<meta property="og:title" content="Tests, Labels, and Segregation in New York City" />

A Black girl sat in her Chicago high school classroom in 1920 and heard her teacher say that native-born white students were more intelligent than Black and immigrant students. The teacher claimed that there was proof, from a new test given to soldiers. “A race conscious Negro girl, one of the leaders of the class, objected to this remark,” but the teacher responded by showing the student tables with the test results. “With a brave look in her eyes,” the student told the teacher that she “did not believe that the figures were accurate.”¹

The girl told Horace Mann Bond, a Black scholar, about this encounter. And he reported it as evidence that “every Negro student” should “be in possession of every detail of the operation, use and origin of these tests, in order that he might better equip himself as an active agent against the insidious propaganda … which seeks to demonstrate that the Negro is intellectually and physically incapable of assuming the dignities, rights and duties which devolve upon him as a member of modern society.”²

A few years earlier and a few thousand miles away in New York City, educator Elizabeth Farrell was engaged in a different kind of debate about intelligence tests. Farrell ran New York City’s “ungraded classes,” which were segregated classes for students labeled with disabilities. Some of these students had intellectual or developmental disabilities. Farrell, like many of her non-disabled colleagues who shaped the education of Disabled students in US cities in the 1910s and 1920s, did think that intelligence tests were useful, but that educators could not make decisions on the basis of tests alone. They should remember that students did not necessarily perform well in uncomfortable test situations. And other sources of information about the student’s abilities or progress in school needed to be used in deciding whether a student should attend a segregated “ungraded class,” a regular class, or even be placed in a residential institution.³

Psychologists like Henry F. Goddard had far more confidence in the new tests. He used the tests to claim that tens of thousands more New York City students than had previously been identified had intellectual disabilities.⁴ Goddard implied that many New York City students who were in school did not deserve to be there.

Both the Chicago and New York debates show the growing power that the idea of intelligence had in the 1910s and 1920s. Intelligence was now an innate thing, something that existed inside a person regardless of their social context. And it could be tested, measured, and used to predict their future.⁵

New intelligence tests were celebrated by the era’s eugenics movement - or the movement for “good genes.” Eugenicists thought white northern European non-disabled people were superior, and they tried to control and limit the number of people who did not fit their “eugenic” ideal.⁶ Many Americans - Black people, Mexican-Americans, recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, and people with a range of disabilities - became targets of their policies.

Yet as we see in the case of the Chicago classroom, people resisted eugenicist ideas about intelligence. Scholars and high school students spoke up, and parents removed their children from institutions that they did not think were serving their children well or demanded changes in school policy.

All of this discussion about intelligence tests happened in the very same years when New York City gradually began to ensure that nearly all of its children were attending school. Compulsory attendance laws had been on the books since the 1890s, but they had many exceptions and little enforcement. Gradually, the laws tightened.⁷ And yet at exactly the same time, new ideas emerged to suggest that some students did not deserve to be in school. Many educators and communities kept pursuing the education they knew their children deserved, but claims about “intelligence” and tests to measure it proved to be an enduring tool of segregation in New York City schools.

Horace Mann Bond, “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” The Crisis 48, no. 2 (June, 1924): 61. ↩︎
Bond, “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda.” See also Alan Stoskopf, “An Untold Story of Resistance: African American Educators and IQ Testing in the 1920s and 1930s,” Rethinking Schools, accessed July 22, 2023, https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/an-untold-story-of-resistance/#8. ↩︎
Elizabeth Farrell, “A Study of the School Inquiry Report of the Ungraded Classes,” Psychological Clinic 8, no. 2 (April 15, 1914). ↩︎
James Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). ↩︎
Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 8; Keith Mayes, The Unteachables: Disability Rights and the Invention of Black Special Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023). ↩︎
”Eugenics and Physical Anthropology,” accessed July 22, 2023, https://understandingrace.org/history/science/eugenics-and-physical-anthropology-1890-1930/. See also the collection of relevant essays in “The Persistence of Race Science,” Undark, accessed July 22, 2023, https://race.undark.org. ↩︎
Moses Stambler, “The Effect of Compulsory Education and Child Labor Laws on High School Attendance in New York City, 1898-1917,” History of Education Quarterly 8, no. 2 (Summer, 1968): 189-214. Mayes, The Unteachables, links the expansion of compulsory education to the “invention of Black special education” in a national study. ↩︎