![]() Their first home was a Victorian in the Fillmore District. ![]() Lester and his mom and older brothers moved from Marietta, Georgia, to San Francisco in 1965, he said, because “she didn’t want to find us dead one day hanging by a tree.” The District Labeled Her Son Mentally Retarded - and Didn’t Tell Her “I just didn’t like it, you know, because they wasn’t teaching us nothing.” “I walked to school and cried all the way,” he said. The students who landed in classes for the “educable mentally retarded,” Peckham wrote, were doomed to fall “farther and farther behind,” because - instead of academics - the classes emphasized “personal hygiene and grooming” and “basic home and community living skills.”ĭarryl Lester remembers those classes: lots of recess time and plenty of field trips. Today, California is the only state that has such a ban. ![]() District Judge Robert Peckham agreed, calling the tests “racially and culturally biased” and “discriminatory.” He ordered a permanent ban on IQ testing of black students across California for purposes of special education placement. It tested knowledge that some – and not others - had acquired at home or school. ![]() Questions like, ”Who wrote Romeo and Juliet,” they argued, didn’t assess a student’s innate capacity to learn. The lawsuit alleged that was because the tests were biased toward Eurocentric culture. When the Bay Area chapter of the Association of Black Psychologists learned of complaints from black parents in San Francisco, they teamed up with civil rights lawyers and sued in 1971.Īs a group, African Americans across the country scored lower on IQ tests. Their top priority was to stop districts from using IQ tests, which they thought were culturally biased, to decide who belonged in special education, said one of the breakaway group’s founders, Harold Dent. That same year, a group of black psychologists broke off from the American Psychological Association in protest over black community concerns that they believed the larger organization was too slow to address. case, California education code required school districts to use IQ scores when assessing students for special education.īased on the test results, black students statewide - young Darryl included - wound up categorized as “educable mentally retarded” at disproportionate rates: 27% labeled that way in 1968 were black - even though black students made up less than 9% of the student body. But many educators, black parents and advocates for black students say plenty remains broken.īefore the Larry P. October marks the 40th anniversary of the judge’s ruling, which was supposed to help fix a system he had deemed discriminatory. in a landmark lawsuit that changed special education for black students across California. What he didn’t know until last year: His reading difficulties had made him the lead plaintiff - under the pseudonym Larry P. At each, he struggled with reading and didn’t get the help he needed for it. From first through seventh grades, Lester had attended three public schools in San Francisco. But he crumpled it up and threw it in the trash. The letter delivered good news: Lester would be getting disability benefits after blowing out his back in a sheet metal accident.
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