Radiolab - G: The Miseducation of Larry P

Episode Date: June 7, 2019

Are some ideas so dangerous we shouldn’t even talk about them? That question brought Radiolab’s senior editor, Pat Walters, to a subject that at first he thought was long gone: the measuring of human intelligence with IQ tests. Turns out, the tests are all around us. In the workplace. The criminal justice system. Even the NFL. And they’re massive in schools. More than a million US children are IQ tested every year. We begin Radiolab Presents: “G” with a sentence that stopped us all in our tracks: In the state of California, it is off-limits to administer an IQ test to a child if he or she is Black. That’s because of a little-known case called Larry P v Riles that in the 1970s … put the IQ test itself on trial. With the help of reporter Lee Romney, we investigate how that lawsuit came to be, where IQ tests came from, and what happened to one little boy who got caught in the crossfire. This episode was reported and produced by Lee Romney, Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters. Music by Alex Overington. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Elie Mistal, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Amanda Stern, Nora Lyons, Ki Sung, Public Advocates, Michelle Wilson, Peter Fernandez, John Schaefer. Lee Romney’s reporting was supported in part by USC’s Center for Health Journalism. Radiolab’s “G” is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-S. See? See?

All right. Hello. Hey. How you doing? I'm doing. Maybe just say who you are real quick before we start. Pat Walters. I'm a senior editor here.

Excellent. So where do we start? I mean, do you want to tell me how you got into all this? Yeah. So we're doing this series, and this all started for me, or I got thinking about the thing we're about to talk about a lot because of this moment several months ago where I sort of got caught between two of my closest friends. I got caught just, I get caught between them all the time. It's really hard. It's really hard.

Political caught? Yeah. So friend number one is this guy, I'd call him a bit of a. contrarian politically. And we ended up getting in a few arguments about this guy named Jordan Peterson. It's precisely the sort of danger that people who are really looking for trouble. Who you probably know, he's a public figure.

Public figure, Canadian psychologists, who has gotten, he said a lot of things that are very controversial about gender and race. Yeah, I think the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible. Like, he thinks white privilege is a myth, and he said we should somehow enforce monogamy. He's sort of like a man's movement. He's big with dudes. He's really big with white dudes. And this friend of mine is a white dude.

And so we were arguing about some things. Jordan Peterson had said that my friend had liked. And at one point, he said to me, he kind of called me out. He was like, you've never even listened to the guy talk. Like, you were having all these arguments about his ideas. And you've never even listened to him. So I was like, okay. Fair point.

That's fair. And so I decided I would listen to him. and then enter friend number two. We're hanging out a couple days later, and I told her I'm having a fight with friend number one. Again, he wants me to listen to this guy, Jordan Peterson. I told him I'd do it just to be fair. And she got this look on her face and was like,

why would you do that? And then she said this thing to me that really stuck with me afterwards, and she said, his ideas are dangerous. And I remember thinking, like, what makes an idea dangerous? Even stepping beyond politics, thinking about science or thinking about the law or all these sort of realms of ideas, what makes one so dangerous or threatening or risky that we shouldn't even talk about it? And so I decided to have a staff meeting with all of the radio lab.

people and I asked everyone to bring their most dangerous idea. Just as a thought experiment. People brought all kinds of weird stuff and I have a... I remember there's some fights at that meeting. There were some fights, yeah. Someone was like, maybe there's one species that we should just like agree we're going to let go. We only have a limited amount of time, energy and money. Stop worrying about the elephants.

Let them all die. And we're going to just focus on other things. A soft one. Recycling is pointless. That's probably just true. Someone brought, like, the idea that boys are better at math than girls. Right. A female staff member brought that one in because she heard it from her daughter's math teacher.

That's crazy that people think that still. There was the idea that breast cancer screening is pointless. There was something about a law in Nebraska that allowed you to drop off a baby that you didn't want. Right. God is dead, assisted suicide, psychiatric euthanasia. One producer brought a book that some guy had written, argument. that, like, mass incarceration is a tragedy,

and a solution would be, instead of putting people in prison, we should bring back public whippings. So, like, instead of... That's what it was. That's being sent to prison. That's when things devolved a tiny bit. Yeah.

But before they did, more than one person brought the same idea. And this idea really stuck in my head. Like, a group of us kind of became obsessed with it. And that's the idea that we decided to base this series on. And I'm not going to tell you what it is yet.

All right. All right, I'm Chad. I'm Boomrod. This is Radio Lab. Over the next five episodes, we're going to turn things over to our senior editor, Pat Walters, who's going to explore this mysterious, dangerous idea in all kinds of weird places. We're calling this series, and this will make sense in a little bit. We're calling it G. There's nothing I love more than picking the lint off myself.

Wow. It's like a little game built into my clothing. You're so easy to please. Before we get started, I should say I produced this whole series with Rachel Cusick. She's been a true partner on the whole project, so you'll be hearing from her a bunch too. And this first episode began with a discovery that she made one day when she was looking around on the Internet. One of my favorite pages is Today I Learned. I do love Today I Learned.

I love a good... It's amazing. If you don't know, this is a section of Reddit. And so I went there, I'm scrolling, like, just the general page. And then I see a Today I learned headline that kind of stopped me in my tracks. And I'm just going to read it. Okay. Hold on it's very small font.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And it says, TIL, today I learned, that it is illegal in the state of California to administer an IQ test to a child if he or she is black, even when dispensed by a school psychologist as part of a professional assessment. Wait, it says it's illegal to give an IQ test to a black. kid in California? Yeah, that's what it said. Do you click on it? I totally click on it.

Okay. Because I'm looking to find out that it's fake for sure. Yeah. So I start reading the comments. Mm-hmm. And they're really vile, very racist. They mostly came from a group of people who call themselves race realists. And those are people who basically say, let's just all agree that white people are inherently

more intelligent than black people. Okay, so you see these responses. Yeah. And I'm like, this black kids can't. take IQ testing can't be real. Whoa. Like my head was spinning for a little while. I'm like, yo!

But it is. This is for real, son. After Rachel found that website, we started calling around asking people about this, and one of the first people we talked to is this guy. His name is Brandon Gamble. I'm banging on the table. I'm so excited about this. He's the dean of student success

at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama. But back in the mid-90s, Brandon had just gotten a job as a school psychologist in Long Beach, California. First day in the job, I got like on a nice white shirt, it was short sleeves and a tie. And on this first day, his two supervisors, they took him aside into an office and told him about this thing called the Larry P. rule. I was like, who's Larry? And why should I be concerned about that? And my supervisor, he was like, well, like his affect changed. And he was like,

oh, man, well, it basically says that, and he's kind of dancing. around it. But he's like, oh, yeah, because of Larry P, we can't give IQ tests with African-American students. And are these two white men that are telling you this? Yes, they are. Yeah, they are. And then they kind of look to me like, well, what do you think? It, like, put us in kind of an awkward, like, up until that moment, they're my supervisor. Now they're at a loss as to what to do and talk about. Eventually, he says, they pulled out a big three-ring binder, opened it to a section in the middle. You know, Roman numal 4, page 2. And they show them a list of about 20 different an IQ tests that he was not allowed to give to black kids.

And I'm reading this stuff and I'm freaked out. Can I just ask a basic question? IQ tests. People still use IQ tests? Well, like you. You know, I thought they were something that had been tossed out years ago. It's a real beauty. I mean, of course, you still hear IQ tests talked about by...

Seriously, low IQ person. President Trump. You're going to have a child. Jordan Peterson. You want the child to have an IQ of 65 or 145. Decide. But when we started looking into it, it quickly became clear that IQ tests are kind of all over the place. That aptitude tests are the single best predictor of job performance.

Thousands of companies use them to pick employees. Every applicant entering the military has to take an ASVAB test. Every branch of the military uses them. They're used in the justice system. If you are past the 70 mark, you are considered smart enough to face the death penalty. Test takers have 12 minutes to answer 50 questions. Even in football. At the NFL combine.

And they're kind of massive in schools. More than a million kids get IQ tested every year. They're used mainly to figure out which kids will get into gifted programs and which kids will get special ed services. But in California, if your kid is black, they almost definitely won't get one. And it's all because of this Larry P thing? Yeah. So then who's Larry P?

Yeah, who's Larry P? Okay, so let me bring in Lee Romney. I'm an education reporter for KALW radio. And last year, she got kind of obsessed with that question. Of course, Larry P. is a case. A lawsuit. But the problem was, the guy at the

center of that case, Larry P., that was a pseudonym. And the actual guy, whoever he was, had basically vanished. No one had heard from him in about 40 years. But Lee was able to track him down in a small neighborhood just outside Seattle.

Yeah, I knocked on the door and he came and I And I said, hi. Hi. Hi. I'm Lee. I'm Daryl. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Turns out his name is Daryl Lester.

Welcome. I warned you guys that I'd have these little things on. Oh, okay. Yeah, thanks so much. He's about 60 years old now. Lawsuit happened back in the 1970s. And he was very surprised that this reporter had showed up wanting to talk to him about something that had happened back when he was like 10.

through me a loop, but it was happened so many years ago. You want to sit down over here? We can. Can we turn off the, um, yeah, the sound just because it makes it hard to, um, whenever there's a song or because sometimes I think, oh, it's so nice. So Lee and Daryl sat down in the living room and Lee asked him to tell his story from the beginning. Starts back in the 1960s. Okay, so maybe go back a little. So you're from, you guys are from Georgia.

Yeah. Where in Georgia did you grow up? Marietta. With how many brothers and sisters? Four brothers and my mom lost her only daughter. So she ended up with five boys. I am the youngest. Story begins in 1965.

In that year, Daryl's mom... Your mom was she working? She's a nurse. She decided to take the whole family, she and her five boys, and moved them to San Francisco because she wanted to get away from segregation. And this was at a time when the civil rights movement is like...

We was there doing the 60s. Yeah. At its peak. And, man, it was so gorgeous there during this 60s. That was a gorgeous city. And little Daryl is suddenly in this, like, radically different world. Yeah, he was in it just a much more diverse place. I had some nice good white buddies.

My white buddy, his name was Tom. Yeah. Man played on the 49ers. That was our football team. And every day. We do our work and then he'll ride his bike over to my house. And I get on the back of his bike and we ride the football practice. So they were, you know, they were tight.

It was just a whole change of atmosphere. Darrell even remembers this one time when he and his brother went to this festival. It was a, it was in the goal. Golden Gate Park. On Saturday, January 14th, on the Polo Grounds in Golden Gate Park, me and my brother went to it. We were kids. A human B-In took place. It was a gathering of the tribes, a gathering of people. And I remember the police picking us up, putting us on the horse.

And he got to ride this horse all around the park. I remember all of them. So everything was going pretty well for Daryl. except for school. We lived on that little slanted street like hill light, and then if you walk down the block and turn right, it's a steep hill. A real steep hill.

You go up that hill, and the school was on top of the hill there. That was the first school I went to when we first got there. And I stayed in trouble. It was terrible. The kids was just, just way too fast, coming from the country, come from Georgia. He said he got teased and he said he would just have these outbursts.

And then I would come home and I tell him, I don't want to go to school. You know, I just had enough. She said, no, you're going to school. You're going to go and you're going to learn. So he's having a little bit of trouble. What grade were you in then? First grade. And then one day in the first grade, teacher grabs Daryl and a couple other kids,

pulls him out of class and walks him down the hallway to this room. Do you remember what kinds of questions they may be asking you for the test? They did it all. They did it all of us.

Daryl's a little fuzzy on this part, but apparently when he and the other kids walked in, there was a man standing in the front of the room. And the man pulled out this maroon briefcase. Wow, this has never been used. We found one on eBay. Ooh, it smells like my basement.

Wow. Okay, so it says the Wexler Intelligence Scale for Children, copyright, The Psychological Corporation, New York City. This is the thing that, like, in some ways, like, yeah, it changed his life. Even though Daryl doesn't remember all the details from that day, here's how we think it would have gone down. All right, I'm going to open it up. The man at the front would have taken out a bunch of little green booklets.

Okay, everybody, today we're going to take a few days. tests. And the tests are general information, general comprehension, arithmetic, vocabulary. I'm going to ask you a series of questions, and I want you to answer them to the best of your ability. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, tests. Let's begin. I'm going to say a phrase that is missing a word. I want you to finish what I want to say. Can you do that? Okay. Lemons are sour. Sugar is... What?

Can you tell me what word is missing? No. Think of sugar. Sour is a taste. How does sugar taste? Yes, good, sweet. Okay now. You walk with your leg. You throw with your... Think about throwing. What part of your body would you throw with? No, let's try again. You walk with your leg, you throw with your...

All right, another one. If three pencils cost five cents, what will be the cost of 24? And next one, how many ears have you? How far is it from New York to Chicago? Why is cotton fiber used in making cloth? I want to see how many words you know. Listen carefully and tell me what these words mean. Nuisance. What's a nuisance? Nonsense. What is nonsense?

Daryl said, he said really from the very beginning, he said he did fine in math. I'm good when it comes to numbers. But he could not keep up with the reading. When I look at something and I'm trying to read it and if I can't pronounce it, I'm looking at it backwards. The reality was that he had a reading issue. I'm sure it's fair to call it like a reading disability. Nitroglycerin. What is nitroglycerin? Are you okay?

Would you like some water? It's hard, I think. It was just like very hard. Look at this picture. What important part is missing? Yes, but what is the most important part that's missing? I've got to be kidding me. So Darrell goes home.

He's not really sure what happened, but he feels like he didn't do well at it, whatever it was. And eventually, someone from the school, approaches Daryl's mom and says, we need to put your son in a different class. So the way she describes it in her testimony says, well, I was told that Larry was a slow learner and he needed to help, you know, in his schoolwork. And by putting him in this class, I was under the impression he was put there so he could get more attention. That's when stuff started going downhill. In Daryl's new class, there were 10 students. It was mostly black.

Four boys, six girls. And what was it like a normal day like in there? A normal day, a headache, a straight up headache. Because some kids was loud. Some kids was obnoxious. Some kids just didn't care. Daryl says they spent about 10 minutes a day on reading, 10 minutes a day on math, and about five and a half hours outside.

And they thought that would calm us down. So they went on a lot of field trips. Going to the zoo, Golden Gate Park. What is this? You know, they wasn't teaching us nothing. You know, I walked to school and cried all the way. And by the time I got close to the school, I straightened up and got myself together. Went on into the building.

And that was it. It was that bad. Darrell was in that class for more than a year. And then, fast forward, and one day Darrell's mom is at home, and she gets a phone call. gets a phone call, apparently from one of the NAACP attorneys. And the lawyer tells her that a man named Gerald West is going to pay her a visit.

He says, West is a member of the Association of Black Psychologists. And so the way she describes it in her testimony, she said, okay, and then Gerald West came over. Met with Daryl. Give him a few tests. And that when he was done, she says,

you know, she says, then he turned to me and he says, well, there is nothing wrong with this child. And I said, what do you mean nothing wrong with him? I'm his mother. I should know. You know, I'm his mom. I know there's nothing wrong with him, even though she did know that he needed reading help.

She says, naturally, I didn't feel good about it, and I got angry about it. This is when I really found out what was really going on, you know. And then she's asked, what did you find out? And mom says that he's been designated mentally retarded. That's how she learned that he was in a class for educable mentally retarded kids. She'd never known that.

What had happened to Daryl when he got brought into that room with the man with the briefcase is they'd given him an IQ test. That's what had gotten him designated, and this is the term that was used at the time, and so we're going to use it in this story, educably mentally retarded. And his mom said he wasn't, that the test was wrong, and that it had been wrong about a lot of black kids. And so Daryl's mom and the parents of five other little kids got together and filed a class action lawsuit against the school district arguing that their kids had been essentially denied their education by being put in these classes inappropriately because of an IQ test that deemed them mentally retarded. And that's, yeah, that's sort of the beginning of this whole thing. And so what ends up happening is like in the mid-1970s, these parents essentially put the IQ tests on trial. That's after the break.

This is Angie Cromlich from Fisher's Indiana. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Hey, welcome back. This is G, a radio lab miniseries. This is episode one. I'm Pat Walters. Chad, I boom, Rod. You were saying that the IQ test was put on trial. That's sort of seems to be where we're driving to. I want to know about that trial. What happened at the trial? Yeah, it's super interesting. But before we jump into that, I think it would be helpful to put the trial and the test in a slightly larger context. Okay. And so to do that, I want to tell you where the IQ test came from in the first. place. You mean like who invented it?

Yeah, all the way back to the beginning of these tests. Oh, all right. And to do that, we have to go back to France. In the early 1900s. 1904. Yes. This is Siddhartha Mukherjee. I'm an oncologist and I'm also a writer. And the beginnings of all this, he says, arose out of one might describe them as benign intentions. At the turn of the century in France, there was a lot going on.

That was a time of expansive social change. The church and the state were separating. Trying to create this equal society. This, by the way, is David Robson. Senior journalist at BBC Future, and I'm the author of The Intelligence Tram. And David says one of the things that happened at this time is the government took over the schools. Public education was growing. Universal education was part of that. Suddenly all kids were required to go to school. And within the first few years of this, the government noticed that some kids were falling behind. And so, to figure out what to do, they called. this psychologist.

Alfred Binae in Paris at the time. He was actually the director of experimental psychology at the University of Paris. He had studied all kinds of things, but he'd spent the past 20 years or so studying children. So the French government gave him an assignment. They said, we want you to come up with the test

to sort of predict which kids are going to struggle in school. Just to identify whether children were more vulnerable, I guess, in the schoolroom. So that we can give them extra help. Like, put them in extra help. Yeah. So it doesn't, like, go on three years. And then we're like, oh, crap.

Chad is like three years behind now. We didn't notice that he's having a really hard time learning to read or do math. Albert Bonae saw it as a chance to benefit the individual pupil to diagnose problems so the child could get special help. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So he worked with Teodor Simon. His assistant at the time. And together they came up with this test to look for a whole bunch of different. cognitive abilities. Starting with simple ones like, can the child hold a conversation with the

teacher. Moving on to slightly more complex ones, such as he would give the children a list of words, like house, fork, mother, and asked them to kind of recite them back to him from memory. He made the children draw pictures, and then he had a few harder ones. Like, name three rhymes for the French word reverence, which is like a bow or curtsey. Anyway, he had all these questions. Some were easy, some were hard. The next thing he did is he gave these tests to a whole bunch of kids. Grouped them all by age, and then he compared how they did.

Like for all the six-year-olds, how many questions did they get right and wrong, on average? For the seven-year-olds, same thing, eight-year-olds, on and on. For each age, he calculated the average score. basically a normalization, as it were. What they ended up calling the normal score. And then he would compare each kid to that norm. So if you're a six-year-old and you got the average number right and wrong for a six-year-old, he would say that's your mental age.

Six. If you scored higher than the average for a six-year-old, your mental age might be seven or eight. And if you scored lower, it might be lower. Ultimately, that would lead to a simple math equation. The mental age divided by the chronological age times by 100 gave you the IQ or intelligence question. Oh, so that's how they do it. Yeah, it's a little different now, but generally how it works is like if you're a six-year-old and you get the number of questions right and wrong that the average six-year-old got right and wrong,

your IQ score is 100. And if your mental age exceeds your physical age, you get higher than 100. If your mental age is less than your physical age, you get lower than 100. So that's the basic idea. Now, before B'nai, teachers and parents and lots of other kinds of people had been trying all different things to figure out how kids learn and to compare them to their peers. But this is the first time someone tried to measure it.

And put a number on it. Now Bonae, he was very clear that he didn't think he was measuring everything about intelligence. You know, this is not the whole picture. I'm just measuring something. something about these kids that helps me figure out how they're going to do in school. Binae was very explicit about the fact that he didn't think the mark in his test should be considered a permanent thing about someone. He called it brutal pessimism if you take that one score and you think of it as defining someone.

He said brutal pessimism. Yeah, he believed that intelligence was malleable and that the human mind had, you know, so many different facets that had to be considered. He was apparently adamant about this. But, as we know, good intentions are the devil's toilet paper. Because right around the time Benet was doing his thing... Charles Spearman, who was a statistician... Where was he and what was he doing?

He was in England. It was another psychologist. You know, a psychologist statistician doing research on this topic. Guy named Charles Spearman, who came up with the theory of intelligence that Benet would not have liked. this guy that you're hearing, by the way. My name's Stuart Ritchie. I'm a psychology lecturer at King's College London.

He's the guy who kind of told me about all this. And according to him, Charles Spearman, like Bonae, also worked with kids, gave them lots of tests. And he noticed this sort of counterintuitive thing that B'nai hadn't. You know how I mentioned that IQ tests are actually many, many little tests all lumped together? Like you got vocabulary, math, all these different sub-tests. Well, what Spearman showed in his... analyses of the tests, where they all seem to correlate positively together. People who are good at one type of test tend to be good at them all.

Say I want to see how many words you know. Listen carefully and tell me what these words mean. What Spearman noticed is the kids who are good at vocabulary tests. Bicycle. What is a bicycle? Those kids were also likely to be good at reasoning tests. I am going to show you some pictures in which there is a part missing. Tell me what is missing. And a pattern recognition. Look here and you will see a star, a ball. a triangle and other things.

They tend to be good at speed tests, memory tests. I'm going to say some numbers. Listen carefully. Across all the different kinds of tests. People who are good at one are good at them all. And he saw this as evidence of some sort of underlying. Mental energy. It underlies their cognitive abilities.

And Spearman called this general intelligence. The concept of G. G. And this idea that this sort of general intelligence that Spearman noticed, Did other scientists notice it too? Oh, yeah. Yes. Stort says in the decade since Spearmann first noticed this phenomenon,

it has been proven again and again and again to be true. It's essentially one of the best replicated findings in the psychological literature. And the moment this G idea got walked out into the room by Charles Spearman, this is the moment that Pandora's box sort of got ripped wide open. because now there weren't lots of different kinds of intelligences. Intelligence wasn't complicated. There was just this one kind. And Spearman believed we each had a certain amount of it from the time we were born,

and that that could somehow be measured with the test. The tests were now being used as a social instrument, a way to classify people rather than help individuals. This is exactly the thing the Ney warned against. this is that brutal pessimism. He never got a chance to speak out against the test being used this way. He died in 1911. And in the years after his death, throughout the teens and 20s and 30s,

IQ tests were given to millions of people, used to decide who should get which job. A fast way of deciding who should be an officer and who shouldn't. Who should get into which school. Who should work at a desk and who should be cannon father. Who should be allowed to immigrate to one country or another. And eventually, who should be interested. institutionalized and forcibly sterilized.

Because the thing we haven't mentioned about Charles Spearman and a lot of these early intelligence scientists is they're eugenicists. And so the whole early history of IQ testing is wrapped up in this ideology, you know, that these guys thought they could selectively breed people to create some kind of master race. And we're going to go deep into that part of the history in a future episode with the help of Lulu Miller, one of the creators of invisibilia. But suffice to say, once IQ tests were being used to pay. pick people to be sterilized, it just kept getting worse.

This was not a peripheral idea to Nazism. The measurement was central to the Nazi doctrine of improving the human race, and in their case, it marched on to exterminations. The Nazi version of eugenics started in the mid-1930s, when they began forcibly sterilizing and then executing thousands of people that they had classified as mentally ill, disabled, or what they called feeble-minded, meaning that they've scored low on an IQ test. This program was called T4, and it was a precursor to and essentially a training ground for the mass executions of Jewish people that over the next several years would become

the Holocaust. So in the span of just about 30, 35 years, you go from something called G to selective sterilization mandated by a court to selective extermination mandated by a state and that happens in the span of 30 years. Now, given that history,

I kind of expected that after World War II IQ tests would have gone away. But... No. Here in America? America, particularly around that time in the post-war period, was a very quantitative society. The economy was booming and we were obsessed with measuring things.

Your height, your weight, your, you know, biometrics. So in America, we doubled down on the use of IQ tests. Started using them for everything. To track people, earmarking people for the right jobs, making sure they get to the right schools, et cetera, et cetera. There is a kind of efficiency clause in this, which is, you know, let's make the society more efficient by allocating the right resources to the right people.

And so by the 60s and 70s, Mukherjee says that was the situation. It had really seeped into the center of America. culture. Are we at the trial now? Just about. IQ, in the school systems of every state of the union, one form of intelligence test or another are given each year to at least 10 million children of all ages. The impact on their lives can be enormous.

What gets us to the trial is right around the time Larry P. bumped into the test. People had finally started to push back against it. The civil rights movement was in full swing, and this group of young black psychologists, had stepped up and said, hey, this test is a problem, not only because of its history, but because of the way it's made now. The test did not consider the experiences and the backgrounds of minorities of black children or children who did not have a white middle-class background. They were culturally specific to European Americans.

That's psychologist Brandon Gamble again, before him Harold Dent, who was one of those young black psychologists who started pushing back in the 1960s. And Dent says the problem was, like remember how he told you the IQ test is normed, where they give the test to a whole bunch of kids and clump their scores together to sort of figure out the average score for each age?

Mm-hmm. Well, the test makers only used white kids. If you'd set up one standard, everybody doesn't meet that standard. And so these black psychologists were like, what about non-white kids? If that child is not from that cultural frame and that cultural experience,

they may give different answers. The IQ test scores did not deal with the background and experiences of black children. Which is what this lawsuit ended up being about. A dispute in California today about intelligence quotient tests. A lawsuit has been filed which says that IQ tests discriminate against black children because these tests do not... Okay. Like if we were to try to imagine ourselves into day one of this trial, like what do we know? We know it was a federal case.

So it was in U.S. District. court. This is Lee Romney again. Downtown San Francisco, you know, just a couple of blocks from City Hall. Do you know what the room would have looked like? We know from the court sketch that right behind the witness stand was a giant American flag. You know, the judge seated there next to the witness box. Judge was named Robert Peckham. He's, uh, he was mostly ball, uh, gentleman. Wire room glasses, uh, spoke somewhat quietly. So you've got Peckham up at the front and then, uh, the lawyers for the families. A number of a. One of whom you just heard.

Armando Menacal. At the time of the trial, Armando had only been a lawyer for about four years. I was the only lawyer that was in court every day, myself and the chief lawyer for the state. Well, this trial started in October of 1977. It would go on for seven months. 10,000 pages of witness testimony. 10,114 pages. I'm going to turn some pages.

Oh, my God. Did you go through all of it? of it? I did, I did, but like I whipped through some of it. One of the first big things that happens is the plaintiffs call this guy named Asa Hilliard to the stand. The late Dr. Asa Hiljord. He had been the dean of the school of education at San Francisco State University. Black psychologist. He was a big expert on racial bias in education and testing. Yeah, yeah. So Hilliard goes up to the stand, gets sworn in, and if you have a second, I'll try to find. And one of the family's lawyers stands up and picks up this box. Exhibit P66A.

and walked over to the stand. And then he says, let me hand you this black box and ask you if you can identify this for the court. He says, this is what the actual beast looks like. He calls it the beast. Yeah.

And so Hilliard says, right, this is a kit for the whisk. The Wexler Intelligence Scales for children, aka the whisk. Which was the main test that was being used in schools. Okay, so this is Madden again. And the first thing they do is ask Hilliard just to, like, explain what this test is.

Like, what exactly is it asking these kids? So Hilliard says, right? Let me try one. There's going to be an actor, right? So do you want me to read sort of around what the actor is going to be doing? I might just have you read a bunch of stuff. Okay. Maybe I shouldn't pick number nine.

Since we're so close to Columbus Day, but... He picked this question from a section called General Information. One of the items about general information is, who discovered America? And the only two possible answers here are Columbus. and Leifarickson. And of course, there are some people who would have a little disagreement with that. And in addition to those answers

just being, like, wrong, Hilliard brought this one up to point out that this isn't a test of, like, thinking ability. This is acquired knowledge. Lee gave us another example. Who wrote Romeo and Juliet? Shakespeare?

Yeah, good job. Ding, ding. Thank you. And then they say Chikovsky. Chikovsky is also acceptable. Chikovsky wrote a Romeo and Juliet. See, I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

Now, the people who make these tests would explain to you that the point of a question like that is that a lot of kids won't know the answer. That's question number 16, so it's supposed to be hard. The point of it being on there isn't that, like, knowing that information in particular is especially important. But the test makers have figured out that the kids who get that question right are more likely to do well on all the other parts of the IQ test, because of that G thing we talked about before.

The problem is, there are all kinds of other variables at play here. Like, whether you know who wrote Romeo and Juliet. Who wrote Romeo and Juliet? Might say something about your intelligence, but it might also just be an indication of whether your parents told you about Shakespeare or whether you learned about him in school. What right do we have to expect children from some areas of the country or some areas of cities to have spent time studying about Romeo and Juliet?

And Hilliard argued this acquired knowledge problem affected a whole bunch of different parts of the test. That would be the same thing here on math. If children had not had the opportunity to have good math instruction, and they are going to be compared with children who have had good math instruction, then to me you have an economic, cultural bias that's represented in there. The same thing would be true with similarities and vocabulary. For example. For example, you're supposed to be able to answer the question,

in what way are salt and water alike? In what way are salt and water alike? Okay. In what way are salt and water? Do they have two compounds that make them a thing? H-2-O and N-A-C-L. No. That seems ridiculous.

I would say, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me is like, oh, ocean. They get mixed together. Rachel, you actually got the high score right out of the gate. So, okay, so here it is you get two points if you give this answer. A response that indicates that they are both necessary for life or that they are both chemical compounds. So those are the only two answers that you get two points for. If you say that they are both in the ocean, you get no points.

What? That's just a truth. Why does that no point? I know. Oh, I'm angry. If you say that you can drink both of them, you get no points. If you say salt comes out of the water. Again, there isn't a single right answer.

I'd argue that my answer was just fine. But Hilliard explained that the whisk favors a certain kind of answer. There's an arbitrary decision about the nature of the response. That will give you two points in terms of its abstraction. He said the whisk arbitrarily favors abstract sounding answers, like salt is a compound. And he asked, why is that any more intelligent than saying salt, is from the ocean.

This is where the cultural bias comes in again. And his point was, thinking abstractly in this way is as acquired as knowing who wrote Shakespeare. Now, the state argued there are big parts of the test that do measure things that feel way more like pure thinking abilities. There's a memory test where a kid just has to read back a string of numbers. There are a couple of pattern recognition tests that just involve looking at shapes.

There's a picture completion test where a kid just has to point out what's missing from a drawing. But for every part of the test like that, there's another part that feels way squishier. And the part of the test where you see racial bias most blatantly is this one called... Comprehension. This is Brandon Gamble again. And with comprehension, they may ask somebody kind of a moral question even, right? The kid is given a hypothetical social situation and asked how they should respond.

Like, what should you do if you cut your finger? Or why are criminals locked up? Or why is it generally better to give money to a... charity than someone begging on the street, or why should a promise be kept? And Brandon says, like a lot of the parts of this test, these questions don't have a single right answer, which means they can be biased towards people who answer the question in the way the people who made the test think it should be answered, which is a big problem if you don't think the way the people made the test think.

Brandon told us about one of these questions that he ran into when he started working as a school psychologist. If you found somebody's wallet. Like sitting on a shelf in a store. What would you do with it? Would you give it back to them? You know, try to search them out and find out how to give it back to them. Or would you leave it alone or keep that money?

The correct answer is find the store manager and give them the wallet. But Brandon told me he would not have answered it that way. I would have said, you know, I'm not touching it because they probably accuse me of something. Because you're black. Yeah. And you know what? I've been in that situation. I went with a scouting group and my mother was the direct.

of the scouting group and we were at a science museum. I'm a nerd. I didn't realize it back then how much of one I was, but I was wearing my scouting uniform, which had this shiny belt buckle. So I keep shining it, but I get smudges on it. So I'm looking at my belt buckle, and they're thinking I'm stuffing my pants with things.

So security gets called. Oh, geez. And I have no idea what's going on, but my mother does. My mother's like, you're not strip searching my child. Point is, Brandon, says, if you're a black kid and you see that question, you might think clearly the correct answer is,

leave the wallet where it is. So really what the whisk is measuring is assimilation into American culture and how well you assimilate as a predictor, not so much your actual intelligence in what you know. So the families put forward a bunch of arguments saying the test is racially biased. and then the state gets up and has to defend the test.

And their argument basically goes like, There's nothing wrong with tests that they are just as valid, you know, to use for all, you know, American-born English-speaking kids. This is Craig Frisbee. He's a school psychology professor at the University of Missouri and has done a bunch of research on the Larry P. case and bias in testing. And he says it's not enough for a test question just to feel like it's biased. You always have to go. go back to the data and say, what does the data say?

And does the data bear this out? You have to prove statistically that it is. And a lot of these arguments, the data just doesn't bear it out. So, like, take that question, who discovered America? According to Craig, to prove that that question is biased against, let's say, black children, you'd have to give that question to a group of white children and give the same question to a group of black children and show that the black children are more likely to get it wrong than the white children.

And Craig says the family's in the lawsuit didn't do that. You know, you're kind of going to shooting in the dark a little bit. Well, this could be, this could be. So whenever you try to kind of give an ad hoc explanation for what you see, it's not a scientific enterprise. But the reason, ironically, that data didn't exist is because, like we said before,

the IQ test that was given to the kids like Darrell was only normed. It was only standardized. on white kids. And everyone admitted that no one had attempted in the testing companies had attempted to validate

the test for blacks and whites. Still, Craig says, the state argued the families didn't have the data they'd need to prove their case statistically. But the data the state did have, Craig says,

showed that when you give IQ tests to black kids, you find the entire range of scores that you'd see in white kids. So if tests were truly biased against kids because of their skin color or their race, then you would never have examples of African Americans who get high scores on IQ tests,

and you would never have examples of white kids who get low scores on IQ tests. And so the state said, like, if black children can score very high on IQ tests, how could they be biased? You have the full range. But even though you see that entire range, you see something else, too. The means, the averages differ from group to group. The average shifts down. The average score of black kids was lower than the average score of white kids. What the results seemed to say about Americans was startling and puzzling.

Blacks as a group scored 15 points lower than whites. So if the state was saying there was no bias, what explains that discrepancy then? One of the first things that people will say that to pour gasoline on the issue is to say, oh, if you're saying that tests are not biased, and that means that this group is genetically inferior to this other group. And there was a huge controversy happening in America at this time over that very idea.

An old theory, originally revived by psychologist Arthur Johnson of the University of California. Is it fair to say that your position has been that black Americans as a race are not as intelligent as whites? By my definition of intelligence, yes, I would say that's a fair statement. And the defense, the state, actually tried bringing this argument into the lawsuit. They had introduced it in some of the pre-trial paperwork as a possible defense.

But when they were getting ready to go to trial... Wilson Riles... The state superintendent of education, who was the named defendant in the case and happened to be a black man himself. says this stuff is racist and disgusting and vile. And I can't be a part of that, and I especially can't have the state be a part of that. And so the defense never directly brought that argument up in trial. They sort of took it back.

And that was kind of the ghost in the room. And even though the state kind of tried to shuffle that argument back under the rug, the family's lawyers wanted to disprove it out in the open. What we were attempting to prove is that that test mislabel blacks as being intellectual, inferior. That's Armando Mennicole again, and he says they called a bunch of different witnesses. A whole parade of experts. Medical background, historians, many psychologists, many education experts. To show in court, there's no evidence to support that theory. It's just not true. And then eventually they'd say, and there's three times more blacks in classes for the retarded,

it either means that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Which they just spent weeks disproving. Or the test of discriminatory. eventually get down to the either or. And that was our goal in cross-examination. And we called every one of the state employees as adverse witnesses and cross-examined them before. And there was one encounter with the Department of Education employee. The main guy within the department in charge of the classes for the mentally retarded and the IQ test. That Armando says pretty much stopped everyone in their tracks.

I pretty much got him into a corner where he basically admitted that, yes, He believed that there were more mentally retarded black people than white people. And Peckham goes, wait, wait, wait, wait. Are you saying you really believe that there are more blacks who are mentally retarded? And the guy said, yes. October 16, 1979. Judge Peckham issues his ruling. He just comes right out and says, this court finds in favor of plaintiffs.

Daryl, his mom, and the five other families. won the case. Defendants have utilized standardized intelligence tests that are racially and culturally biased, have a discriminatory impact against black children, and have not been validated for the purpose of essentially permanent placements of black children into educationally dead-end, isolated, and stigmatizing classes for the so-called educable mentally retarded. He says we must recognize at the outset that the history of the IQ test and of special education classes built on IQ testing is not the history of neutral scientific discoveries translated into educational reform.

It is a history of racial prejudice, of social Darwinism, and of the use of the scientific, quote, mystique to legitimate such prejudices. Defendant's conduct, in connection with the history of IQ testing and special education in California, reveals an unlawful segregative intent. To dumb it down, he's basically saying, They proved everything that they set out to prove that this was just a disguised form of segregation, you know, under the guise of science. A group of black folk sued the state and won. How often does that happen? Question. Mrs. Lester, how old is Daryl? Answer. Daryl is 18.

Question. Mrs. Lester, I know that you have a plane to catch, but is there anything else you might. want to say just to sum up your feelings about this case. Well, Lucille, I will tell you just to sum it up. I feel like it was a rotten deal. I really do. Because if I had an understanding in the beginning that Darrell was put in a class with a mentally retarded children, he wouldn't have been there in the first place.

Because I would have went further and taken him to the doctors to find out whether or not anything was wrong with him. And I feel like it's done at him to a certain extent. And even in his attitude toward people, certain people, have changed. Because he feels like he has been pushed aside. Feels like he has been discriminated and things like that. He come and told me. And I have to try and straighten it out and tell him what I feel is right about it.

At the end of Judge Packham's decision, Brandon Gamble says, He put a ban in place. No IQ tests are to be given to black children to make decisions about special education in the state of California. By the time this case ended and Judge Packham issued that ban, years had gone by. Daryl, the kid who set this whole thing in motion when he was in elementary school, was 20 years old now. Wasn't even living in the state anymore.

His mom, Lucille, had moved the family away after things had gone so badly for him in school. And that's really the last anybody heard from Daryl for decades until Lee Romney came along. She's the reporter we spoke with from KLW because as she started reporting on this, she kept wondering what happened to him. Everyone was saying, you know, I have no idea. And to be honest, nobody seemed terribly interested, you know,

because everyone talks about it, Larry P. is a case. And she was like, what about Larry P., the person? which is how she ended up in that little house outside Seattle, hanging out with Daryl Lester. Everyone who works in special ed in California, they all talk about the Larry P case. Which is me. Wow.

So do they know me? They don't. Nobody had ever asked him, not only not asked him about this, nobody had ever really told him about it. And when I came up there and I had the ruling in my hand, This was just the judge's ruling. It's like 130 pages long.

Wow. But it goes, that was my case? Yep. And he goes, you know, that's my case. It was just sort of like, I didn't really expect this. He was, he and his wife were both like happy to have me come up, happy to hear about it. Really that you're here? I feel kind of honored.

And what actually did happen to him after the ruling? So right after the lawsuit was filed, actually, his mom moved him and his family up to Tacoma, Washington. I moved here in 71. Okay, so right as soon as they filed a lawsuit, mom was like, we're out of here. Yep. They had an older brother who had been in the military,

and he was up near Tacoma. So when we moved here, I had like a third grade reading level, and I was in the eighth grade. And then it was time for high school, and pretty soon. They said, well, okay, we're going to be. going to put you in a special aid and a half a day program. Well, what's that? He was back in a special ed program. Well, you get up in the morning and you're going to go over to Safeway.

Safeway to grocery store? And they said, yeah, I went to Safeway. I had to be there at 7.30 and start work at 8. And I worked from 8 to a lunchtime. Were they paying you? No, it was for credits. Oh, my God. Wait, that's a thing? You never heard of that? Eventually, his stepfather complained and got him out of that program. Even though Daryl was, like, terrified to just be dumped into the general population

because he didn't have any foundation. They hadn't prepared you. Not for them type of classes. No. But he was thrown back into general ed without any help. None whatsoever. And he squeaked by for a few years. They kept moving you from grade to grade.

Yep. Eventually, graduation rolls around. I miss my high school deplet. by two credits and thought, I'm not going to make it out in the real world. After that, he moved back to Georgia for a bit, and then he started partying a lot. Oh, my God.

Drinking, smoking, just all kind of stuff. He definitely had some substance abuse issues for years. So then it was just sort of low, you know, it was a lot of really hard physical work. The best job I had is when I was working, that causal aluminum before I got hurt. On the job? Mm-hmm.

Then Daryl told Leah's story that just kind of showed how this thing that happened to him when he was a kid never really let him go. I got hurt on the job. What happened? I got slung into a wall and threw my back all out,

out of whack and everything. And apparently he had received a... They sent me a letter. Like a workers' comp decision letter saying that he would be awarded benefits. But he says he took that letter. And I threw it in the trash. I didn't know. Because he couldn't read it. You know, it's kind of hard to put in the words. I've lived this long, these many years, lack of

reading. You know, there was things I needed to learn that I didn't learn. And he still struggles with this. Sometimes I be down here by myself. Sometimes his wife comes down stairs and he's... What you're crying for? Crying. And they say grown men don't cry. That's a lie. And I should say, Daryl's life is tough, but it's not all bleak.

He has a daughter. He's happily married. I mean, Cecilia, man, we grew up together. Yeah, we grew up in church together. Yeah. That's how we know each other. In a choir. Our families.

25 years. Oh, yeah. We've been together. other 25 years. Long time. You know, so they both sang in this church choir and that since he said he's been clean and sober about 18 years. And so people talk about the case and here, like there's this fully dimensional human

being that seems like that the case doesn't really even get to. My life might not be like my friends that, you know, got better. their jobs, nice homes. Not to say I don't want that, you know, because I do. But it just didn't come my way. But I'm content right now with what I have. So here today, you sitting here talking to me. I'm happy.

I'll tell you over and over again. I'm not ashamed of who I am. I am Gerald Eugene Lester, born 1958, December to 29th from Marietta, Georgia. And I am here still living at 59 years of age. And the ban, the ban that the Larry P. case led to, what happened to it? It's still in place. It's still in place. Yeah, yeah.

So this whole situation, that Darrell got caught up in as a kid has completely changed. The class that he got stuck in, those classes are gone, they're not a thing anymore, and this test that sort of shuttled him into that class is banned for black kids.

And the judge didn't say, ban it for everyone, or revise the test or debias the test or whatever. He said, just don't give it to black kids. Yeah, exactly. But if you're a white kid, or if you're a Spanish being kid, or Hispanic kid, or an ESL kid,

you can take it? Yeah. And that's still in place. Yeah. Still today. It's like I hate this word because I always feel like this word just like hides all kinds of things. But I'm going to say it anyways, I just find that kind of problematic. You are not the only one who feels that way.

It is racism in the school district. It's not right. It's not right. In the next episode of this series, we're going to return to this case and look at all the weird ways it plays out now. And we'll also keep wrestling with this idea of G. The measuring of human intelligence with IQ tests, trying to figure out what it really captures, and learn that despite all of its horrible history,

it was behind solving one of the biggest public health problems of the 20th century. That's coming up in episode two. This episode was reported and produced by Lee Romney, Rachel Cusick, and me, Pat Walters. Her music was by Alex Oberington. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly. Special thanks to Ellie Mistal, Chandriy Kumanika, Amanda Stern, whose book Little Panic is great.

Nora Lyons, Key sung from KQED, public advocates in San Francisco, our actors, Michelle Wilson, Peter Fernandez, and John Schaefer, and, of course, to Daryl Lester. Radio Labs G is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simon's Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science.

Oh, and one last thing. At the end of every show, we have a listener read the credits. Radio Lab is really proud to have listeners all over the world, and we would love to hear you on the show. If you're interested in recording the credits, go to radiolab.org slash credits. It's super simple. Again, that's radiolab.org slash credits.

Thanks for listening. See in a week. To play the message, press 2. Start of message. This is Brandon Gamble. The dean of student success at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama. Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrider.

It's produced by Soren Wheeler. Dealing Keith is our director of sound design. Suzy Leichenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Brazler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kilty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latef Nassar,

Malissa O'Donnell, Sarah Quarry, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Shima O'Lei, Audrey Quinn, W. Harry Fortuna, Ruth Samuel, Imani Leonard, and Neil Don Esha. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. End of message.