Abstract
Introduction
Since 2003, the Oral History Project Team has conducted interviews with individuals who have made substantial contributions to evaluation theory and practice. The previous interviews were conducted with individuals who have a major identification within the field of evaluation and whose professional development has been intertwined with the history of evaluation as a distinct field. Over a similar period some members in the field of evaluation have worked to highlight more of the field's history, especially in pointing out the contributions of individuals from traditionally underrepresented groups, including those who were early in addressing how perceptions and realities of race and class affect our programs and their evaluations. This is especially the case in educational evaluation, where a “collective ignorance” about the scholarship of African Americans has sparked efforts to more fully represent voices that can enlighten and enrich our scholarship and our recorded history (e.g., Hood, 2001; Hood & Hopson, 2008). In keeping with this endeavor, the present interview extends the previous scope of the oral history project to celebrate the life and work of Dr. Edmund Wyatt Gordon, a leading intellectual in the field of education.
Dr. Gordon is a centenarian who remains actively engaged in research at The Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education (IUME) within Teachers College at Columbia University. This center, founded by Dr. Gordon in 1974, was renamed in his honor in 2021 to recognize his contributions in educational justice, equity, and education. Long-time members of the Oral History Project Team (Robin Lin Miller, Melvin M. Mark, Valerie J. Caracelli) along with Rodney K. Hopson conducted three interviews with Dr. Gordon between October 2021 and December 2021. The interview transcripts have been combined and edited for clarity, length, and content. Dr. Gordon reviewed and approved the final product prior to its submission to the
Edmund W. Gordon was born on June 13, 1921, in the segregated town of Goldsboro, North Carolina. In 1957, he completed his Doctor of Education degree in Child Development and Guidance from Teachers College, Columbia University. With degrees from American University (an MA in Social Psychology, 1950) and Howard University (a BS in biology/zoology, 1943), he received a postgraduate Baccalaureate in Divinity (BD) in 1945 from the School of Religion, Howard University. Dr. Gordon's interest in theology stemmed from its capacity to inform social ethics and human services.
Dr. Gordon is currently the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Yale University; and the Richard March Hoe Professor, Emeritus, of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, as well as Emeritus Director of IUME. He previously was the senior scholar and advisor to the President of the College Board, where he developed and co-chaired the Taskforce on Minority High Achievement. From 2011 to 2013, he organized and led the Educational Testing Service (ETS) Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education, bringing together scholars to research and report on the potential of measurement to serve and improve teaching and learning. A recent publication by Dr. Gordon and others (Armour-Thomas et al., 2019) is a further development of ideas generated from the Gordon Commission. A dedication to justice and equity in education has been a common thread throughout Dr. Gordon's distinguished career of scholarship and professional practice.
Dr. Gordon's involvement in evaluation came early in what many commentators have described as the dawn of evaluation as a distinct field. In the early days of President Lyndon B. Johnson's “War on Poverty,” Dr. Gordon was appointed by the president to serve as chief of the Head Start Research Office and to participate in the design and evaluation of the Head Start program. Head Start provided preschool education, nutrition, and healthcare assistance to children living in poverty. With Dr. Gordon's background and education undergirding his interest in social justice, he was poised—as a psychologist, minister, community activist, and scholar—to work in ways aimed at serving the field of evaluation's goal of contributing to social betterment. The Head Start program began as an 8-week demonstration project and developed over time to become a full day and full year service with many offerings. These programs have served more than 36 million children since 1965. Dr. Gordon established the infrastructure for research and evaluation to continually inform and provide evidence-based feedback to the programmatic arm of Head Start. Evaluators continue to be involved in implementing and evaluating the Head Start programs that serve more than one million children and their families each year across the United States and its territories. In addition to his experiences with this specific program, Dr. Gordon's decades-long work on educational measurement has important implications for how we think, not only about measurement in evaluation, but also the potential role of evaluation.
Dr. Gordon has written over 200 articles and written or edited 18 books or monographs on topics spanning structural inequality and education, divergent learning styles, and supplemental education. Dr. Gordon is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Education. Among his many other awards are the American Educational Research Association's award for Distinguished Contributions to Research in Education and its Relating Research to Practice Award, as well as American University's Neil Kerwin Alumni Achievement Award. In 2021, at least a dozen educational institutions across the country, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of California, Los Angeles, New York University (NYU), Morehouse College, and the University of Texas at Austin, celebrated Dr. Gordon's contributions to the field with lectures and events. In the same year, Dr. Gordon was named Honorary President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), a first ever recognition from that organization.
In this contribution to American Evaluation Association's (AEA) Oral History, Dr. Gordon elaborates on several watershed moments and conceptual movements for evaluation. He shares his views on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and its consequences for educational evaluation. This includes his perspective on how education should be individualized. His discussion of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision also points to the critical role of problem identification in policy making and subsequent evaluation. In the interview, Dr. Gordon describes his and others’ seminal work on Head Start and his subsequent views on the evaluation of educational programs. In addition, Dr. Gordon has long worked on educational measurement, not from a technical perspective, but rather with a primary focus on what its purpose should be. His views on measurement and its role in education, which he discusses here, have implications for how today's evaluators might think about their work. Dr. Gordon calls on us to think about evaluation as an opportunity for learning and improvement, rather than as an occasion to codify fixed judgments.
Throughout the interview, we explore the relationship between aspects of Dr. Gordon's personal background and his professional activities. In addition, Dr. Gordon cites Alain LeRoy Locke, Herbert G. Birch, and W.E.B. Du Bois as mentors who influenced him throughout his studies. The critical importance of these mentors in Dr. Gordon's life and professional development contributed to the legacy depicted in this oral history. In turn, Dr. Gordon's mentorship of more than one generation of scholars is notable in that it both includes direct cultivation of scholars who have made powerful positive impacts within their own award-winning careers across the education sector as well as his support of a much wider circle of individuals he has influenced. More generally, Dr. Gordon and his collaborators have provided a framework for pursuing an equitable educational system that affirms the development of what he calls intellective competence and intellective character, while understanding the role that student agency plays in actualizing the potential of historically marginalized students.
Interview with Edmund Wyatt Gordon
Rodney: One of the things I want to talk about is the legacy of the work that you have so inspired. But it's hard to do that without talking about the genealogy and the evolutionary nature of the ideas. Who was the professor that invited you back after you had left Howard for a little bit, who invited you to get a regimen for studying when you came back to Howard?
Dr. Gordon: Oh, that was Alain Locke. One of our great Black philosophers. He was the first Black Rhodes Scholar. 1
Rodney: And how is it that you have some knowledge of Du Bois, 2 and at a time in life that maybe was very informative and formative for you. What were the influences of those two gentlemen if you wouldn't mind?
Dr. Gordon: Rodney, the gods have smiled on me. From my conception to this 101 years. I’ve just been blessed. I went to Howard. That's where I met Locke. I actually met Du Bois at Howard, but I was not bright enough to understand who he was and how important a figure he was. But fate brought me back to him 20 years later in New York. And brought me so close to him that my wife and I were able to own his childhood home there in Great Barrington, give it to the University of Massachusetts that has created the Du Bois Park to match the Du Bois Library, which is there. But why did it happen to me and how did it happen? I don’t know. I was in the right place at the right time. Somebody was looking out for me.
Mel: How is it that those individuals helped shape your thinking and future pathways?
Dr. Gordon: My mother said God made Edmund and threw the pattern away. But as long as I can remember, I have been more aware, more connected than most people. I do come out of three and four generations of educated Black people in the period right after enslavement. My father's people coming out of Jamaica somehow were among the folks that the British took over to England and educated them and sent them back to govern Jamaica. And my mother, her family considered itself Native American but had very strong elements of Africa in its genes. And my grandfather, my mother's father, was a college graduate. And my mother was born in 1878, I think it was.
That was back when people of color didn’t get close to academic institutions. But even more remarkable is that her father, who was born of this Native American woman and an escaped slave, also had a college degree. And this is before emancipation. I used to tell my kids as they were growing up, if I hadn't done something or become something I'd have to explain why. So, rather than trying to explain how and why, I'm glad that I don't have to explain why I didn’t.
Mel: I wonder about Du Bois and others that you had the opportunity to cross paths with, particularly the salient influences they've had on your thinking that you might want to share.
Dr. Gordon: Well, I happened to have been at Howard University at a time when Black people were, in significant numbers, beginning to become educated beyond high school. The problem for us though was that those who went on to the university and got to the PhD, had no place to go. They couldn't go to the major universities. Howard happened to have had a Black President, Mordecai Johnson, a Black man and Baptist preacher who saw it as his role to employ these people and make the place for educated Blacks.
Mordecai Johnson attracted to Howard a significant percentage of all the Black people in the United States, and maybe even in the world, who had doctoral degrees, whether they were professional doctorates or research doctorates. And Mordecai made it his business to bring them to Howard. Ernest Just, an embryologist; Howard Thurman, probably the most distinguished Black theologian; E. Franklin Frazier, an early sociologist; and a man named Robert Percy Barnes, who earned the first PhD in chemistry and taught at Howard for 20 years before transitioning to industry. And of course, he went into the pharmaceutical industry to become one of the richest and most recognized scientific minds. Well, these people were my undergraduate teachers.
I was not initially able to keep up at Howard. After my third semester, I was asked to leave for poor scholarship, but it was Alain Locke who encountered me on the way out and made me promise to come to see him when I come back. And I did that; he coached me, taught me how to be a student, and I finally graduated.
Robin: Let me ask you a question about that time-period. You mentioned all these great male Black scholars. Fisk and all the other historically Black colleges were producing women's scholars as well. Can you talk a little bit about the presence of women faculty at Howard?
Dr. Gordon: You know, that is one of the sad things about my early life. My mother, an elementary school teacher who spent most of her time as a mother and housewife, and my first-grade teacher had more to do with my developing confidence in myself than my developing intellect. I still have to point to my mother. I didn't have and can't point to a lot of women who were influential in my intellective development until I became a man.
It was after I had earned my doctorate in developmental and counseling psychology that I met Margaret Lawrence, the first Black woman psychiatrist in this country. It was well after that I met Esther Jackson, who was the editor for many years of
Rodney: Johnnetta Cole.
Dr. Gordon: Johnetta, who was President of Spelman from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, was, I think, the first woman with a PhD to lead Spelman. We have done poorly with our sisters for a long, long time. I remember in my adolescent and young adult years, the word among Black people was that we protected Black women from exploitation by white men by educating them better. But I'm not sure that in those days that we were educating a lot of Black women at the level of the doctorate.
Rodney: I'll link to Robin's question because you were reflecting on the role of education to imagine, to transform, and to cultivate knowledge—not much different than what we think your work has done in evaluation and assessment. I have some notes, I believe from your memoir (Gordon, 2014), recognizing that certain epistemologies and histories prevailed, and lamenting the very challenge of rewriting the history of Black people, and how the lenses in which we write have not only been our own but have reinforced differential frames of opportunity. I'll quote you and see if this helps: “I had earned my doctorate in psychology before I encountered people who were talking about the possibility of framing experiences in our own lenses. As scholars of psychology who were Black in that time, even scholars of psychology who were female, we may have had a different role in that psychology than those who were white, and many of us scholars who were Black and pseudo-Black may have been so educated by non-Black writers’ study of education that we are looking at education and history through the eyes, through the lenses, of white European hegemony.” And I wanted to just lift that up. When Robin asked her question I thought, “it sounds like frames of references change.” This quote helped me with filling in where I think you were going. Is this a parallel, Prof?
Dr. Gordon: I certainly remember what you’re talking about now. I don't know how much you know about my personal life, but for 70 years I was married to Susan Gitt Gordon. Gitt is a German name. Her people were Pennsylvania Dutch. She's a white woman. I’m not sure how I got the good sense not to be so limited by my ethnocentric view of myself that I was able to get out of my Blackness to marry her. But by the time I met her, a lot of my experience had been framed by Blackness.
In that period from about 1946 until the mid-50s, I was being introduced to the world of European Americans. And in graduate school, the people who were my models, much different from undergraduate, were all white folk, mostly white men and some white women. And, my greatest intellective influences had suddenly become white. We could explore it sometime. I haven't given too much thought to it. I'm not quite sure how it turned out that my first serious job as a psychologist was in a Jewish Hospital. It probably had to do with the fact that there was a progressive—Marxist communists were the far-left wing of the progressives—it may be that there was a progressive head of the clinic in which I was hired. But for about 10 to 15 years, the most important influences on my intellective development were white, and certainly the knowledge well from which I drew was that one. My supervisor at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn is actually the one who re-introduced me to DuBois.
By the mid-50s I had my first Black child. He was born in 1951. By 1956, I had two Black sons and a Black daughter, and a second Black daughter came along by 1960. And it was in my encounters with those children—who my wife and I decided we wanted to identify as Black—that I rediscovered my Black roots. And that was probably what I was talking about in that discussion. I had to learn that the psychological, social, existentialist developments of Black people were different from those of other people because Black people had had a unique experience. Since fortunately I have had some of that experience, that didn't make it too hard for me to come back to it. I rediscovered my Blackness through my Black children. I was wise enough to realize that they, like me, were going to have to deal with their Blackness, and it shouldn't be foreign to them.
Fortunately, at that time it was becoming much more acceptable in the larger community to at least pay some attention to it. There were still advantages in not being Black or in being more than Black. But this wasn't so removed from the mainstream as it was in my childhood where I felt it was an isolating experience. So, I think Rodney, that was probably what I was talking about in that particular talk. And I had forgotten the specific quotation, but I probably talked about that two or three times.
Mel: I'm fascinated as we've kind of been jumping through time and from specific to broad conceptually. I wonder if I could ask you to shift to your early involvement in Head Start and maybe a little about how that came about. But then taking it forward, thinking in a future-oriented fashion, about what recommendations you would have for evaluating programs like Head Start or other kinds of programs, based on your experience and lessons in the interim.
Dr. Gordon: That's such an influential, such a consequential space in my biography that I hardly know where to start. You seem to be ending on its evaluation or its influence on my sense of evaluation. Is that what you wanted me to define?
Mel: I'd love to hear about that, but I would also love to hear about whatever you want to say with respect to Head Start.
Dr. Gordon: Well, when people have asked me about Head Start, the first thing I think about is what I think I brought to it. I certainly left it with the set of ideas I'm about to share with you. Unlike the other people who were influential in shaping that program, who were very much concerned with the value of early formal intervention in the education of kids, I somehow settled on the importance of the informal education of kids. My emphasis in Head Start was not on the schooling or institutional experiences of kids, but on the richness of the parenting to which they had been exposed. So, a lot of my input had to do with family and parental development, which incidentally got pretty much discouraged if not stripped from Head Start for two reasons.
A lot of the families that were using Head Start saw it as a pre-literacy program and wanted us to focus sharply on influencing the readiness for schooling for these kids. I don't know whether it was because of my work in child development that I was more focused on the early emotional and social development, more focused on affective development than on their early cognitive development. Somewhere early on, I had gotten the notion that it was hard to use oneself as a reference point for learning and moving outward if you didn't know something about yourself, feel something for yourself, and most importantly, were not into both self-identity and self-regulation. So, my contributions to Head Start had to do primarily with the family development part of it rather than the academic child development part of it.
The “War on Poverty” was early on challenged by the fact that a lot of our Head Start money was going into family development. And my conception of family development included community development. My liberal self viewed community development as being heavily involved with political development. So, the money that we were pouring into the development of families was being siphoned into political action in Black communities. And in 1967, I think it was ‘66 or ‘67, in the renewal of money for the War on Poverty, Congress deliberately and significantly reduced the amount of money that Head Start was to invest in parent development because it saw that as community development/political development, and some members in Congress thought that federal funds ought not be used to develop political strength in poor people's communities.
So, what has survived in Head Start—and it's good stuff—has been much more directed at the early cognitive development of kids than at the early affective and social development, and certainly not directed at the political development of parents. But if you ask me even now where I think the emphasis in public education ought to be, it ought to be back in families and the communities where children spend their early years. Because I think one of the reasons I have been able to move so far is that I certainly didn't enter elementary or high school, or even college, thinking that I was inferior even though I grew up in a period of great discrimination. Within my well-educated and well-situated affluent Black family, I was something. My mother, Mabel Gordon, thought of herself as Mrs. Gordon of Goldsboro, North Carolina. She thought she was something and thought her children were even more. So, my conception of what Head Start ought to have been, is that it should have been much more directed at strengthening the families and communities out of which these kids are coming, than directed at, say, pre-literacy.
But if its evaluation is one of the things you're thinking about, the struggle we had there was between the people who wanted to use more formal, more traditionally established indicators, while my perspective was on choosing some new ones. What am I talking about? My very, very dear friend, the late Ed Zigler 3 who was with me at the Head Start program, Ed thought that the gold standard for an indicator of the effect of Head Start was to change IQ scores. So, built into that early evaluation were standardized tests. I didn't trust standardized tests then and haven’t throughout my career. Fortunately, Ed was willing to listen to me and told me that he thought I was wrong, but he respected my opinion, so we’d do something about it.
So, we went out to find somebody who could help us find or develop a more appropriate measure. And we ran into Bettye Caldwell who was down at University of Arkansas’ medical school, a white woman. But Bettye was playing with something that she called a preschool inventory (Caldwell & Soule, 1965). What she was looking for were indicators of personal competence on the parts of young children, that would enable them to enter school ready to absorb, rather than being frightened of and running away from, new experience. And we use the Caldwell preschool inventory as one of the indicators of the effectiveness of Head Start. And sure enough, our IQ scores remained fairly stable, as they’re supposed to do. But the Caldwell inventory showed steady gains during the year that children have the experience with Head Start, and in the first 3 years afterwards.
Unfortunately, we began to see some decline in the third year. Some of the people who were advocating standardized tests, said “Yeah, there, we showed you. It doesn't work.” Some others of us, though, thought that maybe it was telling us something about what we were doing in elementary school. And fortunately, again, my friend Zigler and Urie Bronfenbrenner, another early developmental psychologist, 4 supported my position. And we began to develop something that was called Follow Through. And that was a program to enrich what happened in elementary school, because we were assuming that the problem with the decline in gains that we saw in those first 3 years in school were not a negative for Head Start, but a negative for what was going on in those early years in school.
And sure enough, Martin and Cynthia Deutch at NYU did a study of those first 3 years. They found that elementary school teachers, primary and elementary school teachers, had a higher degree of frustration if they had Head Start children in their classes. And, as the Deutches followed through on that differential level of frustration, it was because the teachers claimed that they didn't know what to do with these kids who were not in need of what they knew how to deliver. So, they didn't end up doing much or did trial and error. So, sure enough, our speculation that the Head Start loss in primary and elementary school had less to do with the deficiencies of Head Start than with the deficiencies in that level of schooling in dealing with kids who had had the benefit of Head Start.
What else do I think of when I think of Head Start? Well, I have to talk about my own development. Because I had close encounters with Zigler, Bruner, 5 and Julius Richmond. Julius was a pediatrician, he was head of the medical school at Syracuse, but he had established his reputation as a pediatrician. The way I identify them in my mind are as behavioral scientists from the mainstream that I got to know personally and interacted with intensively over, say, a 3-year or 4-year period. And I have to attribute my exposure to these men and women because Bettye Caldwell was one of them, and Cynthia Deutch. They have had a great influence on my competence as a behavioral scientist.
But to get back to your point Rodney, there weren’t many Black folk in the leadership of Head Start, even though it was a program designed to serve a significant number of Black folk. In fact, I suspect that my race was one part of why I was given a significant role. It was not necessarily because people thought I was the best social scientist in the country to lead it. I think they were looking for Black representation in the leadership of Head Start and I was one of the few people that had any identification as being competent to do that.
Mel: One of the things that you mentioned in talking about Head Start was your desire that it have a greater emphasis on family development, on the family context. And you were describing some of the aspects of your own family background, including your mother's work as a teacher, her high expectations for you, her father obtaining a college degree at a time when that was not common, and so on. Might there have been some connection between your own relatively enriched family background and your thoughts about Head Start and perhaps about child development more generally?
Dr. Gordon: It was at the height of my War on Poverty work that I did a lot of public speaking. And I always began by reminding people that I wasn't any good example of what I was talking about; that I was privileged from conception and how important that background was and still is in accounting for my development. I don't think I would have been the person that I am, made the achievements I succeeded in, if I had come from a less advantageous position. That is the reason for reciting my family's education, history, and completing college; there's no great shakes for me. I was always expected to be an educated person having come out of a background where my family, my mother's and my father's families, had been intergenerationally educated Black people at a time when you counted these on your hand.
Now you asked if it was having any consequence for my work. I think it absolutely shaped my approach to education and human development. When I thought about Head Start, I was certainly aware of and sympathetic to the work some of us had done in preschool education, and how effective that had been. But I was convinced then, as I am now, that what kids most need is solid situations, solid families, in which to grow and out of which to grow. So, the answer to your question is absolutely.
Mel: If I could follow just with one additional question, kind of thinking about the recipe here, because there are certainly plenty of people with advantaged backgrounds who don't partake of a life that's filled with concern about others.
Dr. Gordon: Correct.
Mel: So, I’m curious regarding your thoughts about the other ingredient or ingredients that perhaps led you to take the paths that you did; as opposed to assuming, as some people do, that whatever privilege they had was their entitlement, or otherwise not worrying about others.
Dr. Gordon: I think along with the, let's call it privileges, there is also the commitments of the adults who early on had input. Along with the educational professional education and backgrounds my mom and dad had, they also had pro-social humanistic values. From early childhood, I saw both of them, particularly my father, who was a country doctor who was very, very, very much involved in helping people and reaching out to protect, particularly less advantaged people. So, the material and educational assets that my parents had experienced, I suppose contributed to something, unless it's genes, contributed to their humanity. And that was early on implanted in me. Now, I suspect that there's some relationship between that and the people that I resonated to.
I'm thinking now, was it anything else? I'm thinking of the host of people who influenced me to be a carer and a caregiving person. Did that just happen by accident? Or was it the things that I learned from my mom and dad that attracted me to other people who shared those values?
Rodney: I've seen in a couple of places your recognition about the nuanced epistemological lived experiences. Are you able to connect those epiphanies and discoveries in your life in subsequent professional academic work? Am I asking too big a question?
Dr. Gordon: It's not too big of a question but it is a big question. And I'm trying to figure out how to concisely put it and that requires a little bit of backfill. I did grow up in a Black community. I suppose you would call my family Black but given the privileges that they enjoyed, they were not similarly situated to the less than affluent backgrounds of many Black people in Goldsboro. I recall growing up in a household that convinced me that, because I was Black, I would need to work harder and be better than other people. And that set me to trying to achieve some degrees of excellence and exceptionality.
As I began to think of myself as an intellectual, except for the experience at Howard and with Du Bois, my identification as Black did not quite fit with my identification as an intellectual. In that period in my early adulthood, as I was being exposed to a Northern European Caucasian model, I think I may have even tried to play down the Blackness to achieve the dominant American intellect stature. Certainly, by the time I had decided to marry the person I married, my wife of 70 years, who happened to be a Caucasian woman, I had some trouble making that decision because of my kind of emotional commitment to Blackness. But she wasn't just that, a white woman. She came from an exceptionally high achieving family. If Henry Wallace had won the presidential election in 1940, it is said that J. W. Gitt, 6 my wife's father would have been our Secretary of State.
They were wealthy. And a part of my early experience with her was to make sure that she and her folk didn't think I didn't belong in that circle. So, I was definitely “acting white” by the time my four Black kids came along, though that was when it hit me that acting white wasn't the model that I wanted for them because it wouldn’t work for them. They could get there some time, but they couldn't begin acting white. They, early on, had to figure out who they were and what's the rock they stood on. And so that part of my story in brief kind of relates to that period in my life. That may even have contributed to my achievement.
There's not a lot of people in the world who hold endowed chairs and in two ivy league universities. That didn't just happen, a part of it was affirmative action, I'm sure. But in those two particular universities, I suspect if I hadn't had something on the ball, or they didn't think I had something on the ball, they would have chosen somebody else. So that was a part of my development to be an effective father for two Black boys and two Black girls. I wouldn't do any less of what I did for my professional development, but for my own and their personal development I needed to make sure—I aimed to be an able, respectable, high achieving, Black male of good character. And I added good character because I also had to discover in my psychological work, that there's more to development than intellective 7 development.
In an early version of my book
Mel: In terms of reconnecting as part of the socialization of your children, you used the phrase “rediscovering your Blackness.” Did that lead to any of your work subsequently, that might not have occurred absent that?
Dr. Gordon: I have not thought of any of my professional work that would have been different. Except a problem that I've been working on lately is probably informed by it, and that's the very difficult problem of educating people adequately for dual or multiple cultures, multiple citizenships. If you respect the rich background out of which we, African American folk come—and think about it—you can appreciate how much cognitive dissonance there must be when most aspects of your schooling privileges and glorifies the other. Du Bois writes about dual citizenship, and he's got one line in which he uses the word amused contempt. And that's preceded by his reference to a struggling African American citizen who's struggling to deal with the ambiguities. And then Du Bois says, “while America looks on in amused contempt you're being demeaned even when you're trying.”
Rodney: “Amused contempt and pity” is the rest of the quote. 9
Dr. Gordon: Right. Yes. Thank you. My experience with my children and my own racial identity and theirs must have and be influencing my struggle with that struggle. I haven't always been as sensitive to the race card as I am now, as I reflect on it.
Rodney: Let me just move ahead three score and 10 years. I want to fill in some gaps. We have the now renamed Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Columbia University. We have the legacy of the Gordon Commission that was put together a decade or so ago, ETS, and others. So, what's left for us young bucks to do? How do we, those of us who are in the game, bring in other folk who want to get the message?
Dr. Gordon: You look and you see what we can do, against odds. See what's possible. And you ask the question, I think it was C. Wright Mills who said, “Why not? Why not?” As again coming back to the richness of the environment out of which I came when the “why not?” question came to me, it almost sounded like a responsibility. You younger people can look and say, you know, the people like Gordon and Kenneth B. Clark and his wife, Mamie, and Doxey Wilkerson 10 on and on, did it at a time when Black people weren't even expected to get close to these kinds of places. Why should you not? Why not?
Rodney: I wonder if the legacy of the Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Urban and Minority Education at the Teachers College at Columbia University is a place for you to help us with the future a bit, the legacy that you've left. What are you hoping becomes of the institute?
Dr. Gordon: Well fortunately they've invited me back in and have named the Institute for me. And the current directors have a unit in the Institute that's called the Gordon Legacy Project and is bringing all of the projects that I'm still involved with back into the institute. So, it's emerging. Its emerging programs’ will not only be influenced by my legacy but also by my presence.
Rodney: Would you mind naming one or two of your current projects?
Dr. Gordon: So the thing that claims most of my intellective energy these days is my concern with what I call the repurposing of educational assessment. The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment, which the record should show that I came to in my 10th decade—I was 92 years old when they tapped me to head that effort—we ended up concluding that the measurements ought not only be about measuring developed ability. Measurement also has the potential to contribute to the cultivation and development of ability. One of the principal findings from that commission was that educational measurement should inform and improve learning,
And I'm currently leading the Gordon Seminar on Assessment in the Service of Learning, a seminar of faculty from about 10 universities and what we are trying to do is to operationalize that aspiration. What is it the field has got to become if it informs and improves learning? And we have pretty much concluded that we don't necessarily want to change measurement. We will continue to need to measure the achievement of developing. But the new efforts in measurement ought to be integrated with teaching and learning. It ought to involve people who are primarily responsible for learning. And those are the learners themselves and the teaching persons. So, we’re targeting the teaching and the learning persons. What is it that you need to understand and ought to be doing in order to better serve learning? And the idea is kind of catching on, as I say it's going to be well represented at NAPPE (the Network of Advocates for Promising Practices in Education) and AERA. The 2022 fall meeting of the National Academy of Education has a session on this topic. We've got three books on the way and hopefully part of my legacy will be the contributions that assessment can make to development.
Another one. One of my post docs, Cynthia McCallister, 11 who came to work with me 25 years ago has been focused on the implications of some of my ideas for reconceptualizing equality of educational opportunity. The 1954 decision that outlawed government sponsorship of segregated schools was a significant achievement to our society, our nation. I claim that it was not so good for pedagogy because it got us focused on racial isolation and racial integration to the neglect of pedagogy.
So Cynthia and I are working on the possibility that equal educational opportunity ought to be replaced by equity in educational opportunity. Which means that opportunities should be appropriate and sufficient to the needs of the persons who are being educated. We should be paying a lot more attention to what is it that previously segregated kids bring and need from the system. Not just mixing them with white kids, and not just putting them in traditionally good educational settings. But if we began to examine seriously what we know about human variance, this particular idea is good for education in general, not just education for Black kids. Humans vary much more within the social divisions by which we group them. The differences among women are greater than the differences between women and men. And certainly the differences within Black kids or within white kids are greater than the differences between Black and white kids.
So, we ought not to be organizing schooling around the social divisions that we have traditionally grouped people in. If we're going to organize them around any group differences, they ought to be the groups of human variance: cognitive style, temperament, speed of learning, interest in learning, capacity for self-regulation. A whole range of variations that Anastasi 12 mentioned in her differential psychology and we've tended to neglect them out of this focus on the social groupings that the political concerns around gender and race have led us to. So, Cynthia and I have a group focused on the reconceptualization of equality of educational opportunity to privilege equity rather than equality. We don't want the same. We want treatment set up and opportunities that are appropriate and sufficient.
Rodney: I've been so impacted by your mentorship and I recall when Carol Camp Yeakey 13 introduced us to you. It must have been around 1996 or 97. When I was a graduate student and you came to visit us at Virginia and we had this portrait size picture that was presented to you, and I was in awe, but it would take 25 more years before I actually had a conversation with you. You’ve influenced so many of us. And I've continued to chat with you—thank you so much! And we have multiple levels in terms of your prodigies, many of whom are older than me clearly.
When you think about the role of mentoring our junior colleagues and the role of mentoring, you were our speaker for the AEA GEDI 14 commencement last year on your 99th birthday. Any advice for us younger and those even younger? What should we be taking from how we mentor?
Dr. Gordon: You know, the Spencer Foundation has paid a bit of attention to mentoring. And I've been talking with its’ president, Na’ilah Nasir, about what I could contribute to them. And I have not been able to come up with a “how you do it.” I think the problem for me is that I never tried very hard at mentoring. I simply tried to be me and if I translate that into advice, I think if you're in the fortunate position to be a mentor, then maybe the best thing you can do if you're an honorable, decent and able person is to just be who you are. Because as I have thought about the people who have influenced me, it's less what they said and more of who they are and how they comported themselves, what they talked about, the way in which they thought about ideas, that I was learning from them.
Valerie: When we talked before you seem to mention that one goal, though you didn't use the word goal, for evaluation and perhaps social research more generally, was to improve our professional judgment. I'm wondering if you have further thoughts about that. Thinking of both educational and other types of programs, how they could be done to optimize professional judgment? What do you mean by that concept, and how we can take it and hone it for the greater good of the programs and the people participating in them?
Dr. Gordon: I've been working on a project that I hope to complete before I knock off, on the repurposing of assessment, educational assessment. I’m picking up where the commission that I headed in my now nineties left off. 15 We concluded that assessment in the future ought to inform and improve learning. And one of the things we criticized is how grossly assessment misses the boat when its focus is on the measurement of status, the measurement of achievement, or of developing. If they're going to invest that much energy and time and effort in assessment and evaluation, it ought to do something for the people who are being assessed or evaluated or who are the objects or the study of these things.
And we concluded that better understanding of the process of
Valerie: Thank you. Yes. I think there was one other concept you were telling us about when you think about—almost like criteria. You said that rather than consistency, one thing we should look at is appropriateness. And what was the other, Mel?
Mel: Sufficiency.
Valerie: I was hoping you could unpack that a little bit and explain those concepts. Consistency is sort of reliability in my mind.
Dr. Gordon: In the 1980s and 90s, when I guess it started to decline, there was a lot of excitement about what began as individualized learning. Some other people call it personalized, such as Glaser. 16 What that movement was about was recognizing the fact that human variance, how much human variance there is, particularly in the learning of students, and they were trying to be sensitive to it.
On appropriateness. What was behind that [individualized learning] movement was the recognition that learning ought to be appropriate, not just to the outcomes you're trying to achieve. In order to get to those outcomes, it's got to be appropriate to the person who's got to do it. And the learning has much less to do with who's teaching, even with what you're trying to learn.
The biggest thing is the meaning. My perception of it and its meaning for me, if you want me to learn it. Otherwise, I don't give it enough attention to effectively learn it. So, my concern for appropriateness is that whatever it is that you got to teach somebody, the first thing you've got to do is to figure out the relationship between what it is you're trying to teach, or what it is that has to be learned, and what's happening. What the intentions, what the meaning of the stuff is for the person who's trying to learn it. Then the way you package it, the way you present it, the way you conduct the learning experience has to be appropriate to that. Otherwise, you're just creating more barriers for the kids to climb over in order to learn it.
When the Supreme Court in ‘54 ruled that desegregated schools were unconstitutional, all of us cheered at that, including me. It didn't take me long though, to realize that it was—I don't want to call it a mistake because it was for our society a major, major forward step—but for pedagogy, it was a distraction. It enabled society to turn its attention to race, to racial mix. Another important issue, but I'm not sure that race and racial mix have much to do with the pedagogical problems of people who have been abused by the society. Yeah, it would help if they could get over the implications of racism. But the major thing you've got to do is to figure out what's getting in the way of their learning the stuff they've got to learn in order to move ahead.
Race and racial mix, it seems to me, was not the appropriate intervention. It may have helped, but the appropriate interventions would have come from a better understanding of the variance and of this handicap, this abused, discriminated population, but there's the nature of that variance. And what have we gotten to is a factory-driven system of education to serve them.
And here it is nearly 70 some-odd years after the Supreme Court decision of 1954, and we are still struggling with the gap that I've also written about. And I think we are struggling with it because our conception of equality of educational opportunity has not attended to appropriateness and sufficiency. It's attended to some other interesting, desirable, maybe even useful things. I think the great advantage of racial mix is that in this society, it's in the schools that white kids sit in that you find the richest resources. And if resources, pedagogical resources, have anything to do with learning, then that's an important contribution. But it isn’t sufficient to get over some of the distortions in learning that I think are a product of the thing the court ruled against. [The ruling] wasn't sufficiently appropriate to the problem that we were concerned with.
I talk about that with some hesitancy because there's room for great contradiction there. I believe deeply in sufficiently resourced learning environments. And to the extent that desegregation put a few Black kids in better resourced learning experiences and environments, I have to support that. But they need more than just rich environments. They need to have what it is they are confronting in their learning, faced, and something done about it. We need to get back to that kind of individualization. Or I came to prefer personalization, because if it's personalized, it meets my individual, my personal interests, but it also hooks me. And I think it was John Carroll who taught us that the most important thing about education was time. Time on task (Carroll, 1989). If you can get the learner to spend enough time selectively attending to it, learning—it'll take care of itself. Humans can't be exposed to this kind of stuff long enough and not be impressed by it. So that was kind of the long way of addressing your question.
Rodney: Helpful.
Valerie: Yeah, and it's your project now, the one you're working on. So it's quite exciting actually.
Dr. Gordon: Absolutely.
Valerie: Thank you.
Dr. Gordon: Well, we are trying to do… In fact, that has even shifted since I started working on it. We [in the Gordon Commission] set out in the 90s to try to change assessment. And it has morphed into a project that is trying to integrate into pedagogy, into teaching and learning, some of what we know about assessment. Not its [older] focus on the measurement of status and developed ability. But on its learning analytics, its analysis of teaching learning processes, to better understand what it is that the learner is benefiting from, or not benefiting from. What's getting in the way. Because that's the kind of stuff we need to provide teachers to help their adjustments.
Rodney: Prof, you've filled our cup. Our cup runneth over.
Dr. Gordon: Well, I’m glad at 100 somebody still listens to me. So if you can get some people to hear what I'm talking about, thank you!
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Cassandra Edwards in scheduling the interviews with Dr. Gordon and related matters, the transcription services of Jaleah Rutledge, and the work of Eric Tucker and other members of Dr. Gordon's team in a review of a previous version of the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
