[Paleopsych] Wilson Q.: Schools and the g Factor by Linda S. Gottfredson

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Schools and the g Factor by Linda S. Gottfredson 
http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=105059

    In the world of the American public school, few subjects are more
    controversial than intelligence. If theres a tension in American
    society between the ideal of equality and the pursuit of meritocracy,
    that tension escalates into the equivalent of a migraine headache in
    the schools. Called upon to produce young people fully prepared for
    citizenship and ready to meet the competitive challenges of the modern
    economy, the schools are also seen, at the same time, as the nations
    last best hope to level the playing field and ensure equal opportunity
    for all. In no American institution is the egalitarian strain of the
    American creed stronger. And the very notion that school performance
    is strongly influenced by general intelligencea quality partly
    inbornseems to contradict this deeply held ideal of equality.

    During the past few decades, the word intelligence has been attached
    to an increasing number of different forms of competence and
    accomplishmentemotional intelligence, football intelligence, and so
    on. Researchers in the field, however, have largely abandoned the
    term, together with their old debates over what sorts of abilities
    should and should not be classified as part of intelligence. Helped by
    the advent of new technologies for researching the brain, they have
    increasingly turned their attention to a century-old concept of a
    single overarching mental power. They call it simply g, which is short
    for the general mental ability factor. The g factor is a universal and
    reliably measured distinction among humans in their ability to learn,
    reason, and solve problems. It corresponds to what most people mean
    when they describe some individuals as smarter than others, and its
    well measured by IQ (intelligence quotient) tests, which assess
    high-level mental skills such as the ability to draw inferences, see
    similarities and differences, and process complex information of
    virtually any kind. Understanding gs biological basis in the brain is
    the new frontier in intelligence research today.

    The g factor was discovered by the first mental testers, who found
    that people who scored well on one type of mental test tended to score
    well on all of them. Regardless of their contents (words, numbers,
    pictures, shapes), how they are administered (individually or in
    groups; orally, in writing, or pantomimed), or what theyre intended to
    measure (vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, spatial ability), all
    mental tests measure mostly the same thing. This common factor, g, can
    be distilled from scores on any broad set of cognitive tests, and it
    takes the same form among individuals of every age, race, sex, and
    nation yet studied. In other words, the g factor exists independently
    of schooling, paper-and-pencil tests, and culture.

    Though there has been intense controversy about IQ tests over the
    years, psychologists continue to see them as valid and useful gauges
    of student potential. No longer routinely administered to whole school
    populationsachievement tests are much better suited to tasks such as
    grouping students for instructionthey are widely used by school
    psychologists in individual assessments to determine, for example,
    whether a child who is having difficulties in school has a learning
    disability or some other problem. As a practical matter, all good
    standardized tests of IQ and achievement end up ranking students in
    much the same way because g is the major predictor of academic
    achievement.

    During the 1960s and 1970s, educators launched several ambitious
    efforts to raise the IQs of disadvantaged youngsters in experimental
    preschools. The results were discouraging: Even when it was possible
    to raise the IQs of young children, the gains never translated into
    comparable gains on achievement tests, and the IQ gains evaporated
    soon after children left the programs. The disappointing results
    helped fuel an attack by some researchers on the very idea of IQ and g
    and also contributed to the rapturous reception for the theory of
    multiple intelligences that emerged in the 1980s, notably in Howard
    Gardners Frames of Mind (1983). To replace the idea of general
    intelligence, Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard
    Universitys Graduate School of Education, proposed seven coequal
    intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial,
    musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal (he
    later added naturalist, to make eight).

    Gardners theory offers a useful reminder that there are many human
    abilities and forms of accomplishment, and it puts new labels on some
    of the most common of them. Thus, good athletes have
    bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, and self-help celebrities such as
    Oprah Winfrey have intrapersonal intelligence. Gardner takes the
    seemingly commonsensical notion that people meet the world in
    different ways and elevates it into a comforting accolade: Everybody
    is smart in some way.

    In the classroom, the theory seems to give teachers a new language to
    describe their perceptions of students and classroom life. Teacher
    guidebooks such as Teaching and Learning through Multiple
    Intelligences (1995) suggest using the eight intelligences as
    different entry points for leading students into a single lesson. To
    teach a unit about photosynthesis, for example, a teacher might have
    all students read a description of photosynthesis to provide an entry
    point for the linguistically intelligent, have the class compare
    plants grown with and without sufficient light to reach children with
    naturalist intelligence, engage the logical-mathematical students by
    asking the class to prepare a timeline for the steps of
    photosynthesis, require painting those steps to aid the
    visually-spatially inclined, have students role-play the characters in
    photosynthesis to help the bodily-kinesthetic childand so on, until
    all eight intelligences have been accommodated.

    Theres something very appealing about this scenario, but its unlikely
    that students kept so busy walking through multiple doorways will have
    much time to advance very far once they get through them. As one
    biology teacher told me recently, the multiple intelligence approach
    may allow students with special talents to express their understanding
    in ways that are personally gratifying, but science is inherently
    analytical, and understanding it ultimately requires the application
    of strong reasoning and analysis skillsperiod.

    However much we might wish that there were many distinct forms of
    mental ability, a century of research has found none as widely useful
    as g. Neither of the two major multiple intelligence theorists, Howard
    Gardner and Yale Universitys Robert Sternberg, disputes the existence
    of g, only its preeminence among mental abilities. There are, to be
    sure, many different human mental abilities, but they are neither
    independent of one another nor equally useful.

    The past 100 years of research has yielded a body of knowledge that
    virtually all those working in the field accept as valid, despite
    their various perspectives and the controversies surrounding this
    issue. Differences in IQ among young children can be traced in about
    equal parts to differences in their genes and their environment. (A
    special panel named by the American Psychological Association to
    summarize the state of knowledge on intelligence in 1995 noted that
    the lowest possible estimate of the genetic component is about 40
    percent.) Genetic differences become a bigger source of intelligence
    differences as children age. Behavior geneticists suspect the reason
    is that as they achieve more independence, children are more able to
    select and shape their environments, which then shape them. The power
    of genes can be seen in the fact that identical twins reared apart are
    more alike, after meeting in adulthood, in IQ, brain function,
    personality, and many other traits and behaviors than fraternal twins
    raised in the same home.

    Genes probably work their influence by shaping various metabolic,
    electrical, and structural features of the brain. For example, the
    brains of people with higher IQs tend to have a relatively lower rate
    of energy use (as measured by glucose metabolism) while solving
    problems, and quicker and more complex brain waves in response to
    simple perceptual stimuli such as lights and sounds. Researchers have
    long debated whether people with higher IQs have bigger brains, and
    the latest findings, based on studies with new brain-scan technology,
    show that they do. Distinctions in g, or general intelligence, are
    evidently as much a fact of nature as differences in height, blood
    pressure, and the like.

    A great deal of research also shows that g matters well beyond school.
    In Who Gets Ahead? (1979), sociologist Christopher Jencks and his
    colleagues reviewed many large studies and showed that an individuals
    IQ predicts his occupational level and income in adulthood (as well as
    years of schooling completed) better than his fathers education or
    occupation does. The influence of g varies in different realms of
    lifeschooling, work, parenthoodsimply because some are less
    cognitively demanding than others. Some life outcomes are also shaped
    more than others by such factors as ones noncognitive traits
    (ambition, extraversion) and decisions that others make about the
    individual (college admissions, hiring, pay raises). Yet the evidence
    of gs pervasive and lasting impact is well documented, especially when
    it comes to lifes more complex tasks. For example, personnel
    psychologists Frank Schmidt and John Hunter reviewed thousands of
    studies that were conducted over 85 years in many different companies,
    government agencies, and military settings, and that used everything
    from handwriting analysis to job tryouts to forecast job performance.
    Their meta-analyses of these data showed that mental tests predict
    on-the-job performance better than personality, integrity level,
    experience, and education. In the Journal of Personality and Social
    Psychology, I recently published a study showing that both IQ and
    adult functional literacy correlate in the same pattern with a wide
    variety of adult outcomes, including health and longevity (in part
    because maintaining ones health requires learning and adaptation), all
    regardless of social background. In that same journal, University of
    Edinburgh psychologist-physician Ian Deary and his colleagues reported
    on a study showing that each one-point increase in IQ when the study
    participants were 11 years old predicted a one percent decrease in
    mortality by age 50. If IQ is book smarts, it is clearly much more
    besides.

    Drawing a bead on exactly what g is and how it works remains a
    difficult task, but specialists in mental testing now commonly agree
    that g sits atop a hierarchy of mental abilities. Most of these
    researchers have adopted the three-level hierarchy developed by
    educational psychologist John B. Carroll in his monumental Human
    Cognitive Abilities (1993). After statistically extracting the common
    ability factors from more than 450 earlier studies in which multiple
    tests had been administered to the same individuals, Carroll
    classified all abilities into three levels.

    At the highest level, Stratum III, Carroll found evidence of only one
    ability: g. In Stratum II, he documented eight broad abilities
    involving language, reasoning, spatial visualization, auditory
    perception, memory, and cognitive speediness. Stratum I includes
    relatively specific mental abilities, such as memory span and reading
    comprehension.

    All Stratum II aptitudes are highly correlated with one another. A
    person with weak language ability, for example, is very unlikely to be
    strongly endowed with another Stratum II ability, such as spatial
    visualization. Tests of these abilities show that they are highly
    correlated both with one another and with g. All consist primarily of
    g plus a dose of some more specific ability. As Carroll puts it, the
    Stratum II abilities are all different flavors of g. Despite many
    attempts, nobody has ever succeeded in creating tests that measure
    these abilities without simultaneously measuring mostly g.

    Most IQ test batteries are composed of about a dozen subtests
    (involving, for example, vocabulary, sentence completion, number
    series, matrices, and similarities) of abilities near the Stratum I
    level. A persons scores on each are added together to produce an IQ
    score. But ones intuitive sense that the Stratum I abilities are the
    building blocks of intelligence is incorrect. The basic element at
    each level is g. A Stratum II ability is made up of g plus some more
    specialized ability. A Stratum I ability is produced by adding an even
    more specialized ability to this mix. Each lower stratum thus includes
    increasingly numerous and more complex amalgams of skills that are
    targeted to fewer and more specific kinds of tasks.

    Researchers have drawn quite a clear picture of human mental
    abilities. For instance, the technical manual for one widely used
    test, the Stanford-Binet IV, shows that the Stratum I ability
    vocabulary is about three parts g, plus two parts a special language
    facility that makes its entrance at the Stratum II level, plus one
    part a vocabulary-specific ability entering at Stratum I. Similarly,
    the Stratum I ability memory for sentences is roughly two parts g, one
    part each special verbal and memory abilities entering at Stratum II,
    and one part an ability specific to Stratum I.

    Carroll points out that four of Gardners intelligences (linguistic,
    logical-mathematical, spatial, and musical) correspond to four Stratum
    II abilities. They arent independent abilities, as Gardner asserts,
    but rather are linked to one another and to g. Three of Gardners four
    other intelligences fall largely outside the cognitive realm, while
    the fourth (naturalist) is too diffuse to analyze. Gardners
    intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences seem to be matters
    mostly of personality, while his bodily-kinesthetic intelligence
    reflects mostly psychomotor strengths such as eye-hand coordination.
    These are useful qualities, to be sure, and they can help a person get
    by in the world, but they will not help that person apprehend the
    world. For that you need g.

    Because gifted children tend to have more jagged ability profiles than
    children of average or below-average intelligencethink of the classic
    math wiz who is not as dazzling in subjects such as history that
    depend on verbal reasoningGardner can allow educators to draw the
    inference that every child can be smart in some way. But the math wiz
    will still have relatively strong verbal skills. Where theres notable
    talent, theres always a high level of g. Gardner implicitly
    acknowledges this when he concedes that all the individuals he names
    as exemplars of his eight intelligences probably had IQs above 120
    (the 90th percentile). His eight domains of achievement may enrich our
    lives, but they do not represent independent faculties of mind or
    alternate pathways to mastering school curricula, jobs, or everyday
    tasks.

    Gardners theory has been protected from direct contradiction by his
    failure to develop any formal tests of his proposed intelligences. (He
    believes that assessments should be more holistic.) None of the
    assessments that schools currently use to identify students multiple
    intelligences would satisfy the standards for testing jointly
    promulgated by the three major professional organizations in the
    field. Mindy Kornhaber, a Gardner collaborator now at the University
    of Pennsylvania, evaluated three major methods for identifying gifted
    students in terms of multiple intelligences and concluded in In the
    Eyes of the Beholder (2004) that they are not technically strong
    enough to withstand modest scrutiny. Among other problems, some use
    checklists that seem to assess interests rather than abilities, and
    none have clear enough procedures for raters to agree on who is gifted
    or in what way.

    In the education textbooks used to instruct tomorrows teachers,
    however, one doesnt get any sense that ample evidence favors a single
    broadly useful intelligence rather than multiple independent ones.
    Textbooks written by educational psychologists tend to report the
    facts about IQ with reasonable accuracy, but they systematically
    minimize or muddy the measures relevance. For example, they will
    report that IQ tests predict academic achievement quite well, but then
    imply that this fact need not be taken seriously because, after all,
    thats precisely what IQ tests were first developed to do. IQ, they
    say, represents only a narrow academic ability, book smarts, and it
    matters little outside school. All of this is often topped off with
    the closing argument that IQ does not capture everything important
    about the human mind and soulas if intelligence researchers have ever
    said otherwise.

    The presentation of facts may be muddied but the larger message is
    clear: Multiple intelligence theories are the modern alternativethe
    antidoteto outmoded unitary, narrow, and exclusionary theories of
    ability. Textbooks create an aura of scientific superiority for the
    new theories by substituting their advocates certitude for evidence,
    and the absence of any pertinent research for readers to critique
    leaves the claims pristine. Take, for example, Laurence Steinbergs
    Adolescence (2002), a textbook assigned to future teachers at the
    University of Delawares School of Education, where I am on the
    faculty. Steinberg blithely asserts that even the best IQ tests used
    today measure only a very specific type of intelligence, and that
    there are ways of being equally intelligent as individuals who score
    high on IQ testsbut intelligent in a different way.

    Multiple intelligence theory gathers unto itself all good things.
    Commonly accepted pedagogical principles that have no necessary
    relation to multiple intelligence theorythat teachers should go beyond
    rote learning, appreciate students strengths and weaknesses, use
    different modes of presenting information, and believe that all
    students can learnare described as if they were the hallmarks of the
    multiple intelligence approach alone. The theorys proponents link
    harmful, distasteful, and patently false beliefs with IQfor example,
    that IQ is immutable, environments do not affect learning, some
    children cannot learn, and IQ is a measure of human worth. Readers are
    left with the impression that it is morally suspect to favor narrow
    views of intelligence, which are elitist, and segregate or privilege
    some students. For all their rhetoric about diversity, proponents of
    multiple intelligence betray a deep uneasiness with difference.

    The vogue for multiple intelligences is just one manifestation of an
    attack on ability grouping and curriculum tracking in the schools that
    has been underway for decades. Federal enthusiasm for programs for
    gifted children, for example, spiked after the Soviet launch of
    Sputnik in 1957, and then evaporated in the early 1960s. (Since that
    decade, scores by Americas highest-performing students have fallen on
    national tests such as the SAT and the Stanford Achievement Test.)
    Access to advanced placement courses and programs for the gifted is
    being opened up in the name of inclusion, and as a result, many
    programs are sacrificing their rigor and distinctive curricula.

    Grouping students by ability level in classes or in small groups
    within classes offers the promise of differentiating instruction to
    better fit diverse student-ability levels (though in reality that
    promise is seldom fulfilled). As recently as the 1980s, between 80 and
    90 percent of eighth and tenth graders were being taught in
    ability-homogeneous classrooms. Twenty-two percent of seventh graders
    were in homogeneous classes for all subjects, and 47 percent for some
    subjects. About 90 percent of elementary schools at the time were
    using within-class grouping for at least one subject, and 70 percent
    were using between-class grouping. Im aware of no more recent surveys,
    but observers agree that increasing numbers of schools are attempting
    to eliminate grouping and tracking and also to mainstream both gifted
    and special-education students into regular classrooms.

    The effects of this trend, so cavalierly endorsed by those who
    fantasize classrooms full of pluralistically smart students, are more
    candidly described in textbooks for teaching instructional strategies.
    The text we use at the University of Delaware, Looking in Classrooms
    (2003), declares that educators thinking has progressively moved away
    from policies of exclusion and homogeneous grouping toward an emphasis
    on the value of diversity, policies of inclusion, and practices that
    meet the needs of all students. But Looking in Classrooms is very
    clear about the realities teachers face. It paints a sobering portrait
    of the heterogeneous classes created by the demise of grouping,
    tracking, and special classes for disabled or gifted students. Its
    case example is a sixth-grade classroom with 26 students from varied
    racial and ethnic backgrounds and family configurations. Three of the
    students spoke little or no English, and one of them was legally
    blind. Among the 23 who could be validly tested, the grade equivalents
    for reading ranged along a breathtaking span from 2.3 to 10.5; two
    students were gifted. Such large disparities are common in
    heterogeneous junior-high classrooms. As Looking in Class-
    rooms describes it, the teachers solution for orchestrating
    appropriately different instruction of the same key ideas for her 26
    highly diverse students calls for an effort that is nothing short of
    heroic. Its as if teachers today must not only work in a one-room
    schoolhouse but also individualize instruction for all their charges
    so that all can master the same (trimmed down) curriculum in lockstep.

    Degrouping, which is meant to prevent the social distinctions that
    arise when students are segregated by ability level, can create even
    bigger distinctions. Placing the intellectually unequal in proximity
    forces students to observe their differences in capability more
    directly. It is hard to miss the fact that some students typically
    learn two to five times faster than others, or that some are reading
    difficult books while others struggle with simple ones. All teacher
    textbooks therefore emphasize, at least implicitly, that a teachers
    first concern in mixed-ability classrooms must be to ensure that
    students perceive each other as social equals.

    Looking in Classrooms reviews research on some of the familiar
    techniques for putting this into practice, such as cooperative
    learning and peer tutoring. These are strategies for having students
    interact across ability lines in ways that enhance the performance of
    low-ability students without stigmatizing them for their lesser
    achievement. Proponents cite experimental studies showing that these
    methods do indeed improve performance among low-achieving students,
    while somewhat enhancing, or at least not impairing, performance among
    more-able students. Only the fine print reveals that the experiments
    deal just with basic skills, not with higher levels of understanding.
    Like other textbooks, Looking in Classrooms mentions highly able
    students only when discussing how to lean on them for tutoring of
    their less-able classmates.

    In reality, these instructional strategies for mixed-ability classes
    preclude precisely what helps the more-able students most:
    accelerating their curriculum, allowing them to interact with their
    intellectual peers, and making them work hard. Accelerated and
    compacted curricula can double the speed at which highly able students
    advance, but such differential treatment is decried as elitist and
    exclusionary. As targeted instruction for gifted children is reduced
    in the public schools, their parents must increasingly rely on
    opportunities outside regular school settings. Summer programs for
    talented youngsters at universities, for example, are routinely able
    to advance the top one percent of 13-year-olds one full year in
    biology, chemistry, physics, Latin, or math in the space of only three
    weeks.

    Tracking and grouping persist in American schools despite the strong
    pressure for their elimination. Math and science teachers remain
    strong advocates of tracking, and many parents lobby hard for the
    programs they think their children need. Theres also significant
    pressure from above: College and university admissions offices want to
    be able to identify students who have taken demanding courses. And
    theres the inescapable reality that its very difficult to produce good
    results for any students when they are placed in heterogeneous
    classes. As James A. Kulik of the University of Michigan reported in
    the Handbook of Gifted Education (2003), On the basis of site visits,
    experts have concluded that untracking brings no guarantee of
    high-quality instruction for everyone but may instead lead all to a
    common level of educational mediocrity.

    Multiple intelligence theory is only the latest rationale for acting
    as if most children dont differ much in learning ability. An older
    approach, still widely embraced, is to accept IQ as a concept but act
    as if differences in IQ dont make much difference in the classroom.
    Education textbooks and journals in this vein speak only of
    exceptional versus regular students. So-called regular students are
    those who score between the upper threshold for mental retardation (IQ
    70) and the lower threshold for giftedness (IQ 130). That continuum
    includes 95 percent of students. A closer look at differences in
    intellectual functioning across the 60-point range illustrates how
    different educability actually is, even among the supposedly average.

    For example, individuals with IQs between 70 and 80 (but still above
    the threshold for mild retardation) require instruction that is highly
    structured, detailed, concrete, well sequenced, omits no intermediate
    steps, and links to what the individuals already know. They often need
    one-to-one supervision and hands-on practice to learn even simple
    procedures. As specialists in adult education explain, the material to
    be learned must be stripped of all nonessentials, including
    theoretical principles, and require only simple inferences. Any
    information, written or spoken, must be presented in small pieces with
    clear introductions and simple vocabulary. Because people with IQs
    below 80 (the 10th percentile) are difficult to train, federal law
    bars their induction into the military.

    Successively higher IQs are associated with better odds of learning
    readily from more demanding forms of instruction, learning more
    independently, and mastering increasingly abstract and multifaceted
    material. Individuals of average IQ (100) can master relatively large
    bodies of written and spoken knowledge and procedure, especially when
    it is presented to them in an organized manner that allows them
    practice and provides feedback. By IQ 120, individuals are more
    self-instructing and better able to develop and organize knowledge on
    their own. The complete instruction that is most helpful for low-g
    learners is dysfunctional for these high-g individuals. The latter
    easily fill in gaps in instruction on their own and benefit most from
    abstract, self-directed, incomplete instruction that allows them to
    assemble new knowledge and reassemble old knowledge in idiosyncratic
    ways. But such forms of instruction are dysfunctional for low-g
    learners, who are more likely to be confused than stimulated by its
    incompleteness, abstractness, and requirements for self-direction.

    As any teacher will attest, many other things besides g-level affect
    childrens learningillness, incentives, peer pressure,
    conscientiousness, parental support, familiarity with the language of
    instruction, and more. For these and other reasons, high g does not
    guarantee successor low g guarantee failure. Theres no question,
    however, that higher levels of g constitute a constant tailwind and
    lower levels a persistent headwind in cognitively demanding settings
    such as schools. Perhaps most important, g level affects what students
    are likely to learn with a reasonable expenditure of time and effort.
    Textbooks on instructional strategies rightly treat time as a precious
    commodity to be jealously guarded and wisely spent, and they note that
    slow students often need much more of it than others to learn the same
    material. Instruction must therefore be more tightly focused on what
    is most essential for them to learn.

    Although slow learners cannot be turned into fast learners, all
    students could learn much more than they now do. Students learn best
    and reap the most gratification for their efforts when instruction is
    targeted to their cognitive needs. Good targeting is all too rare,
    even in schools with ability grouping and curriculum tracking. As
    Looking in Classrooms laments, such adaptive instruction is regularly
    attacked as discriminatory because it means treating students
    differently. Its critics would rather give all students access to the
    high-status curricula and self-directed, constructivist learning
    activities that benefit bright students. But that path is far more
    likely to harm than to help these students, robbing them of the
    motivation to learn, depriving them of their full potential, and
    hampering their prospects in a world that increasingly requires (and
    rewards) well-educated people. Depriving faster learners of curricula
    that allow them to make the most of their abilities is likewise an
    injustice to them and to the society that stands to benefit from their
    eventual contributions. By denying the difficulties in accommodating
    intellectual difference, multiple intelligence theories may do little
    more than squander scarce learning time and significant opportunities
    for improvements in the quality of American schooling.

    The substantial heritability of intelligence has been a source of
    great controversyalbeit only outside the community of researchers who
    study the subject. But that element of heritability provides the very
    hope it is often said to obliterate. While it frustrates our efforts
    to raise IQ, it also greatly limits the harm that poor environments
    can do. Research roundly affirms what experience suggests: People with
    higher IQs have a remarkable ability to make their way out of even the
    most dire environments. This protection, along with the
    little-appreciated fact that the laws of genetics ensure that parents
    and children will tend to differ substantially in IQ, guarantees that
    talent will emerge from even the worst of environments, in turn
    ensuring considerable social mobility in any free society. Its not
    only the distribution of IQ that is helped by the laws of genetics.
    The mixture of genes from two parents creates traits in children that
    neither parent has. Heritability thus provides a very broad guarantee
    of difference and variety we would not have in a world where
    environment was all, a world that might leave humans free not only to
    create an egalitarian paradise but to forge the ultimate caste society
    of rich and poor.

    It has always been the task of Americas public schools to facilitate
    social mobility, and, historically, they have performed the job well.
    They should now turn their attention to optimizing the development of
    all children. For that to happen, well have to acknowledge that God or
    nature did not make us all equal intellectually. By embracing rather
    than rejecting the scientific knowledge about g, educators can develop
    curricula and classroom techniques that well serve the nations
    cognitively diverse students.

    Linda S. Gottfredson is a professor of education at the University of
    Delaware and an affiliated faculty member in its University Honors
    Program. She is the author of many articles on the role of
    intelligence differences in school, work, and everyday life, and the
    editor of several special journal issues on these topics, including an
    issue of Intelligence, Intelligence and Social Policy (1997).

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