its rationale: the "deprivation hypothesis," according to which academic lag is mainly the result of social, economic, and educational deprivation and discrimination-an hypothesis that has met with wide, uncritical acceptance in the atmosphere of society's growing concern about the plight of minority groups and the economically disadvantaged. The chief goal of compensatory education-to remedy the educational lag of disadvantaged children and thereby narrow the achievement gap between "minority" and "majority" pupils-has been utterly unrealized in any of the large compensatory education programs that have been evaluated so far. On the basis of a nationwide survey and evaluation of compensatory education programs, the United States Commission on Civil Rights (1967) came to the following conclusion: The Commission's analysis does not suggest that compensatory education is incapable of remedying the effects of poverty on the academic achievement of individual children. There is little question that school programs involving expenditures for cultural enrichment, better teaching, and other needed educational services can be helpful to disadvantaged children. The fact remains, however, that none of the programs appear to have raised significantly the achievement of participating pupils, as a group, within the period evaluated by the commission (p. 138). The commission's review gave special attention to compensatory education in majority-Negro schools whose programs "were among the most prominent and included some that have served as models for others." The Commission states: "A principal objective of each was to raise the academic achievement of disadvantaged children. Judged by this standard the programs did not show evidence of much success (p. 138). 1 Why has there been such uniform failure of compensatory programs wherever they have been tried? What has gone wrong? In other fields, when bridges do not stand, when aircraft do not fly, when machines do not work, when treatments do not cure, despite all conscientious efforts on the part of many persons to make them do so, one begins to question the basic assumptions, principles, theories, and hypotheses that guide one's efforts. Is it time to follow suit in education? The theory that has guided most of these compensatory education programs, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, has been two main complementary facets: one might be called the "average children concept," the other the "social deprivation hypothesis." The "average children" concept is essentially the belief that all children, except for a rare few born with severe neurological defects, are basically very much alike in their mental development and capabilities, and that their apparent differences in these characteristics as manifested in school are due to rather superficial differences in children's upbringing at home, their preschool and out-of-school experiences, motivations and interests, and the educational influences of their family background. All children are viewed as basically more or less ho...

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The culture-only (0% genetic-100% environmental) and the hereditarian (50% genetic-50% environmental) models of the causes of mean Black-White differences in cognitive ability are compared and contrasted across 10 categories of evidence: the worldwide distribution of test scores, g factor of mental ability, heritability, brain size and cognitive ability, transracial adoption, racial admixture, regression, related life-history traits, human origins research, and hypothesized environmental variables. The new evidence reviewed here points to some genetic component in Black-White differences in mean IQ. The implication for public policy is that the discrimination model (i.e., Black-White differences in socially valued outcomes will be equal barring discrimination) must be tempered by a distributional model (i.e., Black-White outcomes reflect underlying group characteristics). Section 1: BackgroundThroughout the history of psychology, no question has been so persistent or so resistant to resolution as that of the relative roles of nature and nurture in causing individual and group differences in cognitive ability (Degler, 1991;Loehlin, Lindzey, & Spuhler, 1975). The scientific debate goes back to the mid-19th century (e.g., Galton, 1869;Nott & Glidden, 1854). Starting with the widespread use of standardized mental tests in World War I, average ethnic and racial group differences were found. Especially vexing has been the cause(s) of the 15-point Black-White IQ difference in the United States.In 1969, the Harvard Educational Review published Arthur Jensen's lengthy article, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and School Achievement?" Jensen concluded that (a) IQ tests measure socially relevant general ability; (b) individual differences in IQ have a high heritability, at least for the White populations of the United States and Europe; (c) compensatory educational programs have proved generally ineffective in raising the IQs or school achievement of individuals or groups; (d) because social mobility is linked to ability, social class differences in IQ probably have an appreciable genetic component; and tentatively, but most controversially, (e) the mean Black-White group difference in IQ probably has some genetic component. Jensen's (1969) article was covered in Time, Newsweek, Life, U.S. News & World Report, and New York Times Magazine. His conclusions, the theoretical issues they raised, and the public policy recommendations that many saw as stemming directly from them were dubbed "Jensenism," a term which entered the J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; Arthur R. Jensen, School of Education, University of California, Berkeley.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to J. Philippe Rushton, Department of Psychology, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2, Canada. E-mail: rushton@uwo.ca Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235-294 Copyright 2005 by the American Psychological Association 1076-8971/0...

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