The National Defense Education Act of 1958: Selected Outcomes

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This dissertation analyzes debates about intelligence and educational opportunity in the post-World War II US, from 1945- 1965. I examine how “intelligence”--as an idea about human difference--was constructed in this period in response to a shifting complex of social and scientific pressures and moreover, how it functioned through policy to regulate educational opportunity. This was a period dense with events that rapidly transformed the educational landscape, including the fitful early years of desegregation following Brown v. Board, the Sputnik Crisis and the passage of the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Such rapid transformations readily evoked the ordering principle of “intelligence.” While exploring larger Cold War/Civil Rights contexts, my research focuses on specific networks of collaboration between ETS, the National Education Association (NEA), Eisenhower administration architects of the NDEA, and James Bryant Conant, via his widely disseminated study of US public high schools, The American High School Today. These actors formed a largely sub rosa collaboration that worked to the political and financial advantage of the NEA and ETS. As well, they positioned The American High School Today as a seemingly independent, scientifically objective endorsement of the NDEA. To wit, The American High School Today and the NDEA both pressed—yet without observable affiliation—the need to identify “highly able” high school students through augmented guidance and testing programs, and to afford these students selective curricula in the sciences, math and foreign languages. While the NDEA contained broad and neutrally stated initiatives addressed to these aims, The American High School Today followed six months later mapping well-defined, naturalized thresholds of individual intelligence to proposed sequences of ability-tracked science, math and foreign language curriculum. This collaboration propelled the subsequent explosion of a new strain of discourse across a range of national media and popular literatures that worked to construct the category of the “academically talented” and “gifted” child, and advocate for this student’s access to select curricula in the public schools. Furthermore, while calls to identify and selectively educate high “intelligence” drew explicit justification from the Sputnik Crisis and the science race with the Soviets, I find that white anxieties about “race”--and, specifically, desegregation following Brown v. Board--were a powerful tacit driver.

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