IQ matters: All things equal, some students will learn more than others
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jun 22
- 2 min read
Updated: Jun 22
Some people are smarter than others, writes psychologist Russell T. Warne in Quillette. Providing excellent curricula and experienced teachers will not narrow achievement gaps. Weaker students learn more in good schools, but stronger students will learn a lot more, so individual differences in achievement will widen.
In developed countries, "only about ten percent of differences in learning outcomes are related to school- and classroom-level characteristics," he writes. Most are related to intelligence and -- because most children are raised by their biological parents -- to family characteristics influenced by genetics.
Many U.S. educators are in denial about the importance of intelligence, his research shows. In a survey of 200 teachers, more than "85 percent believed that it was too simplistic to measure someone’s intelligence with just one score, like an IQ," Warne writes. Almost 85 percent endorsed the discredited theory of "multiple intelligences," and almost 40 percent "thought that 'street smarts' were more important for life success than intelligence." These "beliefs are completely incorrect," he writes. "In contrast, only a third thought that students who perform better on intelligence tests would also perform better in school." That one is correct.
Warne thinks bright students should move more quickly through school: Up to a quarter of high-school students could start college a year early, and five to 10 percent could skip two years, research shows. "There is no evidence that grade skipping creates any harms — academically, socially, or otherwise — for children."
Teachers are being asked to customize lessons for children who are way ahead and way behind, but placed in the same classroom. That doesn't work for anyone, he believes. Some students need more than 13 years -- and a lot of extra help -- to complete the K-12 curriculum, he writes. "Almost ten percent of 12th graders have lower reading achievement than the average 4th grader."
Giving all students a chance to attend orderly schools with high-quality curriculum and well-trained teachers is a worthy goal, even if it doesn't equalize outcomes or close achievement gaps. We don't know who's intelligent until we give them a chance to learn. But we shouldn't pretend that schools can do everything.
Freddie DeBoer addresses the issue in his latest column on "the cult of smart." The "college for all" consensus "has started to slip in part because it’s simply become too obvious that differences in individual talent are real and thus the system cannot actually push everyone through 'the college pipeline,' unless standards are reduced to a ludicrous degree," he writes.
While reformers focused on improving schools, he writes, the real problem "was a) vast differences in structural social conditions between races produced racial achievement gaps that prompted a great deal of angst and b) academic talented is unequally distributed among individuals in our population."
Joanne: "In a survey of 200 teachers, more than '85 percent believed that it was too simplistic to measure someone’s intelligence with just one score, like an IQ', Warne writes. Almost 85 percent endorsed the discredited theory of 'multiple intelligences', and almost 40 percent 'thought that 'street smarts' were more important for life success than intelligence'. These 'beliefs are
completely incorrect', he writes. 'In contrast, only a third thought that students who perform better on intelligence tests would also perform better in school'. That one is correct."
I agree with most of this, but I must object to "discredited" theory of multiple intelligences. Why "discredited"? Intelligence correlates memory and generates adaptive behavior. Different sensory mechanisms store perception in different regions…
While the things said here about IQ are true, there is another factor at work: the inclination to do hard work. In high school, I knew a girl who was not very sharp. Nice, but kind of low on IQ. However, she was full of the inclination to hard work. School was hard for her, but she leaned into it and did OK. Later, she became a very successful adult, not by smarts, but by being willing to work harder at things than other people.
Turkheimer's First Law of Behavioral Genetics: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
All life on Earth descended from a common ancestor. Trout are distant cousins to humans.
Parents roll dice when they put their kids together and some kids come up snake-eyes
<1-1-1-1-(2040)-1-1-1-1>. The human and the canine IQ curves overlap.
Compulsory unpaid labor is slavery. Schools give to many normal children no reason to do what schools require. There's a reason that "academic" has become a synonym for "irrelevant".
"Can't" and "don't want to" are so closely intertwined that it's vain to try to separate them.
It does not take twelve years at $16,950 per student-year to teach a normal child to read and compute. Most vocational training occurs…
A Porsche and a Volkswagen come from the same parent company, but once the Porsche gets ahead, the gap between the Porsche and the Volkswagen will widen, and the Volkswagen will not catch up unless the Porsche is hampered a la Harrison Bergeron.