Reform, racism and the centrality of whiteness: assessment, ability and the ‘new eugenics’

The Nobel Prize winning scientist James Watson was vilified when his views on the supposedly inherent deficiencies of black people became public. The scientific establishment, mainstream media and politicians joined a chorus of disapproval that would seem to evidence a widespread rejection of the old myths of racially ordered intelligence. Unfortunately, the English educational system behaves as if Watson is correct. This paper considers the impact of the various forms of sorting, selection and separation that characterize the use of ‘tracking’, ‘setting’ and ‘tiering’ in secondary schools. These processes amount to a new eugenics whereby black students are systematically disadvantaged but blamed for their own failure by assessments that lend racist stereotypes a spurious air of scientific respectability. The paper documents a key example of these processes through the introduction of the ‘Foundation Stage Profile’ (which claims to quantify the ‘development’ of 5-year-olds). These trends look set to expand through a policy platform built on pseudoscientific notions of ‘talent’ and ‘potential’ that threaten to abandon a substantive concern with equality of outcome.