G: The Miseducation of Larry P
The series has received support from the Fund for Journalism on Child Well-Being, a program of USC's Center for Health Journalism.
Other stories in this series include:
One African American family, half a century of experience in SF public schools
How can San Francisco support its most vulnerable black residents? Help them succeed at school.
Learning While Black: Community forum
A legacy of mistreatment for San Francisco’s black special ed students
African American honor roll student says when teachers set the bar high, ‘you gotta go get it'
SFUSD program intervenes early to keep kids out of special ed for behavior
SFUSD fires up Bayview teachers in hopes they will stick around
A Landmark Lawsuit Aimed to Fix Special Ed for California's Black Students. It Didn’t.
Lead Plaintiff In Landmark Lawsuit Gets 2nd Chance At Education — At Age 60
G: The Miseducation of Larry P
Deborah Lee
By Lee Romney, Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters
Are some ideas so dangerous we shouldn’t even talk about them? That question brought Radiolab’s senior editor, Pat Walters, to a subject that at first he thought was long gone: the measuring of human intelligence with IQ tests. Turns out, the tests are all around us. In the workplace. The criminal justice system. Even the NFL. And they’re massive in schools. More than a million US children are IQ tested every year.
We begin Radiolab Presents: “G” with a sentence that stopped us all in our tracks: In the state of California, it is off-limits to administer an IQ test to a child if he or she is Black. That’s because of a little-known case called Larry P v Riles that in the 1970s … put the IQ test itself on trial. With the help of reporter Lee Romney, we investigate how that lawsuit came to be, where IQ tests came from, and what happened to one little boy who got caught in the crossfire.
This episode was reported and produced by Lee Romney, Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters.
Music by Alex Overington. Fact-checking by Diane Kelly.
[This story was originally published by Radiolab.]