When our guest today, Pepper Stetler, was told that her daughter Louisa, who has Down Syndrome, would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question – why? Her quest to find answers took Pepper on a winding investigation into the history of the IQ test, and how it came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. Her work led her to write a new book, A Measure of Intelligence: One Mother’s Reckoning with the IQ Test. In it she questions how we define and judge intelligence, challenges its flawed foundation, and argues for a fundamental reevaluation of how we understand an individual’s perceived potential.

Pepper is a professor of Art history at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio. She writes extensively on issues facing people with intellectual disabilities and their caregivers. Her writing on these themes has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Slate, the Progressive, the Plowshares, Blog and Gulf Coast, among others. Pepper also researches and writes about the art and photography of early 20th century Europe and the United States. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and her MA and PhD from the University of Delaware. Pepper is here today to discuss the IQ test its dark history and ongoing dangerous legacy and the need to restructure how we value and measure intelligence if we want a more equitable future for all our kids.