Why Intelligence Is Missing from American Education Policy and Practice, and What Can Be Done About It

To understand why education as a field has not incorporated intelligence, we must consider the field’s history and culture. Accordingly, in this cross-disciplinary collaboration between a political scientist who studies institutions and a psychologist who studies intelligence, we outline how the roots of contemporary American Educational Leadership as a field determine its contemporary avoidance of the concept of intelligence. Rooted in early 20th century progressivism and scientific management, Educational Leadership theory envisions professionally run schools as “Taylorist” factories with teaching and leadership largely standardized, prioritizing compliance over cognitive ability among educators. Further, the roots of modern education theory do not see the intelligence of students as largely malleable. Hence, prioritizing intelligence is viewed as elitist. For more than a century, these assumptions have impacted recruitment into education as a profession. We conclude with ideas about how to bring intelligence into mainstream schooling, within the existing K-12 education institutional context. We believe that better integration of intelligence and broader individual differences research in education policy and practice would lead to more rapid advances to finding evidence based solutions to help children.