| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 25, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| BOOKS
How the SATs Changed America THE BIG TEST The Secret History of the American Meritocracy By Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux 406pp $27 Say you are looking for reading that investigates one of the most important recent developments in American society. You should choose: (a) One of the many, many books focused on Silicon Valley. (b) A volume on globalization. (c) A history of the Educational Testing Service and its impact on the U.S. Well, surely not (c), right? Wrong. Because Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy is one of the most astute and disquieting efforts of the season. What begins as a chronicle of the evolution of standardized testing ends as a penetrating commentary on today's frantic skirmish for a place in the professional upper middle class. Lemann shows how our educational system, ''one of the United States' great original social contributions,'' has become a giant--and somewhat rigged--slot machine. Moreover, even though by mid-book you may wonder where it's all leading, The Big Test is a very enjoyable read. That's largely because Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and the author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, delivers his analysis through a series of nuanced biographical sketches. The book begins by describing how several key members of the Establishment set about transforming America's elite, using the application of standardized testing and new university admissions policies. Concerned that America in the 1940s was developing an undemocratic, hereditary ruling class, Harvard University President James Bryant Conant worked to make U.S. universities a breeding ground for ''a new one made up of brainy, elaborately trained, public-spirited people drawn from every section and every background.'' Simultaneously, Educational Testing Service chief Henry Chauncey was waging a holy war on behalf of standardized tests. (A man who ''loved everything about testing,'' he frequently tested himself and, prompted by an unhappy home life, pondered ''marriage compatibility'' exams.) By the early 1960s, the duo and their allies had made the once little-used SAT a standard hurdle for admission to the country's prime universities. Meanwhile, two seminal academic leaders of that decade, University of California President Clark Kerr and Yale University President Kingman Brewster Jr., were helping to transform higher education into a hierarchical complex of institutions topped by large, research-oriented universities. The effort to remake the country's elite largely succeeded. But there were a host of unintended consequences. First, contrary to Conant's wishes, the new test-savvy elite wasn't much interested in public service. Instead, the author says, such a ''Mandarin'' typically became a ''well-paid, securely positioned provider of expert advice: corporate lawyer, investment banker, management consultant, high-end specialized doctor.'' As a result, most people saw the testing and sorting, followed by elite-college admission or refusal, not as a way of improving society through scientific management of its intellectual resources. Rather, they felt it was merely ''a way of determining how big a share of America's goodies they'd get.'' In response, there soon arose a test-preparation industry, pioneered by Stanley Kaplan, a lower-middle-class striver who is the subject of another fascinating Lemann profile. Then the educators' scheme set off a national debate on how best to balance the sometimes conflicting ideals of equal opportunity for all and a better deal for the downtrodden. Since members of minority groups generally performed poorly on standardized tests, universities and government in time decided to take special measures--effectively creating another favored elite, those benefiting from affirmative action. Soon, yet another social group emerged--a resentful one, primarily composed of whites who had gotten nudged aside under the rigorous new placement scheme. Among other things, this final bunch would become the social basis for Proposition 209, the 1996 California ballot initiative aimed at abolishing affirmative action. Lemann makes these social strata real by providing flesh-and-blood representatives. There is, for example, Bill Lann Lee, the smart Chinese kid out of Harlem who won spots at Yale and Columbia University School of Law and ultimately became U.S. Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Molly Munger, an idealistic, white Southern Californian, finds that, because ''the deck had been shuffled only once,'' the new order hasn't made for a better America. In time, she places her Harvard Law credentials in the service of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Marginalized California academics Glynn Custred and Thomas Wood, the developers of the idea of Prop 209, will become her key antagonists. Finally, teasing and manipulating the aspirations and resentments of all of these people are our political leaders, particularly that embodiment of Lemann's Mandarin order, William Jefferson Clinton, Yale University law school, 1973. Lemann, himself a graduate of Harvard College, ends by challenging the entire ''meritocratic'' idea. Conant and his allies, he observes, had futilely tried to ''undermine social rank by setting up an elaborate process of ranking.'' Instead, Lemann says, we should be trying to design ''a society without a specially anointed group at the top of it.'' A utopian wish? Well, the effort would certainly put U.S. society to the test. By HARDY GREEN _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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RELATED ITEMS How the SATs Changed America PHOTO: Cover, ``The Big Test'' ONLINE ORIGINAL: ``The Vision behind the American Meritocracy...Is Extremely Elitist'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
