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Thursday, March 9, 1978
University Daily Kansan
Comment
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Unaged editorial represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Stated columns represent the views of only the writers.
Let Schneider do job
Ross Doyen, Kansas Senate president, faces criminal charges in connection with alleged violations of the state's campaign finance act. If found guilty, he faces one year in jail and a $2,500 fine for each of the three counts that have been filed against him.
Doyen, R-Concordia, is undeniably innocent until proven guilty—but the allegations are disturbing. Equally disturbing is the kneejerk manner in which his fellow state senators have leaped to his defense.
Immediately after Kansas Attorney General Curt Schneider filed the charges, which focus on the delayed reporting of campaign contributions, the buddy system went into effect. Sen. Frank Gaines, D-Augusta, accused Schneider of politically prosecuting Doyen.
GAINES EVEN dredged up Schneider's trip last year to Joplin, Mo., when Schneider and an unidentified woman were photographed near a motel. Gaines said Schneider might be hauled before the Senate Ways and Means Committee to discuss the incident.
incident.
Hiding campaign contributions given by special interest groups is a serious matter. So is jumping on the state's top law enforcement officer for trying to do his job as he sees it. And threatening Schneider with what amounts to legislative blackmail is disgusting.
disgusting.
If Schroeder has a case, it will soon be patient. If not, he probably is through politically. Perhaps the Senate friends of Ross Doyen could display more patience in awaiting either result before blindly attacking Schneider.
During the latter part of the last century, Kansans were following the advice of homegrown Populist leader Mary Elen Lease: "Rise more hell and
Farmers revive Populist spirit
That attitude is undergoing a rebirth. Some of America's traditionally silent and self-reliant workers, farmers and miners, are grabbing at straws that find themselves drowning in economic models that appear beyond their control.
As this vanguard of the republ form movement becomes more embittered by the onstageings of big government and big business, the Populist surge will gain
That rude change will remind the nation that it is indeed the America of the "little man" who has lost his longing to strong group jockeying for government favor.
BUT THE movement may be bified and eventually suffocated by government, which happened during the earlier part of the 1900s.
As proof of the Populist renaissance, leaders of the American Agriculture Movement and its Canadian affiliate talked last week of forming APEC, Agricultural Products of Exporting Countries.
The proposal probably is the first countries.
complete expression of disillusionment on the part of North American farmers. Only pure disillusionment could lead the movement's members to ignore the crucial differences between an oil cartel, like that of OPEC, and a grain cartel.
Wheat can grow almost anywhere, provided that the right variety is either developed or introduced to a region. Wheat harvests occur almost weekly throughout the world. Most importantly, wheat is a renewable resource. Oil is not.
FARMERS HAVE planned a plow down of wheat acreage, scheduled to begin in Kansas March 15. The farm movement's leaders are asking farmers to start slowly by plowing up 5 percent of their wheat acreage a week. Soon after, they will have days after Senate Agriculture Committee hearings are supposed to recess.
The hearings are pleasing farmers, who have sheaves of legislation, such as the Dole Bill. But they also need to remind them that their public relations people have accomplished more than they originally anticipated in September.
"That's what makes us feel we've got a lot accomplished," Bob Scribner of Johnson, a movement supporter, said recently.
And as bills are introduced into Congress, Kansas farmers stand to lose regardless of whether they plant or leave their land fallow.
A report issued by Servi-Tech Inc., a Dodge City agricultural consulting firm, indicates that farmers can expect to lose $10 million per acre in crops planted under irrigation systems. Those losses do not even where; they apply to more profitable crops. The cost of energy for irrigation pumps is $125,000 a year, while the western Kansas farmer's difficulties.
THE political consciousness of farmers is changing has been demonstrated by Kansas and Missouri farm support for the coal strikers. A convoy of 32 cars, trucks and tractors converged on Central City, Ky., to deliver four truckloads of food to striking miners this week.
According to Scriiner, the impetus for movement support of striking miners originated in the movement's Columbia. He joined the movement in Kansai and Kansas joined the food assistance effort.
When farmers from Kansas perform a show of solidarity with striking APalachian coal miners, the effect of inundation on their pocketbooks cannot be discounted.
"I wonder whether it's not anti-big business and anti-big government," Scribner speculated.
Unfortunately, government will continue its pattern of growth and supervision over the economy. The blame, if any can be ascribed, may be partly attributable to special interest groups such as the American Agriculture Movement and the obstinate United Mine Workers.
It is unusual to see a farmer for a man who has 2,000 acres of central Kansas farm land—even if much of the farm is owned by the bank. However, the show of support that farmers have given striking miners has implications that go to the heart of the latent populism that has recently resurfaced.
The straws of revisionist legislation aimed at appeasement will not satisfy the farmer for long, just as striking miners have shown little support for negotiated coal contracts. The farm and railways are still more from America: a rebirth of the historical Populist spirit of the "little man."
Early '70s idealism now lacking
"Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not?' — Robert Kennedy.
A seven-year period is no great chunk of time. But when compared with many other differences are obvious. A look at seven- and eight-year-old KU Student Senate records can attest to the differences between today's student body and the KU students of the early 1980s.
Like any current Senate, the senates of the early '70s drafted unsuccessful resolutions. Certainly many of their successors have felt the need of the directives that guide today's Senate. But for a somewhat cock-eyed approach to history, the unsuccessful resolutions also can be studied.
IF ONE resolution had been approved, KU students of 1978 would be able to cross from Wescoe to Strong Hall without looking both ways. In 1971, the Senate petitioned Chancellor E. Laurence Chalmers to maneuver the Jalapei-Jabawk guard. The resolution suggested that the emergency vehicles use peripheral streets. After the removal of the asphalt boulevard, the resolution
proposed, a strip of natural earth and sod, or an unnavigable stream—filled with water and well stocked with fish and vegetation—could be made through the center of campus.
Bill Ebert, the 1971 student body president, said recently that he still thought it was a pretty good idea.
Contrasted with today's students, students of the early 70s were vitally concerned about the environment. The boulevard resolution was drawn up as a solution to on-campus traffic and as a safeguard against the pollutants in automobile fumes.
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS of seven and eight years ago seemed more willing than today's students to sacrifice some of their ecologically hazardous luxuries.
The Senate of 1970 was prepared to order the Kansas Union Operating Committee to lift restrictions on machines from the Union
properties That "order" was
availed only by a Senate
committee, which produced
plans for a reclamation center.
The machines were never banned because the Coca-Cola Co. stepped in and donated the Whomper, a pulverizing machine. The Whomper never made money but activity fees subsidized it for about $4,000 every year it operated.
Mary Lou Wright, who is still secretary-treasurer of the now-defunct Whomper Inc., said that in the early 2010s she and enthusiast-kind or "we are going to save the world" attitude.
In addition to having this attitude, candidates for student offices often ran on far-reaching platforms. In his campaign for the 70th platform of David Awwhy, Independent Student Party candidate, outlined courses of action for ending the Vietnam War, abolishing Selective Sex and allowing black militants Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.
If a few of the early 70s Senate suggestions had been passed, they undoubtedly would have been repealed by now.
Senate committees worked on
plans to eliminate all or part of the student activity fee. Called "an unnecessary and restricting compulsory head tax," the fee was waived for students with a voluntary method of financing student organizations.
The Senate, typically an organization of embryonic politicians, sometimes found in Congress to pressure from constituents.
FOR EXAMPLE, in 1971 a feminist group known as the February Sisters occupied the old East Asian Studies Study. To appease the feminists, the Senate investigated the cost of dispensing contraceptives through the health insurance program. As an outgrowth of the February Sisters' demands, the Senate, in turn, demanded that the Kansas run government was to have been written by the staff of Watkins Hospital.
To today's KU sophisticates, those unsuccessful Senate resolutions may sound trite, or, in many cases, they represented the unfilled wishes of the early '70s generation. Do today's Senate minutes mirror the same concern? The same are social concern?
I.Q. tests often result in poor school placement
N. Y. Times Features
Bv GEORGE W. ALBEE
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Intelligence quotient tests, better known as I.Q. tests, have been around since the turn of this century. The first I.Q. test was developed in France by a psychologist, Alfred Binet, whose name is attached to the most widely used child test.
The number of different I.Q. tests is enormous. Some are administered individually and others are given in groups. Where once the I.Q. was obtained by dividing a child's age into three equal groups, practice is no longer universally followed. It only worked for children between the age of three and 13 anyway—mental development begins to slow down at age 13 and to level off in the mid-26. The speed, but not the power, of these tests usually begins a long slow decline after age 30.
Obviously, dividing mental age by the steadily increasing chronological age would give the same individual declining I.Q. scores as he got older. Sophisticated statistical techniques have been developed that compare each person's I.Q. with those of others in a measure that compares the person tested with a large number of other persons of the same age.
THE PROBLEM that has led to recent criticisms of I.Q. tests is one of bias. The tests were developed originally to identify which French schoolchildren would not
profit from public education in regular classes. The tests are still used largely to predict school performance. But our schools are staffed by teachers and principals drawn from the middle class. The content of our school curriculum should be the schools teach the things that the dominant establishment in a society wants children to learn.
We live in an industrial society in which consumption of manufactured goods is required of everyone. Our consuming society relies heavily on verbal communication and employs it to create new understanding advertising and we must be able to handle money and use installment credit
As a result, our tests are loaded with verbal and quantitative—mathematical—questions. People who are tested are asked to use and define words and to manipulate symbols. They also are asked to handle numbers. Because these tasks are an important part of the school program, intelligence tests predict school performance with a fair degree of accuracy. Students also require attention, strong efforts, desire to succeed and attention to detail. All are middle-class personality characteristics.
MOST INTELLIENCE tests have been standardized on a "random" sample of the white population. The two most popular in-
stances are the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, were standardized on a cross-section of the white population. Appropriate numbers of families from each social class were drawn and the children in them were tested.
But the definition of the child's social class was based on the father's occupation. Clearly the standardization sample is biased in favor of white, urban, intact family.
Recently a class-action lawsuit was brought in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco against the California Board of Education. The plaintiffs were a group of black children who had been placed in special classes for the educable mentally retarded on the basis of their LQ tests scores. The plaintiffs were inner-city children were marked wrong because they did not agree with the white norms.
FOR EXAMPLE, what is the correct response to the question, "What would you if it another child grabs your hat and ran with it?" Middle-class children respond by asking whether they are teacher or to their parents. Black ghetto children often responded that they would chase the cuprit and fight for their hat. Black psychologists point out that neither answer is absolutely correct for all children. Black child's answer should be scored correct.
Robert Williams, a black psychologist,
has illustrated the point by developing an
I. Q. test that asks questions familiar to any ghetto child but unfavorable to the middle-class white majority. How many of the following questions can you answer:
1. What kind of a car is called a "Deuce and a Quarter"?
1. What kind of a car is called "Hog"?
3. Who is Mr.Charlie?
4. Who was Bojangles?
4. Who was Bojangles?
5. What does the word "chittlin" mean?
5. **WKH167** TO the questions are Cadillac, Buick Electra 225, white man, BILL Robinson, a dancer, and hog intestines that are edible when cooked.
Clearly LQ, tests can be biased in a variety of ways. Efforts at developing "culture-fair" or "culture-free" tests have been largely unsuccessful. Even tests that do not require taking have been found to be highly affected by culture.
One psychologist, Wayne Dennis, tested children in 56 different societies around the world with a simple test called "Draw-a-Man." This task is a good measure of the child's Q. in that it correlates with the american middle class classes. But on this nonverbal test, Bedouin children averaged $8 \mathrm{~Q}}$ and Hopi and Zuni children averaged about 125.
Are the Indian children really superior to middle-class school children? Are Bedouin children really so retarded that they live in the Arab children lived in a culture that forbade drawing or
the making of images. On the other hand, the Indian children lived in a culture that emphasized and rewarded drawings and decoration. Even this nonverbal I.Q. test was highly sensitive to practice and experience.
SHOULD I.Q. tests be abandoned? The California lawsuits do not demand that they be abolished; it simply asks that they no longer be used as the basis for placing minority children in special classes. There are several reasons for opposing these tests as the exclusive basis for making decisions about school placement of children.
They can lead to what the President's commission on Mental Retardation has called the "six-hour retarded child." These are children who lack the ability to live in neighborhoods and home environments but who often do poorly in school. They often become behavior problems in school because of their limited social skills, because of regular classes and into special classes for slow learners.
This placement leads to the stigma of being called mentally retarded. Other children make fun of the "retards" and the effect on the children is devastating. Rarely do they get out of the special classes. Opportunities for fun for these children are reduced. The children develop negative attitudes toward themselves. Often this situation leads to a self-fulfillment prophecy.
ecy in which the children begin to act in the way that the teachers, schools and peers expect them to act.
WHAT IS the solution? It is frequently suggested that an intelligence test should be used only if a through study of the adaptive skills of the child is used at the same times. Certainly some children are not able to attend in all school subclasses, but not all of these low scarcers are actually retarded children—some of them simply need additional help in developing learning skills and work habits. Others need to be placed in mainstream classrooms to receive careful tutoring of curriculums to their own level of ability in other courses.
Whatever the outcome of the California suit, the I.Q. test is no longer going to be the sole determinant of a child's long-term future. The trial has held tests up to light so that children can learn and weaknesses can be assessed. They have been shown to have no magical properties. Rather, they are only one of many ways of studying the child. They are more a measure of the child's intelligence than of experience than they are of some mysterious abstraction called intelligence.
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George W. Albee is a professor of psychology at the University of Vermont and past president of the American Psychological Association.
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Editor
Barbara Rosewicz
Harbara Bose
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John Bass
Editorial Editor
John Bass
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