Jewish "I.Q." vs. "The Mothers of Brooklyn" (Anna)

In my comments on Ruchira's post on IQ below, I noted in passing Stanley Kaplan's embodiment of the contradiction between the rewards, in aptitude test results, paid by effort and sociological factors, and the claims aptitude tests make to predictive value or to gaging innate aptitude; and the irony of that contradiction with respect to arguments about innate Jewish high I.Q. As with many of my bright ideas, the point of my comment is more articulately fleshed out by someone else.  And as is also often true, the someone else who said it better is Malcolm Gladwell.

In his 2001 "Examined Life" piece in the New Yorker on "What Stanley H. Kaplan taught us about the SAT", Gladwell looks at the S.A.T.'s original design, in the mid-1940s, as a standardized test of innate aptitude, like an I.Q. test, and how Kaplan revolutionized educational testing by undermining that claim:

Unlike existing academic exams, [the S.A.T.] was intended to measure innate ability--not what a student had learned but what a student was capable of learning--and it stated clearly in the instructions that "cramming or last-minute reviewing" was pointless. Kaplan was puzzled. In Flatbush you always studied for tests. He gave [a student who had sought his tutoring help] pages of math problems and reading-comprehension drills. He grilled her over and over, doing what the S.A.T. said should not be done. And what happened? On test day, she found the S.A.T. "a piece of cake," and promptly told all her friends, and her friends told their friends, and soon word of Stanley H. Kaplan had spread throughout Brooklyn.

Gladwell also discusses the explicitly Anti-Semitic use in the early to mid-20th century of aptitude tests, which were designed to weed out the hard-working, robotic immigrants who were perceived as stealing college positions and jobs from meritorious native-born Americans (negatively employed "positive" stereotypes that should be familiar to anyone sensitive to similar claims made about Asian immigrants today):

In proving that the S.A.T. was coachable, Stanley Kaplan did something else, which was of even greater importance. He undermined the use of aptitude tests as a means of social engineering. In the years immediately before and after the First World War, for instance, the country's élite colleges faced what became known as "the Jewish problem." They were being inundated with the children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. These students came from the lower middle class and they disrupted the genteel Wasp sensibility that had been so much a part of the Ivy League tradition. They were guilty of "underliving and overworking." In the words of one writer, they "worked far into each night [and] their lessons next morning were letter perfect." They were "socially untrained," one Harvard professor wrote, "and their bodily habits are not good." But how could a college keep Jews out? Columbia University had a policy that the New York State Regents Examinations--the statewide curriculum-based high-school-graduation examination--could be used as the basis for admission, and the plain truth was that Jews did extraordinarily well on the Regents Exams. One solution was simply to put a quota on the number of Jews, which is what Harvard explored. The other idea, which Columbia followed, was to require applicants to take an aptitude test. According to Herbert Hawkes, the dean of Columbia College during this period, because the typical Jewish student was simply a "grind," who excelled on the Regents Exams because he worked so hard, a test of innate intelligence would put him back in his place. "We have not eliminated boys because they were Jews and do not propose to do so," Hawkes wrote in 1918: We have honestly attempted to eliminate the lowest grade of applicant and it turns out that a good many of the low grade men are New York City Jews. It is a fact that boys of foreign parentage who have no background in many cases attempt to educate themselves beyond their intelligence. Their accomplishment is over 100% of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition. I do not believe however that a College would do well to admit too many men of low mentality who have ambition but not brains."

Gladwell describes how immigrant Jews like Kaplan overcame this barrier not by proving their innate intellectual superiority, as Murray et al. would seem to have it, but by defeating the underlying assumption of the importance and predictive value of tested innate ability:

These students faced a system designed to thwart the hard worker, and what did they do? They got together with their pushy parents and outworked it.  Kaplan says that he knew a "strapping athlete who became physically ill before taking the S.A.T. because his mother was so demanding." There was the mother who called him to say, "Mr. Kaplan, I think I'm going to commit suicide. My son made only a 1000 on the S.A.T." "One mother wanted her straight-A son to have an extra edge, so she brought him to my basement for years for private tutoring in basic subjects," Kaplan recalls. "He was extremely bright and today is one of the country's s most successful ophthalmologists." Another student was "so nervous that his mother accompanied him to class armed with a supply of terry-cloth towels. She stood outside the classroom and when he emerged from our class sessions dripping in sweat, she wiped him dry and then nudged him back into the classroom." Then, of course, there was the formidable four-foot-eight figure of Ericka Kaplan, granddaughter of the chief rabbi of the synagogue of Prague. "My mother was a perfectionist whether she was keeping the company books or setting the dinner table," Kaplan writes, still in her thrall today. "She was my best cheerleader, the reason I performed so well, and I constantly strove to please her." What chance did even the most artfully constructed S.A.T. have against the mothers of Brooklyn?

I highly recommend reading Gladwell's full article, which is broader than these extracts would suggest, nuanced, and well-worth a read.

   

Comments

[Ruchira]

This is probably the point that Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University, the third participant at the AEI forum tried to make against the claims of Murray and Entine.

[Anna]

True, to a certain extent, but I, and Gladwell's article, question what "smart" means, which according to the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, Zoloth does not:

"Brought in to rebut the two scholars, Laurie Zoloth of Northwestern University floated an alternative notion: that 'Jews are smart because we value learning.'"

What I (and Gladwell) ask is, what does "smart" mean? I would agree with Zoloth only if what's she's trying to say is "Jews succeed at tests and in professions that reward learning because we value learning."

As Milbank points out:

"Left unchallenged was the question of whether Jews are indeed smarter than others -- even though it would have only required a walk down the hall to the office of new AEI visiting fellow Paul Wolfowitz, whose leadership on the Iraq war and conflicts of interest as head of the World Bank demonstrate that Jews are capable of questionable judgment."

Milbank's point is one I similarly made with my quip (in my comments to your original post) about my doltish Hebrew school classes. There are bright and less bright people in every group, and it is both ethically and factually wrong to make assumptions, good or bad, about a person's aptitude based on their ethnic identity. I don't, though, think it wrong to guess that a disproportionate number of those painfully dull Hebrew school classmates went on to become lawyers and doctors, for cultural reasons, just as a disproportionate number of my not-necessarily bright and not-necessarily Jewish, but affluent, private high school classmates went on to take professional jobs, because money, like those cultural reasons, is also a predictor of academic success. The character trait of inexplicable personal drive or competitiveness (separate from intelligence) can be another, and there are a number of others, but "smart" seems like a pretty reductive way to describe any of them.

[Ruchira]

You are absolutely right. Which is why I squirm when I hear the same song sung by and about Indians, Koreans and the Chinese in America (I am leaving out the Vietnamese and Cambodians who form a much more diverse economic group) who culturally and economically, compare more closely with American Jews than with the general population.

[razib]

even if the average ashkenazi jew has an IQ of 115, that's pretty dull in my book. so we shouldn't make too much of averages. the key is that the shift in mean produces huge imbalances at the tails, 3 or 4 standard deviations above the norm. i don't buy the idea that test prep invalidates any cognitive aptitude. most people i know who took test prep improved some, but there is only some elasticity to this. people don't go from the 40th to the 90th percentile, they go from the 70th to the 85th (especially on math from what my friends who have taught for kaplan courses tell me). the old SAT was a highly "g-loaded" test. that is, it has a very strong correlation with other intelligence tests. certainly preparation and mindset matter, but they give returns on the margins (and those margins do matter!).

[ernie]

Imagine trying to make an argument for innately high white IQs, or low black ones. I know it's a trite reminder, but so was your mother telling you not to play with matches. This half-Hebrew is sick to death of anything racist by Jews being Kosher and anyone else playing the game being a hater. Long live Orwell!!

[Anna]

I agree that it's still a useful reminder, Ernie, which is why I was inspired to post on the subject. This half-Hebrew is pretty sick of this stuff, too. We should know better.