Yeah.

I'm so excited to talk with you about it.

Um, you know, I, I was led to this really by the, um, the circumstances that I share right at the beginning of the book.

You know, I never really expected in my, like, professional life to be writing a book about IQ tests.

I'm an art historian by training, and thought I would just write about art, um, but then became increasingly interested in the kinds of tests that my daughter Louisa, who has Down syndrome, was being asked to take at school, and what people in the school environment thought they were learning about Louisa when she was taking these tests.

So I start off at the beginning of the book, um, with her first IEP meeting before she started kindergarten, and an IEP is an individualized education program, which is a kind of document that kids with certain disabilities are put on to give them the, the care and the support that they need in, in the classroom, um, in an inclusive and classroom environment.

So we were at this meeting to kind of flesh out the details of this, this document, and part of this IEP document is a kind of bureaucratic qualification for her to be eligible to, to have an IEP.

Yeah

What you do there relies on how much advocacy you then do around the law with PAST.

I mean, sort of, because as laws often have, the wording of IDEA says that students will be provided a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.

And that phrasing of least restrictive environment has been left up to a lot of interpretation of what exactly that means.

Many people, including me and advocacy groups online, For parents and students would say that the least restrictive environment is the mainstream classroom.

That's what they meant.

But there is there's some gray room in the law so that that doesn't always have to happen.

If a school district interprets what the least restrictive environment is for a student differently than a parent, then that's where you get a lot of, I think, conflict and tension around the law and the placement and the actions of a school district that are trying to implement that law.

It

What you do there relies on how much advocacy you then do around the law with PAST.

I mean, sort of, because as laws often have, the wording of IDEA says that students will be provided a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment.

And that phrasing of least restrictive environment has been left up to a lot of interpretation of what exactly that means.

Many people, including me and advocacy groups online, For parents and students would say that the least restrictive environment is the mainstream classroom.

That's what they meant.

But there is there's some gray room in the law so that that doesn't always have to happen.

If a school district interprets what the least restrictive environment is for a student differently than a parent, then that's where you get a lot of, I think, conflict and tension around the law and the placement and the actions of a school district that are trying to implement that law.

It

I'm getting the sense that (laughs) this law is imperfect, but can you just explain what's improved in the lives of students with disabilities since these laws were passed in 1975 and since then?

Oh my God.

I mean, so it's... (laughs) It's like a matter of going to school or not going (laughs) to school.

Like the difference is pretty dramatic.

I mean, I am thinking specifically from the position as the parent of a child with, with Downs Syndrome, um, but, like, there is a correlation between the, uh, right of children with disabilities to go to school as established by IDEA, um, and the, uh, education opportunities for students or for people with disabilities that starts going up too.

Um, we have also, uh, within those 50 years post-secondary education programs for students with intellectual disabilities as well.

So those, those start.

What did that look like in practice? Like if I had a kid in Texas who maybe is having trouble reading, if I get there a few years too late, (laughs) does it just mean, "Sorry Charlie, you're not getting the service?"

Pepper Stetler is the author of A Measure of Intelligence, a book exploring the history of IQ tests.

In World War I, there were efforts to create a kind of intelligence test that could be standardized and given to thousands and thousands of army recruits.

Stetler says some standard tests ignore an important distinction.

An intellectual capacity is kind of like a, a biologically ingrained trait, whereas education is like testing whether you have been to school and you have received a quality education, and those things aren't necessarily the same.