1 Cravens, Hamilton The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia, 1978), 249–50; John Dewey, “Mediocrity and Individuality,” New Republic, 6 Dec. 1922, 35; Walter Lippmann, “A Future for the Tests,” New Republic, 29 Nov. 1922, 10. For a discussion of I.Q. testing by teachers and administrators in England, see Gillian Sutherland, “Measuring Intelligence: English Local Education Authorities and Mental Testing, 1919–1939,” in The Meritocratic Intellect: Studies in the History of Education Research, ed. J. V. Smith and D. Hamilton (Aberdeen, Scotland, 1980), 79–95. Mental testing challenged English concepts of class, rather than race, at a time when England had few nonwhite residents.Google Scholar

2 Tyack, David B. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 208–16; Tyack uses examples from a few testing programs, but he relies on the views of the schools’ officials and not on those of classroom teachers. Clarence J. Karier, “Testing for Order and Control in the Corporate Liberal State,” in Clarence J. Karier, Paul C. Violas, and Joel Spring, Roots of Crisis: American Education in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1973), 108–37; Karier relies on the work of well-known psychologists Lewis Terman, Edward R. Thorndike, Henry H. Goddard, among others, but does not consider what took place in the classroom. Paula Fass, “The IQ: A Cultural and Historical Framework,” American Journal of Education 88(Aug. 1980):431–58; Fass criticizes I.Q. testing on a broad level but does not investigate a particular program. Gilbert Gonzales, “The System of Public Education and Its Function within Chicano Communities, 1920–1931” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1974); Gonzales draws different conclusions from many of the sources. Richardo Romo, East Los Angeles: History of a Barrio (Austin, Tex., 1983), 137; Romo writes that I.Q. tests were “generally administered in English to Mexican children,” but he neglects to add that often the testers administered tests in Spanish.Google Scholar

3 A study of the New York City schools, by Leila Zenderland, presents complementary information. Leila Zenderland, “Psychological Expertise and Public Education: The Battle over Intelligence Testing in New York City, 1910–1915” (Paper presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, April 1985).Google Scholar

4 Bean, Walton and Rawls, James J. California: An Interpretive History (New York, 1983), 264; Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, eds., Handbook of Settlements (New York, 1911), 153–57.Google Scholar

5 Judith Rosenberg Raftery, “The Invention of Modern Early Schooling: Los Angeles, 1885–1941” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles), 7–43. The theme of Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order is particularly applicable to the changing atmosphere of Los Angeles during these years. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

6 The 1920 U.S Census notes the number of Mexicans in Los Angeles at 21,653, an increase from 5,632 in 1910. Many scholars find these figures low, but they indicate the dramatic rise in Mexican population in the ten-year period. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census, vol. 2, Population (Washington D.C., 1920), 731, Thirteenth Census, vol. 1, Population (Washington, D.C., 1910),855. See Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrio in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 200-201. For a discussion of the agricultural interests recruiting Mexican workers, see Mark Reisler, By the Sweat of Their Brows: Mexican Immigrant Labor in the United States, 1900-1940 (Westport, Conn., 1976). Los Angeles Board of Education Nationality or Racial Survey, 1938, Office of the Secretariat, Los Angeles Board of Education.Google Scholar

7 Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 6 (1956-60), s.v. “Lewis Madison Terman.” Lewis M. Terman et al., Intelligence Tests and School Reorganization (Yonkerson-Hudson, N.Y., 1922); Los Angeles Board of Education, Department of Psychology and Educational Research Bulletin, Sept. 1928, 13. (Cited hereafter as Bulletin.) Sutherland had been brought from Yale University to become director of Psychology and Educational Research.Google Scholar

8 Kevles, Daniel J. “Testing the Army's Intelligence: Psychologists and the Military in World War I,“ Journal of American History 55 (Dec. 1968):565–81.Google Scholar

9 The earliest work in achievement tests was done by E. L. Thorndike. Achievement tests ran the gamut: arithmetic, first introduced in 1908; spelling, 1910; handwriting and drawing, 1913; reading, 1914; and language ability, 1916.Google Scholar

10 Terman, Lewis Intelligence of School Children (Boston, 1919), 73. The concept of intelligence quotient had been used by the German psychologist, William Stern, but Terman introduced the term into the language. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Use of Human Heredity (New York, 1985), 79.Google Scholar

11 Tyack, One Best System, 191. Tyack notes that experts hired to make school surveys published 67 of them between 1910 and 1919 and 114 between 1920 and 1927. His term “administrative progressives” aptly describes Los Angeles school people. Los Angeles Board of Education, Minutes to the Board, 18:399. Walter Jessup and Albert Shiels, Report of the Advisory Committee to the Board of Education (Los Angeles, 1915). In 1916 Jessup became president of the State University of Iowa.Google Scholar

12 Cremin, Lawrence The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957 (New York, 1961), 200. In Cremin's opinion, Bobbitt typified the change in progressive education in the 1920s. Tyack, One Best System, 144, 163.Google Scholar

13 Bulletin, 4 Dec. 1922, 4, 20 Nov. 1922, 2.Google Scholar

14 The Nation, 17 Oct. 1928, cited in Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists (New York, 1977), 174; Lawrence Cremin showed the relationship of progressive education to science when he wrote, “If science promised nothing else, it promised efficiency; this ultimately was the plum the educational scientists dangled before the taxpaying public.” Cremin, Transformation of the School, 192.Google Scholar

15 Los Angeles Board of Education, Reports of the Board of Education, 1900–1901, 103.Google Scholar

16 Hines, Harlan C. “What Los Angeles Is Doing with the Results of Testing,“ Journal of Educational Research 5 (Jan. 1922):45–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Ibid., 47.Google Scholar

18 Bulletin, 15 June 1925, 8.Google Scholar

19 Ibid. Rudolph Pintner authored several intelligence and performance tests, but in 1924 Raybold most likely administered the standard Pintner-Cunningham. Pintner had used his Pinter Non-language Group Test on foreign children and published the results in 1922. Pintner and Ruth Keller, “Intelligence Test of Foreign Children,” Journal of Educational Psychology 13(Apr. 1922):214–22. In 1930 he published the Pintner Non-language Primary Mental Tests for use on deaf children in kindergarten through second grade with directions administered in pantomime, and he established the test's validity by correlations with the Stanford-Binet and the Pintner-Cunningham. Rudolph Pintner, Non-language Primary Mental Tests (New York, 1930).Google Scholar

20 Raybold expressed surprise that the San Fernando students understood more English than the counselors imagined, and yet, instead of taking this new-found information and using it in a constructive manner, the testers misinterpreted it. The children probably were what educators now call “limited English speakers,” which means that they had an English vocabulary of about one hundred words.Google Scholar

21 Bulletin, 2 Oct. 1925, 12–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 In 1935 Hershel T. Manuel, professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas, published his findings on the “Spanish and English Editions of the Stanford-Binet in Relation to the Abilities of Mexican Children” in the university's Bulletin. Manuel's interest in school performances of children of Mexican heritage in Texas had made him sensitive to some of the difficulties the children had in the often hostile environment of public schools. Manuel and his staff, including George I. Sanchez, one of the first Mexican Americans to criticize the conclusions drawn from conventional testing, had rejected the two commonly used Spanish translations of the 1916 Stanford Revision because neither fit the needs of their subjects. They felt that their translation closely followed the English version, but they allowed for some changes. Because the two languages were not always parallel, some of the idioms differed, and their translation better fit the dialect used by Mexicans living in Texas. The Texas University staff administered the Spanish and English editions of the Stanford-Binet in 1931–32 to Spanish-speaking children in San Antonio. The findings reinforced the assumptions made by Los Angeles school people on the relationships among such factors as intelligence, language ability, socioeconomics, and years spent in school. In most cases, the Spanish version yielded higher mental ages and intelligence quotients than did the English edition. In grades two to five, the average I.Q. was 82.5 on the Spanish edition and 80.5 on the English. After careful analysis, Manuel concluded that the lower scores represented a lack of training or experience. He speculated: “On account of their generally low cultural level and their retardation in school their experiences are greatly restricted. It is possible that this is reflected in such tests as the giving of differences between a president and a king and perhaps even in arranging the weights…. The parents of 10 out of 14 children in the fifth grade said that their children had never had toys such as blocks or puzzles.” Hershel T. Manuel, “Spanish and English Editions of the Stanford-Binet in Relation to the Abilities of Mexican Children,” University of Texas Bulletin, 22 Aug. 1935, 30.Google Scholar

23 Bulletin, 2 Oct. 1925, 13.Google Scholar

24 Ibid. Until at least 1931, the schools continued to use translated tests. See Bulletin, 5 Jan. 1931, 4.Google Scholar

25 In the Bulletin Heim stated, “language difficulty is often indicative of mental deficiency,” Bulletin, 2 Oct. 1925, 13.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., Dec. 1925, 9–12.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., Dec. 1926, 10–15.Google Scholar

28 Ibid., 13.Google Scholar

29 Ibid.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., 15.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., Feb. 1928, 13–15; for a discussion of matriculation of Italian and Jewish students in Providence, Rhode Island, public schools during this period see Joel Perlman, “Who Stayed in School? Social Structure and Academic Achievement in the Determination of Enrollment Patterns, Providence, Rhode Island, 1880–1925,” Journal of American History 27 (Dec. 1985):588–614.Google Scholar

32 Bulletin, Sept. 1928, 10–12.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., Mar. 1929, 6–8.Google Scholar

34 Ibid., Nov. 1931, 40–42.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., Mar. 1929, 8.Google Scholar

36 Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census, vol. 2, Population, 185, Fourteenth Census, vol. 3, Population, 125, Fifteenth Census, vol. 3, Population (Washington, D.C., 1930), 287, Sixteenth Census, vol. 2, Population (Washington, D.C., 1940), 132. The sixteenth census records the black population as 63, 774.Google Scholar

37 DeGraaf, Lawrence “Negro Migration to Los Angeles, 1930–1950,“ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1962); and idem, “The City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 39 (Aug. 1970):323–52.Google Scholar

38 Bulletin, 12 Nov. 1923, 1–8; American blacks sometimes, but not always, surprised the examiners. In a 1924–25 Massachusetts report, black students scored higher than Portuguese children. As editor of American Ethnic Groups, Thomas Sowell noted that in Massachusetts schools with mixed ethnic populations of French-Canadians, Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, blacks had the highest percentage of I.Q. scores over 120. Thomas Sowell, ed., American Ethnic Groups (Washington, D.C., 1978), 207–8.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., Sept. 1931, 65–70.Google Scholar

40 Commodore, Wynn ed., Negro Who's Who in California ([Los Angeles, 1948]) 128; Irving C. Hendrick, principle investigator, “Public Policy toward the Education of Non-White Minority Group Children in California, 1849–1970” (Unpublished Report, National Institute of Education Project No. NE-G-003-0082, University of California, Riverside, 1975). Whitaker recommended encouraging talented blacks rather than dissuading them. She found the school's practice of admonishing bright blacks against advancing academically one of the “most reprehensible … to be found among educators.” Hazel G. Whitaker, “A Study of Gifted Negro Children in the Los Angeles City Schools” (M.A. thesis, University of Southern California, 1931), 82.Google Scholar

41 Some of the classes fitted blacks into subservient occupations; for example, no other high school except Jefferson offered vocational training to become a maid. For a comprehensive account of black school segregation see Hendrick, “Public Policy toward the Education of Non-White Minority Group Children in California,” and Bessie Averne McClenahan, The Changing Urban Neighborhood (Los Angeles, 1929), 92. Community groups pressured the board through their petitions; see Los Angeles Board of Education Minutes, 21 July 1921, 433. Also see, David Ment, “Patterns of Public School Segregation, 1900–1940: A Comparative Study of New York City, New Rochelle, and New Haven,” in Schools in Cities: Consensus and Conflict in American Education, ed. Ronald K. Goodenow and Diane Ravitch (New York, 1983), 67–110.Google Scholar

42 Bulletin, Jan. 1932, 65–70; Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, vol. 3, part 1, Population, 266. The Japanese community had grown from just a few at the turn of the century to over 35,000 in 1930.Google Scholar

43 High School Teachers’ Association and Principals’ Club, Los Angeles School Journal, 17 Jan. 1927, 30.Google Scholar

44 Ibid., 27 Apr. 1925, 34–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45 Los Angeles Examiner, 27 May 1927.Google Scholar

46 U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Education, “The Education of Spanish Speaking Children in Five Southwestern States,” by Anne Reynolds, Bulletin 7 (Washington D.C., 1933), 46–47.Google Scholar

47 Ibid., 46–47. Reynolds may have been familiar with the work of educators at the University of Texas.Google Scholar

48 Tyack, One Best System, 164 180.Google Scholar

49 Minutes of the Board of Education, 31:433.Google Scholar

50 Bulletin, 12 Nov. 1923, 2, 3.Google Scholar

51 Gonzales, Gilbert G. “The System of Public Education and Its Function within Chicano Communities, 1920–1930“ (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1974).Google Scholar