The history of the bell curve: sorting and the idea of normal

Educational Theory

Volumn 58, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 63-82

  Fendler, Lynn ^a   Muzaffar, Irfan ^a  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 65249127463     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2007.0276.x     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Gerald W. Bracey, The Final Exam: A Study of the Perpetual Scrutiny of American Education (Bloomington, Indiana: Technos Press, 1995).
2. There has been vigorous debate since the publication of Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York and London: The Free Press, 1994). The literature in response to this book is so extensive that we will not repeat the criticisms or rejoinders in this essay. For a sampling from various sides of this debate, see Steven Fraser, ed., The Bell Curve Wars: Race, Intelligence, and the Future of America (New York: Basic Books, 1995);
3. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman, eds., The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Times Books, 1995);
4. Brian Beatty, http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/bellcurve.shtml; and Claudia Krenz, http://www.claudiax.net/bell.html.
5. Other purposes include preparing people for the workforce and educating citizens for a democratic society.
6. See, for example, Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893-1958 (New York: Routledge, 1986);
7. David F. Labaree, "Essay Review: Politics, Markets, and the Compromised Curriculum," Harvard Educational Review 57, no. 4 (1987): 483;
8. and Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
9. F. Allan Hanson, Testing Testing: Social Consequences of the Examined Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); and Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum.
10. See, for example, Basil Bernstein, "Class and Pedagogies: Visible and Invisible," in Education: Culture, Economy, Society, ed. Amy Stuart Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29-79;
11. and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
12. Ian Hacking calls this approach historical ontology: "By historical ontology I mean a description of how it is that local participation in education, as a growing imperative of the discourse on transnational human development, came into being." Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002).
13. Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (New York: Routledge, 1994).
14. Benjamin Bloom, "Mastery Learning," in Mastery Learning: Theory and Practice, ed. James H. Block (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 49.
15. Ibid., 47-63.
16. Ibid., 50.
17. Ibid., 48.
18. Betty Wallace and William Graves, The Poisoned Apple: The Bell-Curve Crisis and How Our Schools Create Mediocrity and Failure (New York: St. Martin's, 1995).
19. Even though this book engages thoughtfully with ideological, historical, and empirical data about educational success and failure, it is rarely cited in educational research. We suspect one of the reasons for this oversight is that the book is not written in an academic genre. It was cowritten by a practicing teacher and a journalist in a popular, vernacular style.
20. Wallace and Graves, The Poisoned Apple, 24.
21. David F. Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals," American Educational Research Journal 34, no. 1 (1997): 39-81.
22. Jeannie Oakes, Amy Stuart Wells, Makeba Jones, and Amanda Datnow, "Detracking: The Social Construction of Ability, Cultural Politics, and Resistance to Reform," Teachers College Record 98, no. 3 (1997): 484.
23. Ibid., 492.
24. On social melioration, see Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum. On democratic equality, see Labaree, "Essay Review." On social reconstructionism, see Ken Zeichner, "Teachers as Reflective Practitioners and the Democratization of School Reform," in Currents of Reform in Preservice Teacher Education, eds. Ken Zeichner, Mary Louise Gomez, and Susan Melnick (New York: Teachers College Press, 1996), 199-214.
25. Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods," 57-58.
26. Stephen M. Stigler, The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainly Before 1900 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986), 170. This work will be cited as HS in the text for all subsequent references.
27. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
28. Ibid., 106.
29. See, for example, Hacking, The Taming of Chance; Hanson, Testing Testing; and Johann Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, trans. Sheila Gogol (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
30. Karl Pearson, The History of Statistics in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Against the Changing Background of Intellectual, Scientific and Religious Thought: Lectures by Karl Pearson Given at the University College London During the Academic Sessions 1921-1933 (New York: Macmillan, 1978).
31. Ibid., 2.
32. See also Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970).
33. See, for example, Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory; and Victor L. Hilts, Statist and Statistician (New York: Arno Press, 1981). This rise of social theory was part of a large-scale modernization that also included the invention of the social sciences and the advent of the common school.
34. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 106-107.
35. Foucault, The Order of Things, 350-351.
36. In traditional Chinese lore, earlobe length is an indicator of longevity.
37. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 108.
38. See, for example, Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
39. and John M. O'Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism: American Psychology, 1870-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1985).
40. The logic of analogies is also related to commensuration, a process that involves using a common metric to compare apparently disparate phenomena. Commensuration is also a basis for bell-curve thinking, with scores on standardized tests providing the common metric for comparison between various apparently disparate categories of human beings. For a thorough discussion on commensuration as an instrument of social thought, see Wendy Nelson Espeland and Mitchell L. Stevens, "Commensuration as a Social Process," Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 313-343. For a discussion on commensurability in philosophy of natural sciences, see Thomas S. Kuhn, "Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability," PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 1982 (Philosophy of Science Association, 1983), 669-688.
41. See Hacking, The Taming of Chance, for a thorough discussion of the historical shift in the meaning of "normal."
42. Sarah Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2007), 11.
43. See, for example, Foucault, The Order of Things; Hacking, The Taming of Chance; Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory; Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (New York: Routledge, 1994);
44. and Johann Heilbron, Lars Magnusson, and Bjorn Wittrock, eds., The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750-1850 (Boston, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic, 1998).
45. Compare this stance to that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in which being educated was opposed to being a citizen: "If we have to combat either nature or society, we must choose between making a man or making a citizen. We cannot make both. There is an inevitable conflict of aims, from which come two opposing forms of education: the one communal and public, the other individual and domestic." Rousseau, The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau: Selections, trans. and ed. William Boyd (New York: Teachers College Press, 1956), 13.
46. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (1887; repr. London: Oxford University Press, 1996).
47. For an explanation of the connection between bell-curve thinking and polling practices, see "How Polls Work," available at http://www.notrain-nogain.org/Train/Res/Num/how.asp.
48. Igo, Averaged American, 285.
49. Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson, "Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African-Americans," Journal of Personality and Social Psychologyg 69, no. 5 (1995): 797-811.
50. Ian Hacking, "The Looping Effects of Human Kinds," in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed., Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 351-394.
51. Hacking, The Taming of Chance, 361.
52. Robert Castel, "From Dangerousness to Risk," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 281-298.
53. Ibid., 281 (emphasis in original).
54. Relevant to education, developmental psychology has its roots in the eugenics movement, although those ties have - understandably - been eliminated from many histories of developmental psychology.
55. See, for example, Ira Bretherton, "The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth," in A Century of Developmental Psychology, ed. Ross D. Parke, Peter A. Ornstein, John J. Rieser, and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1994), 431-471;
56. David Elkind, "David Elkind," in A History of Developmental Psychology in Autobiography, ed. John D. Hogan (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996), 71-83. For other kinds of histories of psychology,
57. see, for example, Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
58. Herman, The Romance of American Psychology; Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996);
59. O'Donnell, The Origins of Behaviorism; and Valerie Walkerdine, "Developmental Psychology and the Child-Centered Pedagogy: The Insertion of Piaget into Early Education," in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity, ed. Julian Henriques, Wendy Holloway, Cathy Urwin, Couze Venn, and Valerie Walkerdine (New York: Methuen, 1984), 154-210.
60. Castel, "From Dangerousness to Risk," 285.
61. Ibid., 282.
62. See also Hacking, The Taming of Chance; Thomas S. Popkewitz, A Political Sociology of Educational Reform: Power/Knowledge in Teaching, Teacher Education, and Research (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991);
63. and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990).
64. In Foucault's terms, discursive formation can be said to have crossed the threshold of formalization. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972).