Fortune - July 18, 1988
IT ALL ADDS UP
Commentary on The Mathematics Report Card, the latest quadrennial report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has been uniformly pessimistic. The gloom is unsurprising since (a) we are now conditioned to be downbeat about the educational attainments of America's kids, and (b) the report card itself repeatedly characterizes the findings as grim.
They are certainly that. The enormous nationwide effort to improve math education in the Eighties seems to have had only trivial effects, mostly involving low-level computational skills. In the 12th grade, American students taking college preparatory courses in math -- in effect our best high school mathematicians -- have average scores well below those of their counterparts in other industrialized countries. The report notes that as the kids make their way from the lower grades to the end of high school, they become progressively less able to cope with the math curriculum. Only about 6% of our 17-year-olds can handle what the report characterizes as multi-step problems. Sample stumbling block for the other 94%: ''Christine borrowed $850 for one year from the Friendly Finance Company. If she paid 12% simple interest on the loan, what was the total amount she repaid?'' (Answer: Friendly gets $952.)
Why are the results so dismal? Why do American kids do worse than those from other countries? The NAEP report dances all around this question but nowhere squarely confronts it. There are endless references implying that the U.S. educational system is somehow failing our youngsters: Their parents are less involved than are parents in Taiwan. There is a shortage of calculators in classrooms. There is insufficient opportunity for students to use math in real-world situations. But none of these seem persuasive -- andindeed none are pushed very hard -- as explanations for the failure. There is, as usual, no reference at all to a possibility that has been insistently noted in this space from time to time: American kids may be a lot less smart than our educational commentators, not to mention the country's assorted school systems, assume them to be.
While showing no interest in pursuing this line of inquiry, the authors of Report Card have included some evidence suggesting that mathematical achievement is in fact powerfully related to intelligence. The report notes at various points that Asian-Americans do better at math than whites, that whites do better than Hispanics, that Hispanics do better than blacks. The report naturally does not say so, but this is precisely the sequence you would expect from the respective groups' IQ averages.
One of these days the educational establishment will surely have to focus on the American IQ and where it's going. Not that the exercise figures to lift any gloom.
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Fortune - March 14, 1988
THE EMPEROR'S BRAIN
Still picking arguments with people who insist that deep down inside everybody is the same as everybody else, we come now to the slightly touchy subject of brainy Asian-Americans. Oddly enough, the subject is seasonal. Every year in the dead of winter, Westinghouse announces the winners in its annual science talent search, and every year it turns out that an extraordinary fraction of the winners -- high school students who have shown unusual creativity in science -- are kids of Oriental extraction. The subject has boiled over more than usual here in New York City, where the Benjamin N. Cardozo High School this year all by itself produced 11 of the country's 300 semifinalists, and all 11 turned out to be the sons or daughters of Asian immigrants. Weeks later, the New York Times is still running letters on the meaning of it all.
The letters, like the original reporting and an op-ed article, have several things in common: They basically express puzzlement over the Asian-American dominance. Some suggest, quite plausibly, that it may have something to do with family stability or with a cultural commitment to intellectual achievement. But they race off nervously any time they get close to the main and obvious reason for the dominance, which is that the Asian-American families are extra-smart. They have higher average IQs than other American families. There is abundant evidence, furthermore, that Oriental children in the U.S. and abroad have a special gift for spatial and mathematical thinking.
It is established, for example, that children in Japan are ahead of American children in mathematical understanding in kindergarten. In the first grade, Chinese children from Taiwan are also mathematically superior to their American counterparts. Details of this superiority have been published in several papers by professor Harold W. Stevenson and his colleagues at the University of Michigan. The papers show the Oriental kids increasing their edge over the Americans in subsequent grades, and not, apparently, because of higher educational standards. (The mathematical curricula seem about equal on average.) Stevenson believes that in some measure the edge grows because the Oriental kids work much harder.
And on average they are smarter. That is the message of most of the studies performed by Richard Lynn of the University of Belfast, who has tracked Oriental IQs in many different parts of the world and found them usually superior to those of Caucasians. With the American IQ average normalized at 100, Japanese in Hawaii average 108. (Lynn's latest estimate for Japan itself is 110.) In Singapore, Lynn found Chinese kids averaging 110 (vs. 96 for the Malays). Research in Hong Kong in the Sixties and Seventies generally showed native Chinese youth at about the same IQ level as the British, although the latter obviously came from a select group of families. Arthur Jensen of the University of California at Berkeley, who closely studied children in San Francisco's Chinatown in the early Seventies, show them superior to white children; beginning around the third grade, they show nonverbal scores averaging an extraordinary 110.
Among the letters generated by the news from Cardozo High School, our favorite was the one sent in by the 11 semifinalists themselves. They argued that their families were all different, that their Asian-ness was irrelevant, and that ''stereotyping'' of people like themselves is awful -- the stereotype being that they're smart and hardworking. One wonders if the 14 finalists from New Yo rk City will also write in. To be sure, their case would be more complicated, since three of them turn out not to be Asians.
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Fortune - October 12, 1987
Not all people are equally intelligent, and not all groups of people have the same average intelligence. Those statements are at once truisms and a center of raging controversy. They strike sparks because differences in intelligence lead to differences in pay and status, and therefore work against the ideal of equality, all of which leaves many Americans uneasy. The recent convention of the American Psychological Association featured an acrimonious debate on the ethics of studying these matters.
People who flinch from such studies are advised to steer clear of Why Humans Vary in Intelligence (Paideia, $18), by Seymour Itzkoff. The author, professor of education and child study at Smith College, is attempting something enormously ambitious. Although the book stands on its own legs, it is part of a multivolume project on the evolution of human intelligence over many millennia. Itzkoff is trying to make a coherent whole of evidence drawn not only from standard psychological sources but from paleontology, physical anthropology, neuroscience, and the emerging discipline of sociobiology.
The effort is not entirely successful. Itzkoff is a terrible writer. His book is disorganized, repetitious, often maddeningly obscure. Yet it is also fascinating. In assembling data from those diverse disciplines, the author has somehow put together a remarkably original guide to the present state of knowledge about human brainpower.
The book is strewn with arresting details. Among kids precocious in math, 20% are left-handed, which is twice the national average; the same group is five times as likely as a sample of average students to suffer from asthma and other allergies. As the grandfather of a 3-year-old who for some reason cannot read yet, I was also fascinated to learn that on tests of ''reading readiness,'' the single best predictor is not the child's mastery of letters but his ability to handle numbers. Apparent explanation: Numbers far more than letters make kids think, which is also required for reading.
Among the book's most gripping passages are some suggesting that researchers are at last closing in on the link between IQ test results and underlying neurological reality. For many years now, most serious students of intelligence tests have agreed that they were measuring something that was mostly heritable and ultimately rooted in the physical brain. (Like many other scholars, Itzkoff suggests that hereditary factors probably account for 70% to 80% of variability in IQ.) Until recently, however, it was hard to point to data linking test scores to observable activity in the brain.
Now such data are becoming available. Some studies, for example, have related IQ to electrical impulses given off by the brain -- its ''evoked potential.'' One study in Britain found strong correlations, some as high as 0.95, between certain tracings on the electroencephalograph and scores on several subtests of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (a standard IQ test). Plain implication: Your reasoning power depends heavily on the electrical power in the brain you inherited.
Comments on racial differences in intelligence are always guaranteed to provoke a row. In a chapter headed ''The Irrelevance of Race,'' Itzkoff labors to minimize the row by placing the data in a long-term evolutionary framework, but he has trouble stating plainly why his readers should think race irrelevant. He accepts data indicating that Japanese, Chinese, and Korean IQs are between four and nine points higher than those of white Americans -- asignificant difference. He also points to the average black-white gap of 15 points or so and suggests it may be widening.
While professional psychologists overwhelmingly accept the view of a heritable IQ, many Americans flee from this view. They flee because they think the view condemns them to believe that certain minorities are innately inferior. In fact, the idea of heritable IQs has no such implication, as Itzkoff repeatedly seems on the verge of explaining (he never quite makes it). What the idea does imply is that races or other gene pools will get lower IQs if, within the pool, fertility is greatest among those with the least intelligence. Heritability does not signify any irreversible disadvantage for members of the group.
The most controversial, and also most fascinating, material in Why Humans Vary in Intelligence is not about race but about sex. A main point: Women's IQ is much less variable than men's. Women and men average about the same, but the women's scores tend to cluster more clearly around the mean. This has the unfortunate implication -- especially unfortunate for a professor at all-female Smith College, one would imagine -- that at the highest intellectual levels, women will inevitably be underrepresented. (Minor consolation: They will also be underrepresented at the lowest levels.) Which presumably also means that, even in the absence of invidious discrimination, they will not get a proportional share of high-level, high-status jobs.
THE EXACT ratios are a matter of dispute. Itzkoff cites calculations suggesting that men may outnumber women by 2 to 1 at 130 IQ and over 5 to 1 at 145 IQ. Those ratios are higher than estimates elsewhere (Arthur Jensen guesses around 7 to 5 at 140 IQ and above), but the general point is well supported in the literature, as is Itzkoff's explanation of the lower female variability. He attributes it to the fact that women have one more X chromosome than men, and it serves as a source of stability, limiting extreme effects that are both desirable and undesirable.
Right now New York State is establishing a committee to deal with the regrettable fact that women's scores have been lower than men's on scholastic aptitude tests (which are, of course, taken mainly by above-average students). With no debate at all, the legislature seems to be requiring equal representation for women and men at all points on the bell curve. Perhaps the issue will be debated at next year's convention of the American Psychological Association.