A Closer Look at the Standards for Recognizing Gifted Children

Intelligence is mostly hereditary. Standard IQ tests measure intelligence to a useful approximation. IQ is strongly correlated to success in school and on the job. Alternatives to standard IQ tests measure learned skills, e.g. “street smarts,” or qualities not generally understood as intelligence, e.g. leadership. Score distributions for the various ethnicities largely overlap, but they do not coincide. The greatest differences occur at either end of the distributions where retardation or genius shows up.

The policy implications of the foregoing are too gloomy for the radical egalitarians. It means that a society where positions of power, prestige and/or wealth are evenly distributed by ethnicity will not evolve on its own. They have resolved to make it happen, trashing whatever standards get in the way. They say “racism” is the reason for ethnic imbalances and denounce as “racist” whoever tries to uphold meritocratic ideals or who sees the individual, rather than the group, as the bearer of legal rights.

The Times has lit the fuse to today’s triumphant racists and to the black and Latino pressure groups (“Big Racial Gap Persists in O.C. GATE Programs,” March 21, 22). They will descend on the GATE administrators, who have no constituency and who depend on the goodwill of the Legislature, and cow them into warping GATE’s standards, as has already been done at the University of California.

The curriculum must be dumbed down lest the underqualified suffer blows to their self-esteem, the cardinal sin in education today. What began as a program to challenge gifted kids will become another exercise in multicultural awareness.

NED McCUNE

Costa Mesa