Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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In 1964, a young Texan arrived at Yale University. He was a member of the old-boy network that dominated Yale at the time-the “Baxter Thatcher Hatcher” crowd, as Calvin Trillin has called it. Their Yale was little more than a second boarding school for rich white boys: no one studied too hard, and the two major admissions criteria were a legacy and an Andover diploma. George W. Bush had both. He joined the Deke fraternity, played intramural sports, and accumulated a rack of gentleman’s Cs.

The same year, Yale’s president, Kingman Brewster, declared his intention to make Yale more than “a finishing school on Long Island Sound.” He hired a new dean of admissions, Inky Clark, who destroyed the university as Bush knew it. No longer would Yale be a posh playground for the rich; from now on, grades and test scores would determine who was admitted. In fact, none of Bush’s three younger brothers went to Yale: their spots had been taken by a new elite, the “meritocracy”-those who had done well in school.

As Nicholas Lemann explains in his excellent book, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, the story of this change is complex and disturbing. It begins at Harvard University in the 1930s: James Bryant Conant, Harvard’s president, decided to require applicants to take an intelligence test designed by a eugenicist. This was, believe it or not, the SAT, and Conant had high hopes for it. He wanted to use intelligence testing to eliminate the old aristocracy that filled America’s elite universities, and to replace it with a “meritocracy” of talented young men. They would become the country’s new Platonic guardians, leading their countrymen to equality and prosperity.

Lemann describes the career of Henry Chauncey, Conant’s protégé at Harvard, who had such faith in the power of standardized tests that he soon rose to the presidency of the Educational Testing Service. Over the next several decades, Chauncey used his position to change the admissions policies of universities across the country-convincing college presidents, one by one, to use the SAT as an admissions criterion. Young schools like the University of California conformed immediately to Chauncey’s thinking: one ought to go to Berkeley because of one’s academic talent, as firmly declared by scores and grades, and not because Daddy had gone there. After graduation, one could become a public servant, dedicated to guiding California and the nation down rich and brilliant paths.

Soon the prizes awaiting graduates of top schools began going to new kinds of people-intelligent, academic people, or at least those who knew how to appear that way. At Yale, for example, admission of public-school students increased dramatically, and the eleven-percent Jewish quota was discarded. But these groups simply formed a new aristocracy, albeit of a different shape and color. Lemann claims that the question of what to do with a university education inevitably became tied up with money-the new “meritocracy” began to use its position in the same ways the old aristocracy had: to gain wealth and influence and to separate itself from, rather than to help, the rest of the country.

The Big Test makes a powerful case that the SAT gave rise to all of these problems. The test’s purpose, according to Lemann, was never to expand educational opportunities-just to hand them out to the right slice of American eighteen year-olds. And some of its supporters were simply elitist: Conant, for example, initially opposed the G.I. Bill, believing that college was useless to all but the mentally superior.

Lemann spends the next three hundred pages demonstrating, in a roving and sometimes overwhelming way, the effects of this wrongheaded notion. Having run through a detailed history of ETS, he moves on to biographical sketches of men and women who were swept into the system that Conant and Chauncey created. Not surprisingly, many of them ignored the path of Platonic guardianship and became rich corporate lawyers. Particularly ironic is the story of Molly Munger, a blond, Harvard-educated attorney who had a crisis of conscience and left her old job for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund-after she had bought her stucco mansion in Pasadena.

The story then shifts to those whom the standardized testing system has shortchanged. Lemann wants to present us with the tragedy of the poor and minority students against whom the SAT, and the meritocratic system in general, discriminate. (For example, the word “regatta”-hardly a race- or class-neutral term-has appeared on the test.) Affirmative action arose, of course, as an attempt to counter such prejudices.

But Lemann explores this important issue through the lens of a single confusing event: the battle over Proposition 209 in California four years ago, which ended with the abolition of racial preferences in University of California admissions. The University of California has a complex history with a great deal of attendant political wrangling, and Lemann’s intense focus on it obscures some of the controversy’s real lessons. For example, the controversy highlighted ETS’s own doubts about the fairness of the SAT. Officials there opposed Proposition 209, because they feared that, without affirmative action, college admissions offices would have to find some other way to help minorities enter their institutions-perhaps by deciding not to consider biased standardized test scores.

Affirmative action also throws into relief one of the more disturbing questions about an aristocracy of merit: what is merit, exactly? The ability to answer multiple-choice questions? An acute sense of humor? A profound moral sensibility? Diligence? The assertiveness to resist joining a gang? An appreciation for Chinese art? People can have all kinds of worthy qualities, and it’s not clear that test-taking ability ought to be the one that determines their fates. Lemann seems honestly to believe this, even though he himself-a Harvard graduate and a staff writer at The New Yorker-is a creature of the meritocratic system.

Lemann’s study contains an important gap: he spends precious little time addressing the SAT itself. Instead, he bandies it about, using the test at various points as shorthand for intelligence, race, book learning, and dollars spent on Kaplan tutoring. Lemann doesn’t answer the big question: what exactly does it measure? Nor does he address the test’s evolution over the years. In the mid 1990s, for example, SAT scores were recentered, and the name was changed from “Scholastic Aptitude Test” to “Scholastic Assessment Test.”

These aspects of the question matter, of course, because the SAT has come to have great mysterious significance in modern American life. It has become an emblem of the things that Americans have to do in order to succeed: they must have distinct, quantifiable achievements; they must demonstrate them in competition with their peers; they must apply them towards concrete credentials from respected colleges and universities. Once they have done so, all kinds of goodies await.

This is the system that Chauncey and Conant, and many other believers in “merit,” established. It allows a small number of Americans into an elite with little connection or responsibility to the rest of the country. The Big Test questions the value and premises of that system: who should be in the American aristocracy? Or, more subtly, should there be such an aristocracy at all? Although Lemann offers precious few answers to these questions, he does a great service-and makes an important comment about American education-simply by asking them.