Educational Administration

[joshwriting]

1. Enrollment in Relation to Age and Grade

Two of the very easiest facts to observe and record about the pupils in any school are age and grade. If they are recorded as in Table 1 on the following page, even these simple items tell much about the working of the school in question. Thus, looking at each vertical column, one sees at once the enormous variability in age of those who reach the same grade or educational standard. In the third grade in Connecticut in 1903, children were reported as young as four years old and as old as seventeen. To include nine tenths of the children in this grade, a range of five years is required. Over three years are required to include even three fourths of them. In the fourth grade, only a quarter of the children are of the so-called "normal" age of ten; a fifth of them are twelve or over; in a class of forty there will usually be one child fourteen or more years old and four children eight or less. In the elementary school, even in the lower grades, there are many adolescents, beginning to be moved by the instincts of adult life. In the high school are many boys and girls under fifteen who, though intellectually gifted, are physically, emotionally, and in social instincts little children.

(from page 3.)
Educational Administration: Quantitative Studies (1913) By George Drayton Strayer, Edward Lee Thorndike
*****

As I noted elsewhere (I think), "With all of its defects the country school of a quarter century ago was strongest in caring for the unusually gifted children. These were given great freedom in thought, in rate of accomplishment, and in the materials assigned. The graded system with all of its improvement has decidedly narrowed the range of opportunity of the gifted child."

Thorndike's work, both then and later, provides a lens through which one can examine educational practice today, not only of the gifted, and see some of the places in which we fall terribly terribly short.

Comments

[wanderingdavi.livejournal.com]

HTML is horribly broken.

Can't tell if it's messing up my page.

Please fix.

[joshwriting.livejournal.com]

Tried it again? It looks fine on my page. (if it is still messed up on yours, send me a screen shot so I can see what you are seeing.)

[wanderingdavi.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. All better, how weird.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Regardless of the substantive issues here, I don't think you should look at the source as trustworthy: I consider Thorndike to be one of the worst influences on early 20th century education, a narrow-minded researcher who cashed in on administrators' wanting to claim that they were managing schools scientifically. Do not trust this source.

[joshwriting.livejournal.com]

In this particular instance, there are two mitigating factors. George Drayton Strayer was hung up on accurate numbers, throughout his career. And the reason that they used the 1903 numbers in their 1913 book is that those were solid. They were and are verifiable - at least to the extent that if they were made up, they were made up long before Thorndike got ahold of them. (and the numbers and pattern are actually pretty much consistent with what is seen in other places during that period.)

So, out of curiosity, how do you feel about Whipple, Terman, and Hollingworth? (Leta, not George)

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

I think I may have misread your original post, because I thought the passage after the stars came from the same source. Yes, the statistics would be correct, but the conclusions drawn from them would be questionable: elsewhere, Thorndike and allies argued that the wide range of skills within individual grades was evidence of a need for "scientific management" of schools.

In terms of the other sources you mention, I don't know much of Whipple, other than editing the 1918 NSSE yearbook that had the triumphal claims of scientific management through ed statistics and assessment. Hollingworth strikes a bell: did he run school surveys at any point?

Terman... well, Terman strikes me as the quintessential pandering educational psychologist. In 1930, he admitted that he really didn't know much about statistics when he was in grad school and became interested in testing. He participated in the Army Alpha and Beta tests and then sold millions of copies in the 1920s. He created the Stanford Achievement Test series, which was also commercially succesful. I haven't looked at his longitudinal "gifted study" in years, so I'll withhold comments on that.

[joshwriting.livejournal.com]

This is Whipple's book on Special Classes for Gifted Children:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC02140161&id=3VkWAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=gifted+children&as_brr=1

Here is one of Leta Stetter Hollingworth's, on mentally retarded children, which is where she got started:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01923953&id=u28WAAAAIAAJ&pg=RA1-PA8&lpg=RA1-PA8&dq=leta+hollingworth+180&as_brr=1#PPP12,M1

She is best known for her studies of highly gifted children, with Children above 180 IQ probably her best known title in that realm (though finished by her husband, Harry, after her death). There is a comparatively recent bio of her that has been very well received. She ran schools in New York City on two separate occasions, I believe.

A brief online bio:
http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/letahollingsworth.html

and... I have been plugging Frankenstein and the Ed. Policy blog.

[sdorn.livejournal.com]

Ah... the wonders of Google Books. I don't know any interesting questions to ask about the methods side of this, but I'd be curious to know if these earlier writings had the standard reification of "IQ" and intelligence as contemporary writing on mental retardation.