[0:07]Our son, Jesse, had cerebral palsy and could not speak. And they told us he would never be able to learn to read or write, and it was suggested to us that he be placed in a separate classroom or a different school. My wife Marianne and I fought to have Jesse included in general education. He used a computer to communicate, became a straight-A student, wrote poetry, and aced every one of his Latin tests. Then one year, the school insisted that Jesse take the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Now, this test contains just absurd, antiquated questions, like, "Jesse, do you dust a dresser?" And Marianne and I are thinking, "Dust?" My wife and I don't dust. We call dressers "bureaus." And anyway, dusting wasn't a chore I had thought to assign to my child with quadriplegia. The IQ test told us nothing about Jesse's potential, about who he was as a person. Can any attempt to measure intelligence predict a person's value or potential to contribute meaningfully to the world?
[1:38]I'm not sure if I will do a meditation tonight because I'm kind of tired, but Alright, sounds good, Micah. I'll see you in the morning. Have a good night. You, too. Bye.
[1:50]I had a good night of teaching my class tonight at Syracuse University. I had a good night teaching my class tonight at Syracuse University.
[2:03]I am looking forward to having a good day tomorrow. Hope everyone had a good Monday and a good start to their week.
[2:39]Lots of people in society probably like still think that people with disabilities are not like, not like included in their like town or in their family. And some people still have the mindset of sending them away and... I like saw a sheet of paper in the mail that said I had a 40...40 IQ still, and when I like Googled it, it was somebody that can't do tons of things...probably can't teach at a university. Um, here's my uh, my mom, my dad and my uh, and like my younger sister. And throughout like first grade through fifth grade I like watched them trying to help me get in regular like school and then It's like hard to advocate because it took like a long time. But I, I just know that I learned a lot from my mom and dad. The first label plastered on my son's tiny forehead was "jaundiced."
[3:40]That was soon followed by "neurologically impaired," "developmentally delayed," Yeah, that's good. "learning disabled," "low-functioning educable mentally impaired with learning disabilities."
[4:01]Like, you can you feel the love and the cuteness and... What we want to focus on is not a label, but on what are the supports that a child or a person needs in order to participate in a meaningful way? Drunk Micah! This whole idea of segregating kids doesn't...it doesn't fit.
[4:31]Now, Micah and I live closer to each other than we do to our parents. And I don't know if anyone knew that that was going to be possible in his life.
[4:47]It's something that, like, makes me emotional because you just...like it's just these constant reminders that you don't know what people are going to do. Lemonade. Food or not food? No. Why not? It's a drink. It's a drink. He was very engaged anytime I looked in his direction. He had a look on his face that said, "Come on, keep going. I'm right with ya and I want to learn this stuff."
[5:16]The IQ test measures a very limited potential of our brain to learn and misses all the other stuff...a person's ability to take context, clues from their environment, from other people. It misses entirely a person's desire to engage with other people and their openness to relationships. Micah's got a ton of that. He's taking really high-level classes at one of the best universities for disability studies. He's working here, and why do you think it is that we don't have more people like Micah at college?
[5:58]Alfred Binet, the French psychologist, published the first intelligence test in 1905 to identify children that needed educational assistance. Binet stressed that intelligence was a fluid quality, shaped by one's environment and culture, and subject to change over time. The American psychologist Henry Goddard radically altered how the Binet-Simon test was used. In 1908, Goddard insisted that the test was a scientific tool to identify the "feeble minded" in our midst. In 1913, the United States government funded Goddard's research to test 29,000 immigrants a week at Ellis Island. Goddard said his results showed that 79% of Italians, 83% of Jews and 87% of Russians were feebleminded. Goddard's work fueled a widespread movement called eugenics, which called for eliminating the "menace" of the feebleminded through forced sterilization and institutionalization. eugenics had the support of prominent physicians, professors, governors, presidents, and even the United States Supreme Court. From the 1910s through the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of people were institutionalized, and more than 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized.
[7:41]At the beginning of World War I, the U.S. Army administered IQ tests to nearly two million soldiers. Men who scored lower were fit to be privates, but not officers. Privates were the most likely to end up on the front lines of battle. During World War II, Hitler cited the U.S. eugenics research as justification for sterilizing and murdering hundreds of thousands of Germans with disabilities.
[8:13]Recent studies have shown IQ test results are biased by factors such as socioeconomic status and cultural background. For example, African-American students are almost twice as likely as white students to be classified with intellectual disability. Despite its destructive roots and flaws, IQ testing is alive and well. 49 of 50 states still use IQ testing as an assessment tool to determine whether a student is labeled as intellectually disabled. Once a student is labeled, they are often segregated in separate classrooms from typically developing children. In the United States, only 17 percent of students with intellectual disability are fully included in general education classrooms.
[9:09]One high school in Boston is showing that all students, including those with significant disability, can succeed in general education. How many p's are there? Like, two? Two? So 9p what? Square. Good. Write that in that first box. I don't know what Naieer's IQ is. What I do know is that Naieer is a committed, hard-working student who has some challenges.
[9:45]And Naieer, after you paint, you're gonna do one, two, three, right? Cover something up. And then what are you going to do? You're going to step back behind this line here, right? He's gonna take the picture. What are you going to paint that makes you happy? What are you gonna tell me? Show me. Naieer has a style of his own and he's not afraid to go in there and freely draw and express himself and capture line and color and movement. And I don't think he really knows how talented he really is. If I got half of that from some of my other students, I'd be happy because that determination he has is something that is just in him. He cannot give that up. He has to do it. She, she's white. She's white. Yeah. Is she a human or mermaid or what?
[10:48]You don't know? No.
[10:54]He gets frustrated a lot because what he has in his head is hard for it to come out of his mouth. How many men were killed at Gettysburg? So we're looking for a what? Um, looking for It's not like the movies where you get this teacher that comes in and she saves the day and everything's great. It's one day at a time. You guys can use your study guides. I wouldn't even use the notebook. I would literally just use the study guide while we play Jeopardy. I think that intelligence looks different for everybody. It's clear that he has an intellectual impairment. But I don't...that doesn't necessarily mean that he can't be intelligent. Please describe why our unit on government is the most important thing you will learn in all of high school and possibly your life. Naieer. You have learned about the government because you will use this information for when you vote. That is very true. You will use this information when you vote. I will add that. The fact that he is a black man and he is tall, sometimes it is troubling to wonder what might the outside world perceive him as. If he's being loud or jumpy or enthusiastic, somebody might perceive that as being threatening. It's one thing when they're young and they're cute, but eventually they're going to get older, they're gonna go through puberty, and the outside world is going to see them very differently. I remember them saying something about his IQ level, and I think it was like 80 or 90. How? Who developed that IQ? So we're using a testing rubric based on the 19th century or the early 20th century? And we're using it in 2015, 2020 to define our children, our children's mental capacity? Nah...I can't buy that. As a mother, I'm not going to try to fix him or change him. I accept him for who he is. You look and see what they're good at and you nurture that. That's just being a parent. He is going to college. It's not a hope. He is going.
