THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1999 by Thomas Toch

What good and bad about the SAT

THE BIG TEST: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy By Nicholas Lemann Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27

THOUGH TODAY'S HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS may find it hard to believe, Harvard, Yale, and other leading universities weren't exactly bastions of the best and brightest before World War II. They educated primarily the progeny of the upper class--white, Protestant, male students, the products of New York and New England private schools, who were often more interested in debutante cotillions and sporting events than in the life of the mind. Many brought servants with them to Cambridge and New Haven.

James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University and one of the most influential men of his day, wanted to replace this aristocracy of birth and wealth with what Thomas Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy" of the intellectually gifted from every walk of life, who would be educated to high standards and then be given the responsibility of governing society. The creation of what Conant called "Jefferson's ideal," a new intellectual elite selected strictly on the basis of talent, and dedicated to public service, would, he believed, make America a more democratic country.

In 1933, he gave two Harvard administrators the job of developing a nationwide scholarship program for gifted students. The key to the administrators' work would be the creation of a single standard for evaluating the astonishing diversity of the country's high-school students. And the test Conant ultimately selected for that purpose--the newly developed Scholastic Aptitude Test--would become for many students a narrow path to the best opportunities--and richest rewards--in American society.

In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Nicholas Lemann reconstructs the extraordinary story of Conant, the SAT, and their roles in making education the central element of opportunity in post-World War II America.

His history is important and timely. A college education is fast becoming necessary to earn the middle-class salaries that workers won with less than a high school diploma in the days of America's industrial economy. The rise of teenage Internet entrepreneurs notwithstanding, selective colleges and universities represent the way to the top of American society for the majority of those who get accepted. They educate a disproportionate number of the nation's corporate lawyers, investment bankers, leading doctors, and influential academics, and they rely heavily on SAT scores in the admissions process. Although they do admit some students with low scores, these are emphatically the exception. In telling the story of the people and events that shaped the post-war American meritocracy Lemann, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly, has given us valuable new points of reference with which to consider the role of the SAT in college admissions, affirmative action, and school reform.

Conant selected the SAT, which he believed to be a "mental" or intelligence test, over acheivement tests, created by the developer of the New York Regents exams, to measure a student's grasp of course content. Achievement tests, he argued, favored unexceptional rich boys (girls weren't part of Conant's meritocratic equation) whose parents could buy them top-flight high school instruction.

But there was no national debate over Conant's drive to create an education-based meritocracy, or to make education "the official repository of opportunity in America" that it is today. Conant achieved his coup with the help of a handful of close colleagues. Ironically, they were all members of what Lemann neatly terms the Episcopacy, the social class whose defining institutions were the Protestant Episcopal Church, country clubs, New England boarding schools, Ivy League colleges, and, in their working lives, investment banks, major foundations, the foreign service, and university faculties--the very same crowd whose duller members Conant was trying to lock out of the garden. Key among them was Henry Chauncey, a square-jawed Harvard assistant dean and descendent of Puritan clergy who would later serve as the founding president of the Educational Testing Service, the giant testing company that Conant created to administer the SAT. Another was Devereaux Josephs, a classmate of Chauncey's at both the Groton School and Harvard who, as the President of the Carnegie Foundation, funded the creation of ETS for Conant. Together, they substantially redefined the nature of and route to success in America. Writes Lemann: "It was like a slow-motion, invisible constitutional convention whose result would determine the American social structure."

After Harvard deployed the multiple-choice SAT successfully in pursuit of talent worth subsidizing with scholarships, Conant convinced other Ivy League schools to use it. When the essay exams that the Ivies used to test regular applicants were suspended during World War II and replaced with the SAT, the test's influence expanded. And when Conant's advocacy of a new national testing agency culminated with the opening of ETS in Princeton in 1948, his vision of a national test-based meritocracy was assured of becoming a reality.