See Thomas J. Farrell, "IQ and Standard English," College Composition and Communication, volume 34 (1983): pages 470-484. The professional journal College Composition and Communication is sponsored by the professional organization known as the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC -- or 4C's), which is a subset of the larger professional organization known as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). I will discuss the CCCC further momentarily.
For my first draft titled "IQ, Orality, and Literacy" in December 1973 to the final published draft that appeared in December 1983, I worked on that essay off and on for about ten years. I sent the first draft to Professor Jensen with a cover letter. He wrote back and told me that nobody had ever tested my environmental hypothesis, and he posed some questions that he thought I should address. As my essay grew progressively longer, I sent him another draft with a cover letter. Once again, he wrote back and called my attention to certain publications he thought I should look at. I looked at them and further revised my essay until it was approximately 18,500 words in length. I had to shorten it substantially for publication.
Over the years, a number of people read various drafts of my essay and encourage me to get it published, including Walter J. Ong, Eric A. Havelock, and Jean Houston (of the Human Potential Movement).
I set forth my possible environmental explanation as a hypothesis that could be tested. It is a testable hypothesis. But it would not be easy to test because it would require longitudinal studies involving experimental groups and control groups of students, and approaches to instructing the students in the experimental group that would be especially designed for those students.
For example, the approach to reading instruction developed by the late Gary Simpkins would be appropriate for instructing the students in the experimental groups.
See Simpkins' doctoral dissertation The Cross-Cultural Approach to Reading (Ed.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, 1976), and the five-booklet series by Simpkins, Grace Holt, and Charlesetta Simpkins titled Bridge: A Cross-Culture Reading Program: Reading Booklet Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
No doubt other suitable approaches to instructing the students in the experimental groups could also be developed.
But the approaches to instructing the students in the experimental groups would require in-service training for the teachers who would be using those approaches.
So who's going to provide the funding for the in-service training of the teachers? Local, state, or federal government? But what about foundations?
Now, we might wonder if such funding would be a worthwhile investment. There is reason to believe that it might be.
See, for example, Richard E. Nisbet's book Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Culture Count (Norton, 2009) and James R. Flynn's book Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Now, would conservatives object to the funding of longitudinal studies involving experimental groups and control groups and pre-tests and post-tests on standardized IQ tests?
Hernstein and Murray are conservatives. Would they object to the funding of experimental research designed to test my hypothesis? Would other conservatives object?
RADICAL ENGLISH TEACHERS
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