In this article, Nick Wright looks at the work of Michael Gove's former special adviser Dominic Cummings and places it in the context of the history of genetic determinist theories of education.
Ever since the intellectual case for school selection
based on intelligence quotient testing was found to be grounded in faked
statistics there has been an unceasing quest to find a new theoretical basis
for a school system based on differentiating children.
The talmudic text deposited at the DfE by Michael Gove's
departing policy advisor suggests that genetics may be the new great white hope
for those who need the appearance of intellectual rigour to cloak their
preference for selection. Only a political innocent would think that an
argument that dismissed the value of much education, trashed teachers and
claimed for heritability a privileged place in determining children's ability
would go unchallenged.
Michael Gove's special advisor or Spad, Dominic Cummings
– the author of a 250 page reflection on government, politics and education* –
is reportedly returning to his career in the ministerially-favoured 'free
schools' sector.
Already the practical case for such schools – freed from
curriculum requirements, the necessity to employ qualified teachers, pay agreed
pay rates or appoint head teachers with teaching experience – is unravelling
more speedily than the faked science that underpinned the introduction of the
11 plus.
To recap – for any ministerial aide whose Oxford degree
in Ancient and Modern History missed out the 20th century – Cyril Burt,
knighted in 1946 for services to psychological testing – based his conclusion
that the superior performance in his tests of upper class children in private
preparatory schools was due to their greater inherited intelligence. He reached
this conclusion in 1909 and by the time he died (in 1971) the idea that tests
at the end of primary education were an accurate predictor of general
intelligence, and by extension, future academic performance, vocational
aptitude and positioning in the social structure, was under assault.
Burt based much of his research on the performance in
intelligence tests of monozygotic twins.
Within a few years both the identity (even existence) of
his supposed collaborators in field work and the statistical reliability of his
key evidence was questioned. By the end of the decade his intellectual
reputation was irredeemably tarnished and his friend and biographer Leslie
Hearnshaw had concluded that Burt's data – critically important in the
political case for selection and the post-war tri-partite division of secondary
education – was fraudulent or could not be relied on.**
Remarkably, the evidence of this fraud has been
challenged and a lively polemic has ensued in which the strongest suggestions
that Burt's findings remain valid have come from people who still cleave to the
proposition that the genetical heritability of intelligence as measured by IQ
scores has decisive utility in education policy.
While this puts the question firmly into the contested
terrain of ideology and politics Cummings claim that: “There is strong
resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on
genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social
mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best
misleading and often worthless" is a transparent bid to claim the
evidential high ground.
Relying on the work of US behavioural geneticist Robert
Plomin he claims for genetic factors a decisive role in determining
intelligence and educational attainment.
Plomin enters the back story at this point. In a
speculative Spectator article this July he takes a swipe at Leon Kamin,
the author of a 1970's book The Science and Politics of IQ which
analysed Burt's statistics and found the correlation coefficients of
monozygotic and dizygotic twins' IQ scores were the same to three decimal
places, across articles – even when Burt more than doubled his sample.
Plomin seems uncomfortable with the mechanistic
application of his research to contemporary political controversies. In an illuminating
BBC Radio 4 exchange with the geneticist Steve Jones he was at pains to make
the point that no necessary policy implications follow from his work and emphatically stated: “I am not advising on
policy.”
By way of contrast Dominic Cummings makes larger claims
for this evidence.
"Work by one of the pioneers of behavioural genetics,
Robert Plomin, has shown that most of the variation in performance of children
in English schools is accounted for by within school factors (not between
school factors), of which the largest factor is genes. Scores in the phonics
test show ~70% heritability; scores in National Curriculum reading and maths
tests at 7, 9, and 12 show ~60-70% heritability; and scores in English, Maths
and Science GCSEs show ~60% heritability in a just completed twin study (the
GCSE data will be published later in 2013).
Cummings is keen to discount environmental factors in
shaping pupil performance and emphasise the primacy of genetic factors.
“In contrast, the overall effects of shared environment
(including all family and school influences shared by the twins growing up in
the same family and attending the same school) accounts for only about a third
of the variance of GCSE scores. Educational achievement in school is more
heritable than IQ in English school children: i.e the heritability of what is
directly taught is higher than what is not directly taught. Perhaps
differential performance in educational achievement is heritable because it
is taught: that is, roughly similar schools teaching the same material
reduces a major source of environmental variation, therefore the variation
that remains is even more due to genetic variation.”
And he is is equally keen to discount family wealth,
social position and class as factors:
“Similarly, this paper (Science, 23/4/2010) shows
how good teachers improve reading standards for all but this means that the
variance that remains is more due to genetic differences. This leads to a
conclusion almost completely at odds with prevailing conventional wisdom in
political and academic debates over education: differences in educational
achievement are not mainly because of ‘richer parents buying greater
opportunity’ and the successful pursuit of educational opportunity and ‘social
mobility’ will increase heritability of educational achievement.”
To collapse the entire corpus of 'progressive' educational thought into the
simple concept that educational achievement arises from privileged access is a
transparently rhetorical flourish that abandons any claim to rational debate.
Behind it lies a an unsavoury strain of thinking with a
compelling claim to historical continuity. It was, after all, Cyril Burt, who
in his 1909 study argued that:
“Wherever a process is correlated with intelligence,
these children of superior parents resemble their parents in themselves being
superior. Proficiency at such tests does not depend on opportunity or training,
but on some innate quality. The resemblance in degree of intelligence between
the boys and their parents must, therefore, be due to inheritance. We thus have
an experimental demonstration that intelligence is hereditary.” 1909, p 181.
Burt's 1909 comparative measure of parental intelligence
had the virtue of simplicity. He simply assumed it from their profession and social
position taking intellectual and upper class parents of his sample cohort to be
more intelligent than the tradesmen.
Sixty years later, when quizzed about his measure of
parental intelligence he reported that: “The intelligence of the parents was assessed
primarily on the basis of their actual jobs, checked by personal interviews.”
Today of course, rich parents – even those seized by the
insight that the intelligence of their offspring is mostly inherited – are
still inclined to trust the education of their children not to the cash
strapped and highly invigilated state sector but to a more relaxed environment
where generously-endowed private schools with smaller class sizes and better
paid teachers enjoy more intimate and
productive relations with the most prestigious universities. Lower down
the pecking order ambitious parents will move might and main (and address) in
order to get their children into a school perceived to be better.
An inevitable consequence of the current fashion for
behavioural genetics is the hunt for the 'intelligence gene'. Much hope is invested in the work of a young
Chinese researcher Zhao Bowe at the biotech research centre BGI Shenzen where a
large array of DNA sequencing machines is available.
The research programme – which involves an international
group of collaborators – is aimed at discovering the genetic code for
intelligence by distilling information from the genomes of thousands of
prodigies. Large claims are made for the project; that it will identify the
genetic basis of IQ and allow for large scale embryo screening including
interventions to raise the IQ potential of unborn children.
Sceptics naturally predict failure for this utopian
project. They point to the complexity involved in the relatively simpler scheme
to isolate the genetic determinants of height in which nothing much emerged
until the DNA sample exceeded ten thousand. After herculean efforts scientists
have now tracked down something close to a thousand genetic variations that can
be connected to variations in height with some claim to universal applicability
across different population groups.
Zhao's is a bold initiative and one with no easily
determined time scale. If the interest in this project objective arises from a
desire for scientific and rational policies which might identify and educate a
larger cohort of exceptionally gifted children, perhaps one drawn from a wider
social spectrum than conventional school systems and testing regimes deliver,
it might have wide appeal.
If, however, it was to be deployed to exclude some
children from access to the best locally available education its appeal would
be greatest to those who dismiss the potential of the great majority of
children to develop beyond expectations. Cummings is frank in his advocacy of
special educational privileges for children who are identified as especially
gifted.
From the standpoint of school improvement professionals,
concerned with the education of that great majority of children who do not
enjoy the class room conditions of the elite, the priority is to devise
strategies that realise the educational potential of the many.
If it would be perverse to ignore science that showed a
powerful role for heritability in IQ
test results it would be equally perverse to discount the significance of the
uncontroversial finding that Cummings references: 'that good teachers improve
reading standards for all'.
Education has a wider role than simply identifying and
developing exceptionally gifted pupils. Such children have to live in a real
world where the fullest development of each child's potential is the condition
for the fullest development of society as a whole.
Behavioural genetics has a serious public relations
problem in education circles that is not going to be easily dispelled by
partisan polemics of the type deployed by Michael Gove's attack dogs.
Neither will it be rehabilitated if it is deployed to
perpetuate an education system that allows privileged elites, whether those
elites are selected by parental wealth or genetic endowment, to prosper while
the needs of society as a whole, and of the individual child, are neglected.
A deeper understanding of the role of heritability
factors in the development of the child is an undoubted common good. But a
fixed gaze on the genome must not be at the expense of a 20/20 vision of
education for all.
* http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1381763590219/-Some-thoughts-on-education.pdf
** Hearnshaw,
L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press.