This article explores the complex rhetoric some psychologists deployed in relation to teachers within early twentieth-century research on intelligence testing in America. Psychologists’ ways of talking to, at, and about teachers at that time established a relationship characterized by an originary indebtedness—of teachers toward psychology. That framework eclipsed in discourse what was, in reality, a more chaotic relationship of mutual usefulness, defiance, and interdependence between the two professions. Instead, it established between teachers and psychologists the assumption of an unrepaid—and, arguably, unrepayable—moral obligation.
Anyone who studies teachers in the Progressive Era in relation to the rise of intelligence testing is tempted to bemoan the confiscation or “colonization” of teachers’ expertise by scientists in that time.Footnote 1 Yet, importantly, teachers were, in the minds of psychologists, the foot soldiers of the intelligence-testing movement. As Paul Davis Chapman puts it, “The key to the whole testing program was the classroom teacher.”Footnote 2 For intelligence testing to spread, psychologists wanted to secure teacher support in buying and administering the tests; they had to not only teach teachers to test but persuade them of what they saw as the incontrovertible rightness, benevolence, and importance of testing. At the same time, psychologists could not spell their own obsolescence by granting teachers complete control of their measuring instruments.
These are to some extent familiar tensions. JoAnne Brown, in a seminal study on the semantics of profession building in the intelligence-testing movement, theorized the pull between “popularization” and “monopoly” of IQ in its early days.Footnote 3 Psychology, a baby discipline in the 1900s, had to self-advertise by providing information about its methods, while keeping safe its claims to expertise. Brown argues that psychologists solved this tension by using engineering and medical metaphors, which gave the public adequately evocative knowledge but kept the actual science arcane. As far as the world of education was concerned, as Brown notes, psychologists engaged in denigrating and ridiculing teachers. While this is, as we shall see, quite true, it was not the whole story; psychologists’ rhetoric about and toward teachers was not just a show of muscles, hard facts, and scientific knowledge. Intelligence-testing proponents were not (or not just) engaged in ruthless territorial conquest by wielding the weapons of statistics and (pseudo-)science.Footnote 4 The teacher instead became for psychologists an ideal character and interlocutor through whom to operate crucial conversions from the abstract, “cold” scientific object of IQ to a social and moral project, embodied by individuals, anchored in practice, and traversed with hope. In that story, IQ testing became a boon, with teachers as its primary recipients, who owed it to society and to themselves to make the most of it.
From Conquest to Diplomacy: Establishing the Relationship
The golden decade of intelligence testing, between the mid-1910s and the mid-1920s, was an era well known for the scientific scrutiny surrounding education and the difficulty schools had coping with a huge rise in urban population and an increasingly diverse student body.Footnote 5 At the time, “virtually every aspect of education”Footnote 6 came under scientists’ microscopes. Teachers, furthermore, were under unprecedented pressure from administrators to increase the efficiency and accountability of schools—a request characterized in the Progressive Era by a double emphasis on standardization and individualization.Footnote 7 Education must have clear and objective standards, but it must also adapt to the potential and needs of each child. Fulfilling both criteria involved selecting students for the purpose of differentiated education. Until the 1910s, that selection had been operated semi-informally, using criteria such as teachers’ marks and judgment. Within the space of ten years, however, teachers’ judgment was threatened by measurement as a preferred means of assessment and selection.Footnote 8
To an extent, that replacement happened through a combination of favorable conjuncture and sheer force. Hypothesizing about the reasons for the wide and swift spread of IQ tests in America, Chapman and Kurt Danziger agree that psychology professors and school administrators pressured teachers to adopt the tests. Chapman delineates the movement as “top-down,” with the university psychology professors at the peak of the pyramid and education bureaucrats, administrators, and head teachers serving as mid-level intermediaries. Teachers, says Danziger, lay “on the bottom rungs of an ever more intrusive bureaucratic structure.”Footnote 9 Indeed, the need for IQ testing was formulated, at first, in clear contrast to teachers’ judgments and advertised as a replacement for them. By constantly comparing IQ results with teachers’ judgments, psychologists sought to expose teachers’ intuitions as less efficient and accurate.
Unreliable Teachers
However, the commands of professors and bureaucrats alone do not quite cover the ways in which teachers were mobilized by intelligence-testing proponents. Early on, as we shall see, that endeavor was phrased in terms of personal responsibility, not blind obedience, and of spiritual and moral duty, not administrative order. At the root of it was an original flaw, which lay in teachers.
That flaw was the fundamental “unreliability” of teachers, a keyword in a hefty corpus of texts on teachers’ marking practices contemporaneous with the research on intelligence testing. The pioneer of this research was Daniel Starch, who mapped, through several studies, variations in teachers’ marks within and across different disciplines.Footnote 10 Starch's conclusions were sometimes striking: mathematics and geometry were no more likely than English to be marked reliably or consistently. Further work showed that teachers were poor at evaluating two pieces of work submitted by the same student, or they evaluated identical work differently on different days, noted Howard Banker (who compensated for the unreferenced claim by adding, “These facts have been demonstrated again and again by the work of many investigators”).Footnote 11 The first decades of the century saw “much agitation”Footnote 12 around teachers’ marks from both statisticians and psychologists. In 1918, Harold Rugg could already cite twenty-three articles presenting evidence of teachers’ unreliability.Footnote 13 The accumulation of scientific evidence on the unreliability of teachers was talked of with definitiveness and anguish:
Out of the discussion of the last fifteen years we find one point of absolute agreement, namely … (1) the striking variability in teachers’ marks; (2) the unreliability, the lack of consistency, with which teachers mark; (3) the inconsistency in the way in which teachers distribute their marks [emphasis in original].Footnote 14
To remedy these issues, suggestions ranged from publishing “the distribution of teachers’ marks each semester in open bulletins,”Footnote 15 “training teachers to grade,”Footnote 16 heightening self-criticality through teacher-rating scales,Footnote 17 and, of course, standardizing marking practices and criteria.Footnote 18 In this context, it was easy for proponents of IQ tests to present teachers as essentially unable to assess children's intrinsic abilities. Since teachers could not complete the most basic task of teaching—grading consistently according to their own criteria—it was only to be expected that they would be even worse at evaluating children's intelligence. And indeed they were, or at least they did less well than the Stanford-Binet scale at evaluating a child's intelligence when checked against this scale. The claim that teachers were useless at assessing intelligence spread like wildfire in psychological writings, helped in part by the then footnote-light nature of scientific publications; references were infrequently stated, and articles, books, handbooks, and manuals gave, from the early days of IQ testing, an impression of absolute consensus on the matter.Footnote 19 It is important to note that there was, in fact, no consensus on the validity of IQ testing, which was already considered at the time a polemical topic among scientists, and, as later historical work as shown, was based on a number of faulty assumptions, design problems, and statistical fallacies, including the very notion that “intelligence” was a unitary entity that could be ranked on a unilinear scale.Footnote 20
The constant comparison between teachers’ judgments and measurement made it sound like they were direct adversaries; in the battle between IQ tests and teacher's opinions, the latter inevitably came second. This argument deployed a simple dichotomy, still familiar today, between objectivity and subjectivity, between science and intuition. This is Brown's argument, and she has powerfully shown how early psychologists “branded” IQ by using “the cultural authority of medicine and engineering,”Footnote 21 leaning on turn-of-the-century enthusiasm for measurement. This numbers-obsessed framework, she says, excluded educators, whose professional identity psychologists both directly and indirectly defined in opposition to their own. In Brown's words:
More often than not, psychologists and educators were in competition with one another for power and influence in educational policy and classroom procedure. … As aspiring professionals, educators stood in pathetic contrast to physicians and engineers, their accomplishments, methods, and institutions ridiculed and attacked wherever medicine and engineering were celebrated.Footnote 22
This rhetoric allowed psychologists to brandish scientific standards—reliability, efficiency, accuracy, and predictiveness—against which to judge teachers. Leta Hollingworth, in her handbook for teachers on gifted children, took some time to answer for her readers the question, “How do we know that the teacher, and not the test, is in error?” Teachers, she said, mistook beauty, poise, or bookishness for intelligence; they got confused by age; and, more importantly, teachers’ evaluations did not have predictive value: “The research of the past twenty years has proved that the test is the best instrument of prediction [emphasis in original]. Children, given appropriate opportunity, usually achieve and develop in accordance with the predictions of mental tests.”Footnote 23
This framework defined educational method in terms always already incompatible with the duties and the aptitudes of teachers. In 1922, arguably the zenith year of the intelligence-testing movement,Footnote 24 with memories of another war fresh in every reader's mind, the battle in the minds of psychologists had been so clearly won that the winning was mentioned twice by psychologist Raymond Franzen on the first page of his monograph on school adjustment for individual differences:
Standardized measurement of educational product has won its way to a recognized place in the school life of this country. … The case of scientific measurement in education has been argued and won. The objections to older forms of measurement have become the criteria of the value of the new.Footnote 25
The “pathetic contrast” between psychologist and teacher aligned with narratives of scientific progress.Footnote 26 Scientists had at their disposal modern means of testing, “measuring instruments of greater accuracy than the older systems of teachers’ marks.”Footnote 27 Intelligence testing, in particular, was a veritable fountain of youth: “The science of psychology has been vitalized and rejuvenated by this achievement,” said Herbert Woodrow.Footnote 28 This scientific method was young, efficient, and fast: an “hour of examination” was enough for the psychometricist to assess accurately what would have been inaccurately assessed by a teacher in months of teaching.Footnote 29 Those texts rehearsed the literary trope of wonder in the face of scientific progress: “The teacher,” Lewis Terman noted, “will doubtless be surprised that any single test requiring only ten minutes could possess this degree of accuracy.”Footnote 30
The “pathetic contrast” was evidently gendered, too. While administrators and headteachers were mostly men, teachers of the time were overwhelmingly women,Footnote 31 and the sexism of educational texts of the period is always apparent.Footnote 32 Often, “the teacher” is a “she”—visibly not for political correctness. The teacher, “especially when she does not understand the situation,”Footnote 33 could hardly be trusted with managing all levels of ability in a classroom. Terman himself, despite purposefully recruiting an all-female group of researchers,Footnote 34 felt that he had to warn teachers that they should not babble about children's IQ results.Footnote 35 The intuitive, gossipy female teacher is a constant presence in the writings of the time. Thus the “pathetic contrast” between teachers and scientists, and the “ridiculing” and “attack” of their methods, did exist; spoken about under the guise of scientific neutrality, teachers were belittled and deemed unfit for the task.
However, Brown's “pathetic contrast” suffers important nuances. In both the discourses and practices of intelligence-testing proponents, the explicit denigration of teachers constantly coexisted with placating declarations of unity and offers of help and redemption.
All Too Human: Diplomatic Addenda
The modern concept of intelligence belonged—because they had invented it—to psychologists. This meant that the literature on intelligence could be less territorial than the literature on marking. When Terman's handbook The Measurement of Intelligence came out in 1916, he could easily state that the teacher “has no means of knowing whether the average for her class is above, equal to, or below that for children in general. Her standard may be too high, too low, vague, mechanical, or fragmentary,” or that teachers “don't have a very definite idea of what constitutes intelligence.”Footnote 36 This was not ruthless denigration of teachers, but logic: “what constituted intelligence” could only be calculated using tests; intelligence had never truly belonged to teachers’ expertise anyway. Psychologists were not truly chiding teachers for their “grave errors” in assessing intelligence, nor suggesting that this made them bad teachers. The obvious foreignness of the concept of intelligence to teaching placed psychologists from the start in positions of pedagogues.
Teachers’ “failures” in that domain were thus often mitigated by pacifying claims, particularly the common assertion that teachers were no more useless than anyone at assessing intelligence. Hollingworth highlighted the difficulty “even for those who have devoted years of special study to this subject, to arrive at a perfectly clear concept of intelligence.”Footnote 37 Terman indicated, “Every psychologist who is experienced in the mental examination of school children knows that his own or the teacher's estimate of a child's intelligence is subject to grave and frequent error.”Footnote 38 The humanity of teachers—and psychologists—was their downfall, their ultimate limit: (un?)fortunately, “teachers [were] not automatons.”Footnote 39 Particularly noted were the errancies of everyday life when teachers’ judgments could be “dulled” by “mental distraction,” poor sleep, or personal issues.Footnote 40 “They are the kind of errors which any person, however discriminating and observant, is likely to make in estimating the intelligence of a subject without the use of standardized tests,” concluded Terman.Footnote 41 The matter was out of the hands of common mortals.
To highlight this reinforced the notion—crucial, I think, to the spread of intelligence testing within schools—that IQ tests were essentially different from, rather than a superior species of, teachers’ judgment. This distinction allowed psychologists to precisely locate measurement in relation to—rather than as replacement for—the teacher's work. And that location was unequivocally before—the intelligence test preceded, supported, grounded the teacher's work. In Franzen's words, “Measurement should form the basis for teachers’ opinion; it should neither supplant nor supplement it.”Footnote 42
Otherwise put, it should come first. Psychologists insisted on strong sequential order in the uses of science and teaching. In the 1930s, Hollingworth would stress with particular force the necessary anteriority of scientific testing over educational processes:
Before education can discharge this most important task of all with economy and justice, it must become a science. The science which is fundamental to education is psychology. Psychology had to develop the methods of mental measurement before there could be accurate or humane dealing in a system of compulsory education. We must take “the measure of a man” before we can know how to educate him.Footnote 43
Before, before, before: intelligence testing, arrived recently on the educational scene, was positioned retroactively by its advocates as a foundation. IQ tests were the entry point into the child's life, providing the base setting for education.
This claim helped negotiate spaces, or moments, for both teacher and psychologist in the educational system, allowing psychologists to avoid alienating a much-needed potential groundforce. However, it also established a one-way system of favors between the two professions, with psychologists as benefactors and teachers as benefiting. Knowledge flowed in just one direction. Measurement could inform teaching, but the reverse was not true: even when they held anecdotal validity, teachers’ judgments were not useful to psychologists. Teachers that Alfred Binet studied said they could “tell” a child's intelligence by “a glance of the eye,” but, asked Terman rhetorically, “how are we going to standardize a ‘glance of the eye’ or an ‘expression of curiosity’ so that it will serve as an exact measure of intelligence?”Footnote 44 The positioning of IQ as anterior to teaching—not an eviction, but a grounding of teaching—was a powerful way of establishing it as a help or as a gift, not as a replacement. Teachers’ all-too-human unreliability, it was understood, could be redeemed by adopting the tests. And in that respect they would get a lot of help.
Helping Teachers to Help Themselves
The purpose of this booklet is to make the Binet-Simon scale available in popular form to the great army of men and women active in public and semi-public positions in the care and control of childhood.Footnote 45
“Teachers must learn to use tests,” said Terman, in bold.Footnote 46 That was an accepted fact, though it is unclear when that fact actually became accepted; it just was, thanks to lavish use of what one might call arguments from obviousness. Texts of the time overused adverbs such as clearly, obviously, and evidently when asserting the power of science.Footnote 47 The obvious remedial legitimacy of intelligence measurement became a leitmotiv, relying also on statements of exclusivity:
The only way of escape from the fallacies we have mentioned lies in the use of some kind of refined psychological procedure. … Without the use of scales for measuring intelligence we can give no better answer as to the essential difference between a genius and a fool than is to be found in legend and fiction.Footnote 48
Handbooks for teachers on mastering IQ testing routinely placed such claims at the start, stating, rather than providing evidence for, the normalization of tests in schools. Thus Terman, in his introduction to The Intelligence of Schoolchildren, asserts, “That [the tests’] universal use in the schoolroom is necessary to educational efficiency will doubtless soon be accepted as a matter of course.”Footnote 49 Perhaps he need not have bothered, because his eminent contemporary and dean of the Stanford School of Education, Ellwood P. Cubberley, had already prefaced the book by saying, “The large usefulness of intelligence testing has been thoroughly demonstrated. … The question now is not, Are intelligence tests of value? But, how may teachers and principals be made masters of their use?”Footnote 50
How indeed? The following, by B. R. Buckingham, editor of the Journal of Educational Research, can serve as a guide:
The psychologist and the teacher are getting together on this question. The psychologist has simplified his methods of testing and he is training the teacher to use the simpler instruments. On the other hand, school people are realizing with conviction that they need to know and to know in terms of the new methods of measurement, the physical and mental development of the children entrusted to their care.Footnote 51
This quotation rehearses three major narratives in psychologists’ texts of the time: first, the creation of a sense of camaraderie between psychologist and teacher; second, the empowerment of teachers through the use of simplified scientific instruments; and, finally, the assertion of teachers’ gratefulness. I analyze them in turn below.
All in This Together
First, Buckingham's quotation provides a sense of comradeship, of “togetherness,” between teachers and psychologists in the endeavor of school improvement. This togetherness had many declensions. As above, it was partly an assertion of shared humanity, humble in the face of awesome science, and reclaimed a common social and philosophical project—teachers were de facto assumed to share psychologists’ goals regarding student selection.
That claim was not solely philosophico-political. It also leaned on a recent history of increased collaboration between teachers and psychologists. In previous decades, the work of Stanley Hall and of the Child Study movement had supported a practice that would prove essential to the spread of intelligence testing: teacher-led research.Footnote 52 Teachers of that generation, well formed and trained in psychology, were, psychologists claimed, “themselves becoming active, creative workers in the field … [carrying] on scientific studies not only in the practice schools … but also in the school systens [sic],”Footnote 53 and reporting to education journals. In the ideal worlds of Hall's followers—and, certainly, in Terman's mind—teachers had huge potential as testers, data gatherers, and day-to-day supporters of their cause in schools.
Evidently, psychologists’ vested interest in the spreading of tests and methods must have created a strong incentive to self-publicize; Terman, especially, had clear economic stakes in the matter.Footnote 54 As Leila Zenderland has shown, Terman worked hard to stifle his colleagues’ criticisms of teacher-testers; it was essential for him to present and train teachers as legitimate testers. In a striking early article, Terman lambasted the “bombast, pretentiousness and shockingly open claims to recognition”Footnote 55 of those who, such as J. E. Wallace Wallin, had cast doubts on the appropriateness of encouraging teachers to use intelligence tests.Footnote 56 Psychology must show a united front and profess and practice a collaborative enthusiasm that left little space for contestation or conflict.
“The Teachers Protested”
However, although teachers, administrators, and psychologists were indeed “getting together” increasingly often, that repeated claim uneasily covered up a significant problem with IQ testing: the diversity between teachers in their acceptance of the practice. Some teachers enthusiastically adopted tests, but the warmth was not universal. In the following, Terman recounts his difficulties with getting kindergarten teachers to evaluate children's intelligence:
When asked to estimate the intelligence of each child on the usual scale of five: very superior, superior, average, inferior, and very inferior, the teachers protested that there was almost nothing in kindergarten work on which they could base a judgment. The ratings on intelligence were finally secured, but they correlated with IQ's only to the extent of.29.Footnote 57
Kindergarten teachers, in fact, would have been particularly reticent about IQ tests, being, as they were, the most child-centered corps of the teaching body and quite opposed to the rationalization of education.Footnote 58 But Terman's tale of the protesting teachers was a more general warning to those who sowed dissent, and it was also an implicit call to administrators to support the work of psychologists, addressing the corps of principals and superintendents “over the heads” of teachers to guarantee unity on the ground. Psychologists were greatly aware of the importance of that cementing layer: the school administrator was everywhere mobilized to motivate troops of teachers. But very rarely was there any reference to forceful imposition of intelligence testing; instead, superintendents and principals were asked to be motivational speakers, explainers, and distillers of IQ's associated socio-educational vision.Footnote 59 In this extract from an article by J. Carleton Bell, we see the extent to which teachers’ support, as envisaged by psychologists, depends on deeply emotional engagement with the cause, fueled by a kind of magical thinking set against narratives of scientific progress:Footnote 60
The recognition of the value of measurements for the teacher can only come about through the encouragement of the supervising staff. When superintendent, principal and teacher unite whole-heartedly to study the needs and capacities of individual children and to base the school work upon their findings, much of the drudgery and grind of teaching will disappear, and educational measurements will attain their greatest usefulness.Footnote 61
But not all teachers and, indeed, superintendents aligned with these wishes. Unlike university psychologists and administrators, teachers had to deal with the everyday consequences of IQ testing, including parental reticence about seeing their children tested.Footnote 62 While the evidence is sparse, there is reason to believe that teachers did not unanimously comply with the pressure to test. Judith Raftery, in a persuasive case study of teachers’ uses of IQ tests in Los Angeles in the 1920s and early 1930s, shows the confusion and uncertainty the tests generated.Footnote 63 She also highlights that teachers were themselves adapting, tweaking, or translating tests, or were using achievement rather than intelligence tests, which they saw as more useful to their work. Wayne Urban's study of the National Education Association maps the resistance of teachers to the desire for control coming from upper echelons, and he notes that superintendents’ compliance was not always matched with teachers’ enthusiasm.Footnote 64 Lana Goldstein's study of the Chicago Teachers Federation and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann's work on the Progressive Education Association similarly show the considerable defiance of unionized teachers toward IQ testing for the purposes of tracking.Footnote 65 Teachers, among themselves and in professional conferences, regularly denounced intelligence tests, and clearly some superintendents did too. A 1931 New York Times report on the New York State Teachers’ Association's annual meeting noted:
Addressing 500 elementary principals of the State at a section conference, Dr Edwin C. Broome, Superintendent of Schools in Philadelphia and president of the National Council of School Superintendents of the United States … assailed intelligence tests as an inadequate measure of a child's ability. … Listing as one of the “unsolved problems” the search for reliable measures of children's intelligence, Dr Broome said intelligence tests “are not the final word in the segregation or classification of boys and girls.”Footnote 66
Thumbing through the New York Times at the time, the lay reader would have encountered some quite intense articles denouncing psychologists as “[doing] little but give intelligence tests,”Footnote 67 or pointing at “an army of young Ph.D.’s who have never taught children framing up these tests and judging the efforts of teachers by them.”Footnote 68 Psychologists’ defensiveness and assertions of “togetherness” indicate that they knew that teachers were a too imperfectly united “army.” In a 1923 New York Times article rather clumsily entitled “No Fundamental Basis for Disagreement Among Teachers,” Virgil E. Dickson vehemently smothered the controversy, asserting of the teacher, “She wants something that will help her to understand better the nature and ability or present condition of each child and something that will enable her to know better how to teach him. She has a feeling that these tests will help her.”Footnote 69 The much-decried intuitiveness of teachers was here, ironically, reclaimed as a testament to the tests’ usefulness.
Yet there is no contesting the use of intelligence tests in schools overall. Goldstein reports that in 1925, 64 percent of elementary schools were using IQ tests for ability grouping.Footnote 70 And even when there was resistance to the practical aspects of testing, it does not follow that there was resistance to the principles behind testing. Raftery wisely warns against the temptation to take “eminently quotable leaders” such as Terman at their word regarding “how school testing worked”Footnote 71 ; but her study does show teachers who sought to modify or adapt tests in part because they hoped for a more perfect test. As such, they aligned with psychologists in their dreams, doubtlessly very sincere, of genuine improvement to the lives of thousands of children.Footnote 72
“For the Benefit of the Teacher”
In this endeavor, the psychologist was to define the tests, as Dickson's previously quoted article stated, “for the benefit of the teacher.” The relation between the two professions was never presented as equal; teachers had something to gain from it, while scientists had only duties. Teachers, therefore, were everywhere used, but nowhere treated, addressed, or talked about as useful. Psychologists’ both rhetorical and practical mobilizations of teachers skirted around acknowledging the actual services rendered by their soldiers, foregrounding instead psychology's favors to education.
Characteristically, Buckingham's words present science as having generously empowered teachers by making its instruments accessible to them. And indeed, to a great degree, it had. Handbooks and training courses materialized psychologists’ intentions that teachers should learn to use tests properly, and articles or books described in detail the necessary courses: training, Terman suggested, took half a year; trainees had three lessons per week and additional courses in educational psychology; teachers already working could take Saturday or afternoon classes and summer courses.Footnote 73 Teachers’ colleges and normal schools were a priority. In accordance with the narrative of chronological precedence of IQ tests over teaching, it was particularly important to cultivate in young people a taste for the practice.
Though teachers were indeed furthering psychologists’ enterprise, doing research, spreading information about the tests, administering them, endorsing their values, and getting schools to buy the materials,Footnote 74 psychologists’ texts avoided acknowledging that teachers were rendering any kind of service. Instead, they drew much attention to the fact that psychologists had served teachers in the first place by simplifying tests.Footnote 75 Simplicity was a unique selling point of IQ tests and also doubtlessly facilitated their adoption; the concept was simple and the test was simple (the scoring was not so simple; more on that later).Footnote 76 The insistence on simplicity implied two things, which I discuss in the following paragraph: that teachers were unable to grasp very complex ideas and that simplifying things for teachers was the psychologists’ duty.
First, from the early days of intelligence testing, much anxious literature existed on teachers’ intelligence; when “Bineted,” normal school students and current teachers were found to have disappointingly average or even below-average IQs.Footnote 77 The “facts” were superficially deplored and presented as debunking the myth of the all-knowing teacher.Footnote 78 But, having dismissed the infallible teacher figure, psychologists recast it into a much stronger ally, the perfectible teacher figure. Teachers were now addressed, talked about, and treated as lifelong students. Psychologists relished presenting teachers as pupils, or even as children, as L. A. Sharp indicates, “Before school marks can have a definite meaning there must be a standardized measure developed; and teachers must be taught to use it, just as children are taught to use the foot rule.”Footnote 79
This was not just rhetoric. Teachers were effectively finding themselves increasingly taught, tested, and controlled by higher authorities, both administrative and scientific.Footnote 80 Handbooks and manuals for teachers employed precisely the pedagogical strategies that were being extolled for use with students. The introduction to Edward Strong's 1920 Introductory Psychology for Teachers, for instance, highlighted the importance for teachers of learning by doing and of “starting with concrete experiences of everyday life,” and the handbook used storytelling to introduce psychological knowledge.Footnote 81 The double emphasis on teachers’ “low” intelligence and on further education created teachers who were permanently in training, waiting for the next scientific discovery.
Relatedly, psychologists presented their own work as going beyond the call of duty. In their view, teaching teachers and adapting their scales had turned psychology into an especially charitable, supererogatory science. The “services” that psychology rendered were everywhere emphasized, from “large service to the teaching staff” to “[serving] the children of Berkeley”Footnote 82 through to “services to the human race”Footnote 83 and equally abstract assertions of “contribution” to “the science and the art of education.”Footnote 84 Still, the practical sides of those services were never eclipsed: tests were “the teacher's useful tools,” which allowed the teacher “in the long run less work, and much easier and more successful work.”Footnote 85 IQ testing, both as philosophical enterprise and as practical tool in the day-to-day running of schools, was for psychologists a calling and for teachers a blessing and a wealth of opportunities.
Grateful Teachers
So they must be grateful for it. In the earlier quotation by Buckingham, the psychologist ventriloquizes teachers, asserting both their indebtedness and their support: “School people are realizing with conviction that they need to know and to know in terms of the new methods of measurement, the physical and mental development of the children entrusted to their care.”Footnote 86 That was common practice, especially in handbooks destined for teachers, where fictional teachers’ voices were routinely heard, and fictional populations of teachers asserted or admitted the usefulness of tests.Footnote 87 Real teachers were also quoted in intervention studies in schools, beginning with Dickson's pioneering work.Footnote 88 Dickson, a mentee of Terman,Footnote 89 is credited with achieving the earliest large-scale implementation of IQ testing in American schools, in 1917 in the public schools of Oakland, California. Dickson's Report on the experiment, published in 1918, begins with a preface on “The Interest in Research Work Aroused Among Teachers and Principals”; Dickson's first concern had been to survey teachers and administrators to map their needs. Dickson concluded that teachers, although very willing to accept school readjustment by selecting students through IQ testing, were “very helpless unless they have the co-operation of the administrative forces. Hence the class for principals was organized that we might, all working together, study these problems.”Footnote 90
We see here an early example of the rhetoric of togetherness developed above, as well as a clear insistence of the contribution of psychology, but Dickson, not content with his sole surveys, added extra “evidence” on the helplessness of teachers: “Great interest has been shown by both teachers and principals with the result that the Research Department has been flooded with calls for help which it could not find time to give.”Footnote 91 This is, I have found, a typical move from psychologists in that era; they constantly alternated between quoting real teachers and ventriloquizing fictional teachers, without it being always clear how many teachers had said what to whom. In a later work, Dickson affirmed that “teachers who have taken the work have expressed their appreciation of the instruction received and the benefits that have accrued from it,” and in the same text, “Every teacher who is trained in the principles and practice of mental testing finds it an invaluable aid in her classroom teaching,” mingling firsthand reports with implausible generalizations.Footnote 92 This artistic blurriness, at odds with the psychologists’ insistence on fact and data as basis for intervention, occurred in many texts of the period.
Controlling the Teacher-Tester
The rhetorical and practical setup of IQ testing as a one-way favor from psychologist to teacher provided an ideal ethical framework within which to enclose and police teachers’ uses of tests. For if teachers were to be “experts” of a kind in assessing children's intelligence, it was important that psychologists retained control over their uses of the tests. Early on, there was some criticism, internal to psychology, surrounding teachers’ access to intelligence testing. In 1922, Marion Trabue penned a piece warning of the “dangers” of teachers’ inexpertness when administering tests.Footnote 93 That critique is particularly intriguing for its intermingling of “pro-teacher” ideas—tests, said Trabue, should “never be substituted for common sense and good judgment”—and calls for exclusive use of scientific methods by scientists, for fear of abuse.Footnote 94 Regulatory anxiety thus led, paradoxically, to greater recognition of the domain of teachers’ expertise: teachers gained “common sense” and “good judgment” when commentators estimated that it was necessary to restrict their uses of tests.
But most psychologists were absolutely adamant that teachers should indeed be testers. The psychologist, Prometheus-like, had brought to teachers a new light; the least teachers could do was take their responsibility seriously and not overstep their role. Teacher-testers must be disciplined, focused, and motivated, like a regiment—Terman particularly liked the expression “the rank and file of teachers.”Footnote 95 IQ testing, teachers must understand, suffered no imprecisions. Terman allowed for the possibility of a teacher in practice having to teach herself how to use tests (an evident sign of psychologists’ need for teachers). That was not ideal, but better than not using tests at all. In that case, she had to ensure she “studied the directions with conscientious care and [learned] not to take liberties with them.”Footnote 96
In order to ensure that no “liberties” were taken, becoming a certified Bineter involved strict procedures of control. Scoring the tests was the most difficult part of the process, and teachers’ scores had to be checked by psychologists “until the right habits have been thoroughly established.”Footnote 97 Guy Whipple details the procedure:
The tests should first be scored by the teachers, and that all papers should then be shipped to the office of the chief examiner and checked or rescored by clerks trained for this work. If the first half of the papers returned by a given teacher are found to be without error, the remainder may be regarded as sufficiently certain to be without systematic errors.Footnote 98
Dickson had more drastic measures in mind: after fifteen weekly lectures, teachers’ scoring aptitudes on sixteen to twenty tests were checked, after which “the teacher [was] henceforth known as a ‘certificated mental examiner’”; but,
…Even at this point, however, the training in the work of individual mental testing is not complete. Tests submitted by a certificated examiner are still checked from time to time and errors are called to the attention of the teacher concerned.Footnote 99
Teachers were not allowed to forget who had trained them as well as their own fallibility; they were always at risk of error, always in progress. Those practices and discourses glossed over a fact that was, from the early 1920s, increasingly uncomfortable to psychologists: the unreliability of scoring on Binet and other scales.Footnote 100 The obsession over whether teachers were following strict procedure raises questions about the validity of a test advertised as simple. Why would it leave so much space for individual error? Psychologists turned that awkward question into a way of justifying control over teacher-users. Thus they maintained ownership of methods, knowledge, and, of course, qualifications.
For no liberties, either, were to be taken by teachers regarding their true rank. The teacher, Terman sternly notes, “must understand clearly that the mere ability to give a Binet test acceptably gives her no claim to the title “clinical psychologist.”Footnote 101 In an early text, while defending the legitimacy of teachers as testers, he warns against “confusing the complex and baffling science of clinical psychology with the mechanical use of the Binet intelligence tests.”Footnote 102 Elsewhere he recommended that teachers avoid offensive vocabulary such as “dullard” or “feeble-minded”—words that he himself lavishly used.Footnote 103 Clearly, not everything that psychologists allowed themselves was allowed to teachers. And even though teachers gradually began to publish in educational psychology journals, reporting, for instance, on the experimental classes set up by psychologists,Footnote 104 there was always an editor somewhere to warn that teachers were not the most accurate of researchers.Footnote 105
Within this system of favors, the teacher—insider-outsider, used-user, agent-puppet, ally-adversary—helped define, but without ever being allowed to defy, psychology as profession and science. Teachers constituted for psychologists a kind of outer limit—an indirectly definitional alter ego, necessary to their cause but kept at arm's length from their knowledge. Throughout the era, psychologists glazed their practices and knowledge with the impermeable veneer of charitable pedagogy.
Honor and Shame
Easily detectable in psychologists’ tight control of teacher-testers is the intrinsic distrust of the teaching profession by Progressive Era scientists, who, perhaps not without reason, tended to view teachers as “great conservatives.”Footnote 106 The political leanings and activism of teachers in the Progressive Era have been debated, but there seemed to have been little doubt in the minds of intelligence-testing proponents that teachers did not share their progressive enthusiasm.Footnote 107
When they were cast as either allies or adversaries of the cause, it was often along political lines. Teachers who embraced the tests were attributed the favorable label of progressive: “Progressive educators are no longer interested in arguments regarding the validity of the test method,” said Terman.Footnote 108 “The interest shown among principals and teachers … is indicative of open minds and a progressive attitude,” added Dickson.Footnote 109 The definition of a good teacher incorporated indebtedness to scientists: “The efficient teacher is the one who is accepting all the help which tests can give in promoting, drilling, and guiding.”Footnote 110 Promotion for those good soldiers took the form of certificates (not to be confused, as pointed above, with a psychology degree), but mostly it involved spectacular professional improvement. The ideal teacher, touched by the wonders of measurement, was “transformed from a tiresome drillmaster into a guide to the child's best development.”Footnote 111 Similar metaphors of metamorphosis surrounding teachers abound in literature of the time.
But those miracles did little to hide the fact that the “progressive,” “efficient,” ideal teacher-tester was mostly an impeccable executive. That teacher had abandoned the pipe dream of improving children through education and embraced the “fact” of limited potential; she had reoriented her efforts toward selection. In a striking editorial in the Journal of Educational Research in 1921, Buckingham vociferously asserted the uselessness of teaching.Footnote 112 Schooling, he argued, is solely valuable as a selective enterprise: “We cannot create capacity,”Footnote 113 only identify the maximum potential of students and teach them to the brim. Within this drastically restricted understanding of education, intelligence tests, said Buckingham, allowed teachers to select more accurately than ever. Only then could the transformation occur:
Thus, the teacher becomes a guide and director. … He is no longer blind. … When to the old consecration by which the craft has been distinguished is added the new insight which modern methods can confer, teaching will acquire new dignity.Footnote 114
That final flourish implied that psychology had, yet again, bestowed upon educators nobility and validation. It also gave teacher-testers little visibility beyond the horizon of the Binet test.
Indeed, psychologists talked little about what teaching actually involved except testing and sorting students into different tracks according to their IQ results. This put teachers in the odd situation of having knowledge and techniques that ennobled them but that did not lead to precise applications. Yet this was the teachers’ problem. Buckingham did not believe that teachers could do much more than select students but, paradoxically, in an earlier editorial, he had railed against teachers who complained that the obsession for measurement had not yet improved teaching:
If instruction has not been improved as the result of knowledge gained from testing, it is not the fault of the tests, for they have provided the facts and to provide the facts is their sole office. … It is primarily the fault of the school people. … It is the school people who must be heard from. The “next step” after testing is theirs.Footnote 115
The problem for psychologists in envisaging a “what next?” to teachers’ uses of tests may simply have been caused by their realization that, indeed, this territory belonged to educators. It may also have come from fifteen years of meticulous focus on measurement rather than application. But, I would argue, the vagueness of the educational horizon beyond testing and sorting mostly illustrates the difficulty for the discourses of intelligence-testers to solidify into specific, clearly spelled-out programs for the future that teachers could take up. Teachers hovered, as we have seen, in a semirestricted space that precluded ownership of the knowledge. The “good” teacher—the certified Bineter, the believer, the good soldier—was inevitably also a bad teacher; she could not convert into practice a knowledge that had never truly been her own. Teachers, having been enlisted, addressed, trained, and talked about mostly as executives, were the ideal people onto whom to displace complaints about lack of effective school improvement. Their lack of success also hinted that the originary debt had not been repaid—but arguably, within those parameters, it could never be.
Meanwhile, teachers who gave signs of abusing, misusing, or simply not using the tests exposed themselves to public shaming in the form of, for instance, Hollingworth's legendary use of snarky scare quotes: “The idea that [gifted] children exist at all is even laughed to scorn by teachers and principals who have a quarter of a century of ‘experience’ behind them. … They become known only to those educators who ‘believe in’ mental tests.”Footnote 116 Slightly more menacingly, they were treated as unpatriotic, undemocratic, and unwilling to participate in the progress of the nation, as Dickson argued:
We are fighting to make the world safe for democracy. We must fight in a different way to make education and vocation recognize individual differences that will make our own people safe for democracy.Footnote 117
Alexander Carter, in a 1921 article on “Presenting Educational Measurements so as to Influence the Public Favourably” in the Journal of Educational Research, stated:
The measurement energy so far has mainly attacked problems of inner development. The members of this association of course desire to be true educational patriots. To attain this wish, they must do their fair share of the fighting necessary to secure better school support.Footnote 118
Despite their martial rhetorics, those two quotations are less aggressive than the ample corpus of texts that denounced the lack of collective ethos and quasi-criminal streaks, of teachers who failed to adhere to the cause of progressive education. This was especially the case in relation to giftedness.Footnote 119 Teachers who neglected to use appropriate tools to detect children of high intelligence were no less than modern Frankensteins: “It is possible through wrong education to turn a gifted child into an intellectual monstrosity,” said Howard Taylor.Footnote 120 The teacher impervious to, or unwilling to accept, the help of the psychologist risked creating lazy, antisocial children whose energies were redirected toward “Bolshevism.”Footnote 121 In short, the acceptance of IQ tests was in itself a test of true democratic spirit; socialist radicals or unrepentant reactionaries lurked inside those who refused to use the tests.Footnote 122
Conclusion: “The Only Distributing Agency”
I will conclude by noting the invisibility in scientific writings of the period of the fact that teachers too were doing an immense service to scientists and to psychology. Psychologists hardly ever thanked teachers, and when they did praise them, it was in deliriously grand terms, equating the ideal teacher with “Jesus” or “Plato.”Footnote 123 But scientists rarely expressed gratitude for the day-to-day efforts of ordinary teachers or for their contributions, focusing instead on teachers’ gratefulness toward them. It is not that teachers’ contributions, initiatives, and transgressions did not exist, or even that they necessarily went unnoticed among individual psychologists. It is, I contend, that the discursive framework simply did not allow for thanks to be given to teachers, because teachers’ and psychologists’ works were, from the start, precisely not conceptualized as an exchange of favors.
Here it is useful to recall that elsewhere in educational research contrasting frameworks existed. Lagemann's history of educational research opens with an originary battle between John Dewey and Edward Lee Thorndike—won, she argues, by the latter—that led to the perception of schooling as an ever-improvable system.Footnote 124 Dewey had the words to name teachers’ contributions because he had a theoretical framework within which they made sense: he portrayed education “as an art” that does not “turn [its back] upon science,” yet “which happens not because of scientific method but because of departure from it.”Footnote 125 Working from the premise of the irreducible unpredictability of teaching situations, Dewey highlighted the importance of the “other things,”Footnote 126 the interstitial spaces of knowledge and questioning—mismatches between theory and practice, differences between measured and observed achievement, problems that “arise in actual relationships with students.”Footnote 127 The intelligent detection and investigation of those glitches was not just the teacher's domain but the point of origin of scientific inquiry. Within that framework, Dewey could easily conceptualize teachers’ initiatives, actions in situ, and unique contributions to educational science. Not so, as we have seen, within the discursive framework of intelligence-testing proponents.
Educational journals like Peabody sometimes reassured their readers as to the value of their work: in 1928, Bruce Ryburn Payne, mapping “ten years of progress in the service rendered by normal schools and teachers colleges,” dropped a casual reminder:
We educators have ourselves had so much talk about buildings, equipment, laboratories, libraries, statistical work, and this, that, and the other, in recent years, that somehow even we seem to have forgotten that the teacher is the only distributing agency.Footnote 128
Some of the reasons behind that “somehow,” I hope, have been unfolded in this article. The invisibility of the teacher as “distributing agency” was certainly, in part, the fruit of an era where increased standardization and bureaucracy in education had somewhat atomized teachers’ roles and responsibilities. But that was not the only factor. In fact, discourses surrounding teachers in respect to intelligence testing overemphasized teachers’ roles, responsibilities, and motivation—the IQ testing movement was extremely teacher focused. Yet the celebration of scientific rigor, of interprofessional camaraderie, and of the favors psychology rendered to education meant that teachers’ contributions found few referential points by which to be defined in ways other than due repayment for services rendered. Thus, whether actual or potential, teachers’ contributions were not legible themselves as a help on the way to educational “progress.” Beyond its specific aspects, this particular story in the Progressive Era can help us think more generally of the ways in which teachers’ services to society or science might be rendered unthinkable, or eclipsed, when framed within systems of thought that demand their existence, yet deny them gratitude. The assumption of a thankfulness going only one way was, I think, a key “weapon” of IQ testing proponents in the “war” with (and alongside) teachers in the Progressive Era. The relationship was characterized by an assertion arguably stronger than it would have been if scientists had repeated ad infinitum that they were more accurate, more rational, and more efficient than teachers. That assertion was that psychologists deserved the thanks.
