1. Smith, Contrast Timothy, “Immigrant Social Aspirations and American Education, 1880–1930,” American Quarterly, 21 (Fall, 1969) with Greer, Colin, The Great School Legend (New York, 1972).Google Scholar

2. For a critique of the melting pot belief, see Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel P., Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, 1963), and Gordon, Milton M., Assimilation in American Life (New York, 1964). Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted (New York, 1951) sets out the themes of alienation and disorientation in the immigrant experience.Google Scholar

3. A number of recent studies emphasize diversity among immigrant groups. See Vecolli, Rudolph J., “Ethnicity: A Neglected Dimension of American History,” in The State of American History, edited by Bass, Herbert J. (Chicago, 1970); Vecolli, , “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” Journal of American History, 51 (1964); Vecolli, , “Prelates and Peasants: Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church,” Journal of Social History, (1969); Greene, Victor R., “For God and Country: The Origins of Slavic Catholic Self-Consciousness in America,” Church History, 35 (1966).Google Scholar

4. For a similar, though more limited example, see Cohen, David K., “Immigrants and the Schools,” Review of Educational Research, 40 (1970).Google Scholar

5. For example, see Ayres, Leonard P., Laggards in Our Schools (New York, 1908).Google Scholar

6. Calculated from U. S. Immigration Commission, “The Children of Immigrants in the Schools,” Reports (Washington, D.C., 1911), vol. 29, pp. 63–64.Google Scholar

7. Ratios of the number of eighth grade students to the number of seventh grade students were calculated for nativity groups for Boston, Chicago, and New York. The differences were trivial. U. S. Immigration Commission, Reports, vol. 31, pp. 190–193, 564–568; vol. 34, pp. 624–628.Google Scholar

8. Maller, J. B., “Economic and Social Correlatives of School Progress in New York City,” Teachers College Record, 34 (1933): 664.Google Scholar

9. In Detroit, for example, by 1935, 70 percent of the Jewish youth had graduated from high school compared to 40 percent of the non-Jewish youth. Glazer, Nathan, “Social Characteristics of American Jews,” in Finkelstein, Louis, The Jews (New York, 1949), II, 1712.Google Scholar

10. Counts, George S., The Selective Character of American Secondary Education (Chicago, 1922), pp. 111–112.Google Scholar

11. See Zborowski, Mark and Herzog, Elizabeth, Life is with People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York, 1952), Part II, ch. 2.Google Scholar

12. Counts, , Selective Character, p. 112.Google Scholar

13. See especially Covello, Leonard, The Social Background of the Italo-American School Child (Leiden, Netherland, 1967), p. 292. We believe similar attitudes held true among Poles.Google Scholar

14. U. S. Immigration Commission, Reports, vol. 29. The data in the Summary volume are suspect. They are drawn from an unrepresentative sample of the cities and schools in the Commission's data, and they exaggerate the differences in performance between nationality groups. Nevertheless, they are the only data which permit attempts to control the effects of independent variables on nationality differences in retardation, and so we have used them.Google Scholar

15. Ibid., p. 92.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., p. 61.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., pp. 98, 92. Italian English-language acquisition continued to lag in subsequent decades; in 1930, at every age level the proportion of Italians who could not speak English exceeded the proportion of Russians who could not: Google Scholar

18. A number of “IQ” issues are not raised here. One is the possible genetic base of group IQ differences. Our presumption is genetic equality between groups with respect to the determinants of IQ scores. That presumption is consistent with the available evidence, provided we also assume that genes play a larger role in determining IQ than they do in determining educational attainment. Put another way, we assume that the impact of cultural differences is relatively greater on educational attainment than it is on IQ differences. If this is true,—and it is difficult to conceive an important effect of genes on educational attainment that is not mediated by IQ^∗,—and if groups were equal in genetic endowment affecting IQ, we would expect smaller differences on IQ than on educational attainment. Our best estimate for the period in question is that Jews exceeded Southern Italians by one-half standard deviation in tested IQ, but exceeded them by two-thirds of a standard deviation in educational attainment.Google Scholar A second set of issues concerns the impact of individual IQ scores on individual attainment within ethnic groups. All of our estimates about the role of IQ differences between groups assume that the relationship between IQ and educational attainment is the same within each group. There is reason to believe that this may not be true. We think it is fair to speculate that among Jews IQ differences mattered less for educational attainment than they did among Italians. We suspect that lower ability Jews were more likely to pursue schooling relative to high ability students than were lower ability Italians. Put another way, a high IQ Italian would stand at a greater advantage over his lower IQ peers than would a high IQ Jew, with respect to educational attainment. If this reasoning is correct, our present estimate of the part group IQ differences played in accounting for Jewish-Italian schooling differences is high, and our confidence in the importance of cultural values for explaining differences in educational attainment is strengthened.Google Scholar ^∗ Athletic prowess, musical talent, and physical attractiveness are important to only the lucky few, and add little to explaining variation in educational attainment among the general population.Google Scholar

19. Murdock, Arine, “A Study of Race Differences in New York City,” School and Society, 11 (1920). The first discussion of the test in the literature, reports results for over 1,000 subjects in Bloomington, Indiana. Standard deviations appear to be 24 for 10 year olds, 28 for 11 year olds, and 25 for 12 year olds. Calculated from Pressey, S. L. and Pressey, L. W., “A Group Point Scale for Measuring General Intelligence with First Results from 1,100 School Children,” The Journal of Applied Psychology, 2 (1918): 266. This means that Italians in Murdoch's sample scored well over a half standard deviation below Jewish subjects. These results are at variance with our other evidence, and are discounted on the assumption that the Pressey test was overly reliant on language acquisition. See also Seago, Dorothy W. and Koldin, Theresa S., “A Comparative Study of the Mental Capacity of Sixth Grade Jewish and Italian Children,” School and Society, 22 (1925): 566 and Feingold, Gustave, “Intelligence of the First Generation of Immigrant Groups,” 15 (February, 1924): 70 cited in Cohen, , “Immigrants and the Schools.” Google Scholar

20. Gates, See Arthur, “The Correlation of Achivement in School Subjects with Intelligence Tests and Other Variables,” The Journal of Education Psychology, 13 (1922): 281; Maller, , “Economic and Social Correlatives,” p. 659; Ziegler, Carl W., School Attendance as a Factor in School Progress (New York, 1928), p. 26.Google Scholar

21. Feingold, , “Intelligence of the First Generation,” pp. 77–82.Google Scholar

22. Jencks, Christopher S., et al., Inequality; A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York, 1972), p. 337.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., pp. 323–325.Google Scholar

24. Duncan, Beverly and Duncan, Otis Dudley, “Minorities and the Process of Stratification,” American Sociological Review, 33 (1968).Google Scholar

25. See, for example, Bridges, James W. and Coler, Lilian, “The Relation of Intelligence to Social Status,” The Psychological Review, 24 (1917); Dexter, Emily, “The Relation Between Occupation of Parent and Intelligence of Children,” School and Society, 17 (1923); Pressey, S. L. and Ralson, Ruth, “The Relation of the General Intelligence of School Children to the Occupation of Their Fathers,” The Journal of Applied Psychology, 4 (1919).Google Scholar

26. In addition to Bridges and Coler, Dexter, and Pressey and Ralson cited above, see Counts, , Selective Character and Van Denburg, Joseph K., Causes of the Elimination of Students in Public Secondary Schools of New York City (New York, 1911).Google Scholar

27. Joseph, Samuel, Jewish Immigration to the United States from 1881–1910 (New York, 1914).Google Scholar

28. Rubinow, Isaac, “Economic and Industrual Conditions—New York,” in Bernheimer, Charles S. (ed.), The Russian Jew in the United States (Philadelphia, 1905), pp. 110–112.Google Scholar

29. United States Industrial Commission, Reports, (Washington, 1901), vol. 15, p. 478, pp. 343–369.Google Scholar

30. Not all income was earned by male members of the family, so not all of the Jewish income advantage can be attributed to male occupational superiority. Forty-three percent of the Russian Jewish households in the seven cities surveyed by the Immigration Commission received income from boarders, compared to 27 percent for Southern Italian households; thirty-six percent of the Russian Jewish households received income from offspring, compared to 22 percent for the Southern Italians. These differentials were somewhat offset by the fact that 17 percent of the foreign-born Italian wives worked, compared to 8 percent of the Russian Jewish wives, U. S. Immigration Commission, Reports, vol. 1, p. 766.Google Scholar

31. On the impact of cultural values on economic decisions, see McLaughlin, Virginia Yans, “Patterns of Work and Family Organization: Buffalo's Italians,” in Rabb, T. and Rotberg, R., eds., The Family in History (New York, 1973), pp. 111–126.Google Scholar

32. Duncan, and Duncan, , “Minorities and the Process of Stratification.” Google Scholar

33. Knowledge of the intercorrelations between educational attainment, test scores, and father's occupation permits the estimation of the regression coefficients in a path model in which attainment is assumed to be determined by scores and father's occupation. These results are maximum effects, unless either test scores or father's occupation is negatively related to an omitted variable that affects attainment positively. We then substituted the average differences in standard deviations between Russian Jews and Southern Italians on father's occupation and test scores into the resultant equation predicting education. Our prediction of the difference between the two groups on educational attainment fell short by one-third, as the text notes. Inclusion of family size did not alter the results importantly. At least thirty percent of the attainment gap remained unexplained when family size, test scores, and father's occupation were taken into account. For an explanation of the method of path analysis see Duncan, Otis D., “Path Analysis: Sociological Examples,” American Journal of Sociology, 72 (1966): 1–16.Google Scholar

34. Zborowski, and Herzog, , Life is with People, pp. 118–123; Zborowski, Mark, “The Place of Book Learning in Traditional Jewish Culture,” Harvard Educational Review, 20 (Spring, 1949); Antin, Mary, The Promised Land (Boston, 1912), pp. 204, 217.Google Scholar

35. Agnoff, Charles, Journey to the Dawn (New York, 1951), p. 196; Tobenkin, Elias, Witte Arrives (New York, 1916), p. 16.Google Scholar

36. The Exodus is the central myth exemplifying this theme.Google Scholar

37. From the Daily Forward , May 6, 1906, cited in Park, Robert E. and Miller, Herbert, Old World Traits Transplanted (New York, 1921), p. 7.Google Scholar

38. Tobenkin, , Witte, p. 23; Agnoff, , Journey, p. 238.Google Scholar

39. Kohn, Melvin, Class and Conformity, A Study in Values (Homewood, Ill., 1969), p. 63; Strodtbeck, F. “Family Interaction, Values and Achievement,” in McClelland, D. C., et al., Talent and Society (Princeton, 1958); Rosen, Bernard, “The Achievement Syndrome: A Psychocultural Dimension of Social Stratification,” American Sociological Review, 21 (April, 1956). See also Psathas, George, “Ethnicity, Social Class, and Adolescent Independence,” American Sociological Review, 22 (August, 1957): 415–423 where Jews scored higher than Italians on measures of “parental regard for child's judgment.” Google Scholar

40. Like most generalizations, these should be treated with care. For example it appears that Southern Italian districts that had undergone some land tenure changes and whose economic base was more oriented toward “economic individualism” sent a larger proportion of migrants to the U. S. than the more feudal districts. McDonald, J. S., “Italy's Rural Social Structure and Emigration,” Occidente, 12 (September-October, 1956). On Southern Italian life, see Covello, , Southern-Italian Child; Williams, Phyllis, South Italian Folkways in Europe and America (New Haven, 1938); Banfield, Edward, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (New York, 1958); Vecolli, Rudolph, “Contadini in Chicago” and “Prelates and Peasants.” Google Scholar

41. Levi, Carlo, Christ Stopped at Eboli (New York, 1947), p. 76, passim; Covello, , Southern-Italian Child, chs, 6–8; Vecolli, , “Prelates and Peasants,”; Banfield, , Moral Basis. Google Scholar

42. Gans, Herbert, The Urban Villagers. (New York, 1962) and Whyte, William Foote, Street-Corner Society (Chicago, 1943). Jews traditionally characterized the world as a dichotomy, contrasting Jewish with Gentile. In America, however, except for the very Orthodox, that dichotomy did not inhibit participation in secular and civic society.Google Scholar

43. Whyte, , Street-Corner Society, pp. 105, 107.Google Scholar

44. Covello, , Southern-Italian Child, pp. 254–273. Gans reported that the actual mode of child rearing among Southern Italians in Boston's West End mitigated against school success. The West Enders were episodic and impulsive in their responses to children, stressed immediate person to person contact, and showed limited interest in the use of words and concepts.Google Scholar

45. Covello, , Southern-Italian Child, pp. 241–274; Vecolli, , “Prelates and Peasants.” Google Scholar

46. Covello, , Southern-Italian Child, pp. 286–329; McLaughlin, Virginia Yans, “Patterns of Work and Family Organization: Buffalo's Italians”; Gans, , Urban Villagers, pp. 150, 297. Hostility to schooling, especially to compulsory attendance, as being inimical to the immigrants' economic needs was accentuated by the high proportion of Southern Italians who came to the U. S. with the intention of returning home. Youth who could contribute to that goal by working were an economic asset not lightly given up.Google Scholar

47. For an alternative to this assessment of the relationship between school success and Southern Italian-American culture, see Iorizzo, Luciano and Mondello, Salvatore, The Italian-American (New York, 1971), pp. 92–93 and, more generally, Smith, , “Immigrant Social Aspirations.” Covello notes that a change in attitudes toward schooling became noticeable during the 1920's as more and more Italians began to abandon the idea that they would soon return to Italy. Southern-Italian Child, p. 298.Google Scholar