Lewis Terman

When Lewis Terman of Stanford University revised the Binet scales in 1916, he directed their use in a manner of which the professor from the Sorbonne had never dreamed. Whatever benefits might have been achieved by revising the Binet test were overshadowed by Terman’s bias and his narrow-minded declarations to future psychologists: “(Mental retardation) represents the level of intelligence which is very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial.” Terman further predicted that when future IQ testing of these groups was done, “there will be discovered enormously significant racial differences which cannot be wiped out by any scheme of mental culture.”

It is amazing how the Stanford psychologist, later president of the American Psychological Association, reached these conclusions from a scale that was standardized on a sample of approximately 1000 children and 400 adults -- none of them Black. Nevertheless, in the same breath, he called for specific education classes and prescribed their content and pedagogy: “Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master abstracts.” Stern, created of the IQ concepts, warned against these interpretations of IQ scores, but Terman’s pronouncements reached dangerous proportions: “There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a great problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.” From this perspective, Terman was in agreement with the Galtonian eugenicists and English biometricians.

...There were also the American psychologists, led by Lewis Terman, who chorused the blood lineage theme to explain different scores along the continuum. And it was the educational psychologist Edward Thorndike who announced that intelligence was “roughly” 80 percent genetic, 17 percent based on educational opportunities, and 3 percent accidental. Thorndike’s speculations placed an unfair emphasis on the role of heredity; he undoubtedly planted the seed of intellectual bias among prognosticators of Black-white mental abilities.

Throughout this period of intelligence testing, few attempts were made to censure the tests or even to voice skepticism; Terman’s views soared as words of great wisdom for neophyte psychologists. As the testing mystique grew, the cloak of secrecy increased. Only “the informed” knew about the IQ formula and its calculations. Individuals submitted to IQ testing but the results were kept under lock and key, protected from unsophisticated eyes. The mental testers, with the sanction of school officials, were given free rein to test any school-age child. Parental consent was unheard of, much less considered a normal condition. There was no code of ethics or standards to check the profession; it was in fact a system in complete control of its subjects.

The 1917 Stanford-Binet scales maintained their dominance in the test world for 20 years -- until the 1937 revision. This revision retained the majority of the old test items but was extended downward to the 2-year-old level and upward to the 22-year-old level. In repetition of the original revision, this version failed to include Black children in its normalization data.

Black-White Mental Testing

The earliest effort by US researchers to investigate Black-white differences using intelligence tests was made in 1897 when G.R. Stetson tested 500 African American and 500 European American public school children in Washington, D.C. The test utilized by Stetson consisted of four stanzas of poetry, which the experimenter read aloud and the children were required to repeat. In this exercise, of which little publicity was made, the Black children outperformed the white children. It is interesting to observe that consequently it was determined that memory technique was not a valid measure of intelligence.

The first reported study using the Binet scales to determine whether racial differences existed was made in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1912. In this study, Josiah Morse of the University of South Carolina directed his graduate student, Alice C. Strong, to measure, with the Goddard revision of the Binet scale, the intelligence of 225 white children and 1,125 Black children. Strong went so far as to divide the Black children into groupings based on the degree of their skin pigmentation: dark, medium, and light-colored.... Morse later reported that while the Strong study showed that

the colored children did excel in rote memory … [they] are inferior in aesthetics judgement, observation, reasoning, motor control, logical memory, use of words, resistance to suggestion and in orientation or adjustment to the institutions and complexities of civilized society.

Despite the egregious indictment, Morse at least recognized one flaw in the testing instrument ... in a stroke of rare intellectual insight for 1913, Morse noted:

if Binet and Simon had originally tested southern negro children they would have worked out from the results a scale which would have been different from their present one in several respects, and which when applied to southern white children would be found to be, for the most part, a year or more too young … Perhaps someday each branch of the human family will have a Binet scale of its own.

In 1914, B.A. Phillips compared the test scores of 137 white and 86 Black children and then went beyond the mere recording of scores by raising the question of providing separate educational training for Blacks:

If the Binet tests are at all a gauge of mentality it must follow that there is a difference in mentality between the colored and the white children, and this raises the question: Should the two groups be instructed under the same curriculum?

...With the acceptance of psychology (with its tests of mental ability) as a science, unquestioning credence was given to reports like those of Phillips. As racist research efforts continued, statistical measures of central tendency evolved in mental percentage comparisons between Blacks and whites. When W.H. Pyle (1915) tested 408 Black children in the MIssouri public schools and compared them to white children in the same area, he concluded: “In general the marks indicating mental ability of the Negro are about two-third of the whites.” The two-thirds statistic was historically significant in that it also supported a political contention that had previous regarded the Black as a “fractioned” man.