect. 2. Intelligence levels. I. Title.
BF431 .A5775 2003
153.9—dc21 2002075087
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
1. Maximizing Intelligence 1
Four Propositions about Intelligence 2
The Ten Most Important Risk Factors 6
The Basis for the Book 8
Organization of the Book 10
2. The Nature and Importance of Intelligence 13
Definition and Measurement of Intelligence 13
The Nature and Malleability of Intelligence 22
The Timing of IQ Changes 3 7
Why IQ is Important 43
3. The Risk Factors for Intelligence 51
Evidence for the Risk Factors 51
The Role of Parent IQ 53
The Sequence of Risk Factors 56
Risk Factors after Birth or Conception 57
Environmental Risk Factors before Birth 70
Summary of the Risk Factors for Intelligence 92
4. Race, Family, and Intelligence 101
Racial Differences in IQ and Achievement 103
Racial Differences in Risk Factors 110
Racial Differences in Schooling 119
Reducing the IQ Gap 12 8
5. Agents of Change for Intelligence 13 5
The Timing of Changes 135
Schools and Preschools 136
Families and Early Intervention Strategies 162
Summary 177
6. The Outlook for Maximizing Intelligence 181
An Integrated Theory of Intelligence 181
Maximizing Whose Intelligence? 189
Policy Approaches for Maximizing Intelligence 190
Appendix A: Multivariate Analysis of the Risk Factors 197
Appendix B: Analysis of Risk Factors for African 203
American Children
Appendix C: Regression Analysis of 1996 NAEP Data 207
Index 211
Preface
I first became interested in the factors that influence intelligence and aca-
demic achievement in 1965. That was the year I joined a large team doing a
study required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The team was led by the late
sociologist James Coleman, and it produced the now classic report, Equality of
Educational Opportunity (EEO). Like Coleman and the rest of the team, I be-
lieved we were going to explain why African American students had lower test
scores than white students. I believed we were going to demonstrate that black
students attended segregated schools with inadequate resources and programs,
and that these school deficiencies would explain most of the achievement gap.
I was as surprised as any team member when we could not document signifi-
cant school resource differences between predominately black and predomi-
nately white schools, at least when we divided schools by region (at that time
Southern school districts generally had fewer resources than Northern districts).
I was even more surprised when we found very small achievement effects for
most school and teacher characteristics after controlling for family socioeco-
nomic (SES) characteristics. Even without formal controls for SES, the simple
correlations between achievement and school resources were much smaller
than the correlations between achievement and family background. My first
essay on this issue appeared in On the Equality of Educational Opportunity,
edited by Harvard Professors Frederick Mosteller and Patrick Daniel Moynihan
(1972).
The EEO report had one set of findings that seemed to support the notion
that desegregated schools benefited the academic achievement of African Ameri-
can students. The seminal Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Educa-
tion, had also implied this benefit, and therefore many civil rights advocates
immediately concluded that the Coleman report supported the desegregation
benefit thesis. I was not so sure, because in the EEO data most school character-
istics had fared poorly as predictors of academic achievement. Moreover, at the
time of the EEO study, most desegregated schools existed because of housing
patterns, which meant that desegregated schools had higher SES black students
than segregated schools.
Given my concerns about how the Coleman report was being interpreted, I
welcomed the opportunity to participate in a study of a voluntary busing pro-
gram in the Boston area (called METCO). The METCO program bused Boston
vii
viii Maximizing Intelligence
African American students to suburban school districts in order to experience
integrated education in some of the finest school systems in the nation. Be-
cause of my work with the Coleman data, I was not too surprised to find that
desegregation did not improve the academic achievement of black students.
Moreover, I discovered that other busing programs were also documenting the
lack of educational benefits, and I published these findings in The Public Inter-
est in 1972 ("The Evidence on Busing").
Over the next twenty-five years I served as an expert witness in dozens of
school districts that were involved in some type of litigation, and I conducted
special case studies as a basis for my testimony. In many of these cases a major
question was whether the lower achievement of minority students (or minority
school districts) was caused by policies of the school district or whether it was
due to factors beyond control of school officials, such as the socioeconomic
conditions of minority families.
There were two consistent findings in these case studies that are relevant to
the propositions advanced by this book. First, lower minority achievement
could be explained by a combination of family socioeconomic factors (usually
poverty) and low achievement scores at the beginning of schooling—before
school policies and programs could have much effect. Second, the achieve-
ment levels of minority students were generally not correlated (or correlated
only weakly) with school characteristics such as expenditures, teacher experi-
ence, teacher education levels, teacher certification, class size, and the racial
composition of schools. In other words, like the original Coleman report, stu-
dent achievement was strongly related to family characteristics but only weakly,
if at all, to school resources and programs.
A major limitation in all these case studies was that the number of family
background measures was usually limited to poverty, limited English profi-
ciency, and (sometimes) family structure (one versus two parent families). As
important as these factors were, they did not comprise the totality of family
characteristics that might be related to achievement. In an effort to expand my
study of family factors that influence academic achievement, in 1994 I began
analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY), which
was tracking the development of children born to women in the original study.
This study had many more family measures than most national studies, includ-
ing mother's IQ and parenting behaviors, and it also administered a full array of
cognitive tests to children both before and after they started formal schooling.
Just as I started analyzing this data, Herrnstein and Murray published The
Bell Curve, in which they argued that parent IQ was the dominant cause of a
child's intelligence through genetic transmission, and environmental factors
played only a very small role. They relied heavily on data from the NLSY to
support their conclusions. Although I was finding parent IQ to be the strongest
single correlate of a child's IQ, I found that other family variables were also
Preface ix
correlated with children's IQ and achievement scores even after removing the
effect of mother's IQ. Moreover, when these other factors were combined in a
multivariate analysis, I found that family environment factors had a combined
effect on a child's achievement greater than parent IQ. This led me to reject the
Herrnstein and Murray thesis that a child's intelligence was largely determined
by genetic factors at birth.
There was still one vexing problem: if a child's intelligence is influenced by
so many family environment factors, why do most special school and preschool
programs (and school resources in general) fail to improve the achievement of
low-achieving students? As I was pondering this question, the Zero to Three
movement came to my attention with its controversial focus on brain develop-
ment. While I do not base any of my propositions on theories of brain develop-
ment, this new movement did lead me to investigate whether the malleability of
intelligence might be time-dependent. Based on several different bodies of
research (reviewed in chapters 2, 3, and 5), I concluded that intelligence was
malleable but that malleability decreases over time. I believe this conclusion is
the only reasonable explanation for two sets of well-documented results that
appear inconsistent on their face. These are (1) the very strong correlations
between a child's intelligence and family environmental factors (after control-
ling for parent IQ), and (2) the very weak correlations between a child's aca-
demic achievement and school resource or program variables.
Finally, having concluded that family environment plays a key and possibly
irreversible role in shaping a child's intelligence, I was not sure what the policy
implications should be. It is one thing to know that parent behaviors influence
a child's intelligence; it is quite another to try to change them. Parent behav-
ior—such dropping out of school, deciding when to have children and whether
to marry first, how many children to have, how to raise children—has many
deep roots and causes imbedded in our modern culture. It is notoriously diffi-
cult to change basic values about family and children.
As I was pondering the policy implications of all this, I became aware of the
major pro-family initiatives being undertaken as part of the welfare reform that
began in 1996. Although the welfare reform movement is concerned about
children's welfare in general, it is probably not motivated primarily by improv-
ing children's intelligence levels. Yet, if the welfare reform movement succeeds
in restoring the value of two-parent families and good parenting behavior to
low income families, that might be its greatest legacy. It was not much of a leap
to conclude, in chapter 6, that since the family has the greatest potential for
maximizing the intelligence of all children, a whole family policy would be an
excellent subject for a national campaign to improve the family risk factors that
impact on a child's intelligence.