In my own view, the rejoinders of McCord and Demerath are remarkably feeble. The investigations they cite, in an effort to refute McGurk’s conclusions, provide no refutation at all. Their own study of “predelinquent” and normal boys in Cambridge-Somerville, Mass., is so affected by subjective evaluations that it contributes little to an objective appraisal of conditions that confront school administrators elsewhere. (They attempted to establish a correlation between the boys’ intelligence and their social class, parental education, “home atmosphere,” and “personality of the boys’ fathers”; other factors dealt with the subjects’ homes--cohesive, quarrelsome, quarrelsome-neglecting, or broken--and whether the boys’ fathers were loving, passive, cruel, neglecting, or absent.) In any event, most of their elaborately tabulated findings tend merely to support McGurk’s own conclusion that at the lowest social levels, white and Negro test scores are not significantly different. The evidence put together by Shuey and McGurk is solid, dispassionate, unbiased, overwhelming; it cannot be disregarded--not, that is, if one wishes to gain any real understanding of the problems that confront local school boards over much of the South. To pull the general figures down to a single, specific case study, consider the findings of some tests administered in Dallas in 1954-55. There more than 1600 Negro pupils and almost 5700 white pupils were tested in the first grade on their general readiness for learning--on their ability to pay attention, follow directions, handle crayons and pencils, understand and use language, and so on. These were the findings: ----------------------------------------------------------------- _Number of _Per cent _Number of _Per cent Negro Negro White White Children_ Children_ _Category_ Children_ Children_ ----------------------------------------------------------------- 15 .92 Superior 576 10.14 105 6.47 High Normal 1,503 26.50 299 18.43 Average 1,814 31.96 677 41.71 Low Normal 1,391 24.50 527 32.47 Poor Risk 392 6.90 ----------------------------------------------------------------- In sum, 37 per cent of the white first-graders scored in the “high normal” and “superior” groups, against only 7 per cent of the Negro first-graders. At the other end of the scale, 31 per cent of the white pupils scored in the “low normal” and “poor risk” groups, against 74 per cent of the Negro pupils.