Disparity among students

The spring before I was hired by Killeen ISD I was completing a course at Baylor in Psychometrics taught by a goofy dude from somewhere up North. Near the end of the course he had us read an article (that I tried very hard to find but was unable to locate) in which the author argued against the idea of No Child Left Behind since the logic of the Bell Curve (and statistics in general) dictated that if any measurement of intelligence or ability was to be meaningful there would have to be a large portion of the population that fell behind it. So it was futile to act like we could get every kid beyond a meaningful yardstick of intelligence.

The same article also referenced findings that in spite of attempts to do so, there hasn't been any success in really increasing someone's IQ.

I don't remember what the point of the article was or why we were asked to read it but at the time I was just wrapping up the worst year of my life as a first year teacher in Belton. I was pretty disillusioned with the whole education process at the time and I basically took away this conclusion:

IF we cannot change people's IQs then there is little we can do for struggling students.

A few months later I was going through new teacher orientation in Killeen where I was told that one of Killeen ISD's beliefs is "Students can learn more and at higher levels". Secretly I remembered the article I'd read and thought it was probably silly to think that. But I also figured I had one year left at most before I was drummed out of education.

Fortunately a lot of things have changed since then.

I was in the teacher's lounge the other day at my school and overheard a teacher saying something similar to what that article's author had said in regards to NCLB and the futility of making them all geniuses. I remembered the article and chimed in with the Bell Curve logic of how some people just have to be at the -3 to -1 SD side of the curve.

But then I also said something that has become really clear to me in the years since I took that class at Baylor: "But they can do better then they are doing now, and that's what we need to try to do for them." We all agreed.

While looking for this article to remind myself exactly what it said, I found this article, which tried to correlate IQ tests to other life outcomes. Turns out it is not completely predictive but higher IQ does seem to point to higher levels of success (more so in academic endeavors but somewhat in non-academic endeavors too). It also links a lot of different variables in life to life's outcomes.

When it comes down to it, IQ is just one piece of the puzzle. Today kids come from backgrounds with divergent family structures, incomes, exposure to knowledge, and beliefs. Even if we can't change IQ drastically we can do a lot to try and help instill the values like empathy, commitment, curiosity, open-mindedness, etc. (wink to the PYP-experienced among us). We can also do a lot to show them the positive effects of loving and caring relationships even if those are rare at home.

It's easy to lump things like that into the category of "Character Development" and block out some time each week for things like that with our counselors but it's really a lot more interconnected with the general curriculum. As leaders we have an imperative to help teachers and students see the importance of including elements of "Character Development" into every lesson so that even if some of our students will never be president or a scientists they will all have some hope of becoming caring productive members of society with some feelings of self-efficacy.