Race, Ability, and Language, Intersections of

Historical Sketch

Race and language differences have had a longstanding link to ability differences throughout the history of education in the United States. Early ability hierarchies that benefited White Protestant English-speaking people can be traced back to the days before the United States was a nation. Early in the 1700s, for instance, craniometry was used to “scientifically” justify an intelligence hierarchy and racial differences by measuring a facial angle formed by two lines: one from the nostril to the ear and one from the upper jaw bone to the forehead. Slaves and indigenous people were at the bottom of this hierarchy that contributed to the racialization of society.

Regarding the treatment of nondominant languages in schools, in the 1900s, communities maintained their languages, and many states authorized bilingual education in schools, allowing instruction in German, Swedish, and Spanish, among others. In general, it was not considered a disadvantage to speak a language other than English in schools. At the same time, however, there was also a movement toward assimilation to White [Page 1732]English-speaking culture, which advocated the repression of indigenous languages, the restriction of the German language in schools, and the requirement that immigrants be able to speak English to become U.S. citizens.

The push for assimilation was well established at the beginning of the 20th century with the standardization and bureaucratization of public schools and the development of norm-based measures of aptitude (e.g., intelligence quotient [IQ] tests) based on the bell curve, which assumes that some percentage of the population will have high, average, or low intelligence. The use of achievement and aptitude tests to evaluate children's and youth's abilities, fueled by social theories of social hygiene and eugenics, contributed to the perception of students from nondominant backgrounds as biologically, culturally, and intellectually deficient. Historians have documented that these newly developed technologies of evaluation were used to place students from nondominant backgrounds in remedial education classes. As a result, these students were labeled slow learners, mental deviants, or laggards, segregated from their peers in the general education curriculum, and pushed out of the schools. These forms of discrimination that linked race, ability, and language differences occurred even before there was any legal system of classification, or of rights and protections for individuals with disabilities.

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