Genes, says Jencks, do not directly determine the cognitive abilities of one group or another. But if genes affect an individual in a given way, but giving him a skin color or other distinguishing factor that allows society to discriminate against that individual, then genes have indirectly effected the individual's ability to gain those skills that would allow him to score well on I.Q. tests. "The assertion that gene's explain differences between individuals' test scores does not necessarily imply that genes affect an individual's learning capacity. If, for example, a nation refuses to send children with red hair to school, the genes that cause red hair can be said to lower reading scores. This does not tell us that children with red hair cannot learn to read. Attributing red heads' illiteracy to their genes would probably strike most readers as absurd under these circumstances. yet that is exactly what traditional methods of estimating heritability do."

Jencks is also a believers in the "so-what theory of genetic superiority, first popularized by Noam Chomsky. That is, he believes the whole argument about which race is more "intelligent" is a useless and inconsequential debate. "The importance of genetic differences between races is political rather than scientific. As of 1972, white people still ran the world. Those who have power always prefer to believe that they 'deserve' it, rather than thinking they have won it by venality, cunning, or historical accidents. Some whites apparently feel that if the average white is slightly more adept at certain kinds of abstract reasoning than the average black, this legitimates the whole structure of white supremacy. Instead of accepting the myth that test scores are synonymous with 'intelligence' and that 'intelligence' is the key to economic success, we would do better to recognize that economic success depends largely on other factors. We could then try to tackle economic inequality between blacks and whites directly."

MOST OF THE DIFFERENCES between the test scores of blacks and whites is due to cultural differences, according to Jencks. "You can go back and look at the Italians and Jews at the beginning of this century in New York," he said. "We have a student who took the school records of New York and did the same kinds of things we did in analyzing school expenditures, etc. He came to the same conclusion that we did, that nothing seemed to matter, Italians still scored lower than Jews. All you can say is that the kind of culture that Jewish kids were brought up in led them to do well in the kinds of things they were supposed to do in school." The situation, "explained Jencks, is the same between blacks and whites today.

Jencks is an old hand at educational studies, surveys, and reformist ideas. As an undergraduate at Harvard he majored in English and wrote articles on higher education for the Crimson. His interest in educational reform led him to enter the Graduate School of Education, where he met David Riesman '31 Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, who was just coming to Harvard. Riesman took an immediate liking to Jencks, and the two began to collaborate on a book "The Academic Revolution." Work on the book was interrupted, however, when Jencks won a Knox fellowship that allowed him to spend a year at the London School of Economics. Returning to the State he went to Washington where he got involved in a number of projects including developing plans for the educational system in the new town of Columbia, Maryland, giving Congressional seminars on educational policy, and acting as a consultant to several White House committees and conferences. During his stay in Washington, Jencks also served as an editor of The New Republic.

In 1967, at the close of the Johnson Administration, Jencks was brought to Cambridge dean of the School of Education. Jencks brought with him a sketchy outline of a best he had done a great deal of thinking about, The Limits of Schooling. Once in Cambridge. Jencks set up Harvard's Center for Educational Policy Daniel P. Moyalitiean, Professor of Education and Urban Politics and Thomas Pettigrew, professor of Social Psychology, were giving in which they were conducing re-analyses of the Coleman Report. The data that was unearthed meshed perfectly with some of the thinking Jencks had been doing on educational reform so he and seven colleagues put together a proposal for additional research and were funded by the Carnegie Corporation. The results of their work is Inequality.

"During the course of writing the book I became more radicalized in my thanking about the issues," he explained. "The more I thought about it the more pessimistic I became about the political possibilities of maintaining a system which provides for economic redistribution without a change in the basic character of the institutions."

BUT DESPITE HIS "radicalization" Jencks remains coolly pragmatic about the solutions to economic inequality. "I've always had the idea that if you want to get rid of poverty the best way to do it is to give people money. If you want to solve some other problem like the way poor people behave, then maybe you would need another solution."

Some of the things the Jencks recommends to alleviate economic inequality are progressive taxation, income maintenance, direct government regulation of wages, and tax incentives to employers for equalizing waged.

"I'm not an absolute egalitarian. Any society has to have rewards and punishments for appropriate behaviors so that's almost bound to produce inequality because some people will behave in ways in which society values and thus reap rewards. The usual utopian method is to use sanctions, some type of pressure to induce appropriate behavior. I find the use of economic sanction much more attractive. If everyone received the same hourly wage, and the only source of "Inequality was how hard you worked, then I wouldn't feel a bit bad about that. But I take John Rawls's (professor of Philosophy), position that you don't want to reward virtues and vices for which people deserve no credit. There is no advantage to rewarding things like extraordinary intelligence, luck, or anything like that, but there is an advantage in rewarding effort."

But Jencks is not optimistic about the possibility for reform of radical changes. The educational institutions of America have too firm a grasp on the peoples' minds, and the political climate in the country is not ripe for dramatic change. Nevertheless, Jencks sets forth the conditions he feel are necessary for the radical transformation.

"A successful campaign for reducing economic inequality probably requires two things," he writes. "First those who low incomes must cease to accept their condition as inevitable and just. Instead of assuming, like unsuccessful gamblers, that their numbers will eventually come up or that their children's numbers will, they must demand changes in the rules of the game. Second, some of those with high incomes, and especially the children of those with high incomes, must begin to feel ashamed of economic inequality. If these things were to happen significant institutional changes in the machinery of income distribution would become politically feasible."

Both Jencks and Inequality are iconoclasts. Because he attacks almost every sacred cow in education and "ecommends politically radical solutions, the book is sure to cause mounting controversy. Inequality is bound to have some effect on the upcoming presidential election as both sides cite the portions of the research that support their beliefs. Whether or not the book will ever advance Jencks's beliefs and his call for open reform is still open to question. But at least he's got people thinking.