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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann
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What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension―and America's best educated, most privileged people are now leaders without followers.
Drawing on unprecedented access to the Educational Testing Service's archives, Lemann maintains that America's meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and that it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. His important study not only asks profound moral and political questions about the past and future of our society but also carries implications for current social and educational policy. As Brent Staples noted in his New York Times editorial column: "Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts announced that prospective students would no longer be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. . . . Holyoke's president, Joanne Creighton, was personally convinced by reading Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which documents how the SAT became a tool for class segregation."
All students of education, sociology, and recent U.S. history―especially those focused on testing, theories of learning, social stratification, or policymaking―will find this book fascinating and alarming.
- Sales Rank: #52101 in Books
- Published on: 2000-11-16
- Released on: 2000-11-16
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .93" w x 6.00" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
Amazon.com Review
Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test starts off as a look at how the SAT became an integral part of the college application process by telling the stories of men like Henry Chauncey and James Bryant Conant of Harvard University, who sought in the 1930s and '40s to expand their student base beyond the offspring of Brahmin alumni. When they went into the public schools of the Midwest to recruit, standardized testing gave them the means to select which lucky students would be deemed most suitable for an Ivy League education. But about a third of the way through the book, Lemann shifts gears and writes about several college students from the late '60s and early '70s. The reasons for the change-up only become clear in the final third, when those same college students, now in their 40s, lead the fight against California's Proposition 209, a 1996 ballot initiative aimed at eliminating affirmative action programs.
Do these two stories really belong together? For all his storytelling abilities--and they are prodigious--Lemann is not entirely persuasive on this point, especially when he identifies the crucial moment in the civil rights era when "affirmative action evolved as a low-cost patch solution to the enormous problem of improving the lot of American Negroes, who had an ongoing, long-standing tradition of deeply inferior education; at the same time American society was changing so as to make educational performance the basis for individual advancement." Lemann's muddled transition is somewhat obscured by frequent digressions (every new character gets a lengthy background introduction), but a crucial point gets lost in the shuffle, only to reappear fleetingly at the conclusion: "The right fight to be in was the fight to make sure that everybody got a good education," Lemann writes, not to continue to prop up a system that creates one set of standards for privileged students and another set for the less privileged. If The Big Test had focused on that issue, where equal opportunity is genuinely at stake, instead of on the roots of standardized testing, where opportunity was explicitly intended only for a chosen few, it would be a substantially different book--one with a story that almost assuredly could be told as engrossingly as the story Lemann chose to tell, but perhaps with a sharper focus. --Ron Hogan
From Publishers Weekly
In a country obsessed with educational opportunity, the principal institution for overseeing the distribution of access to higher education, the Educational Testing Service, was founded in "an atmosphere of intrigue, corruption, competition, and disorder." So contends Lemann (The Promised Land) in this enthralling, detailed story of how the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) became enshrined in U.S. culture. Although the idealistic, patrician pioneers of testing may have wished to displace the entitlements of birth and wealth for what they saw as the more democratic entitlements of scholastic aptitude, at the end of the 20th century "their creation looks very much like what it was intended to replace." This story is compelling in itself, but Lemann's exploration of how the politics of American meritocracy turn on the issue of race makes his history absolutely indispensable to current affirmative action and education debates. Lemann's treatment of the 1996 battle over California's anti-affirmative action Proposition 209 convincingly shows how what is nominally a democratic process actually works. The current crises in American education have deep roots: "America had channeled all the opportunity through the educational system and then had failed to create schools and colleges that would work for everybody, because that was very expensive and voters didn't want to pay for it." The real costs of this situation are now clear; anyone concerned about it should heed this book. Agent, Amanda Urban, ICM.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This book treats two distinctive but distinctly interrelated themes in which Lemann (The Great Migration) has evinced sustained interest: educational opportunity in America as it determines socioeconomic success and (in)equity as it reflects educational opportunity. Lemann does not altogether succeed in integrating these two stories. For lengthy stretches, this book is about the ostensible development of an objective elite through standardized testing and the establishment of Educational Testing Service (ETS) and its major product, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), as an American state religion. Lemann shows how a handful of eccentric, Depression-reared members of the WASP elite went about reforming access to Ivy League education by pushing their confidence in the quantitative social sciences to the point where SAT scores, not family origin, became what mattered most to young adults' chances. As Lemann relates that history, he interjects the personal stories of a later generation of eccentrics at Yale and Harvard Law in the 1960s who fought to make access to higher education yet more inclusive. Finally, Lemann makes clear that the SAT and civil rights come out of egalitarian impulses that might each resist the other. Lemann's work in the archives of ETS is commendable, and overall this is an important contribution to American sociology by a lay journalist. Recommended for academic, public, and high school libraries.
-AScott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Revealing
By A Customer
This book really is a secret history. The author is talking about a single test which has a huge impact on millions of people. The implications of the SAT are huge, but the reasoning behind it is something that is rarely mentioned explicitly. The author explains it all... It isn't that Lemann is simply against the SAT. This book isn't that polemical. We get the background of the test. The story of American education. I learned alot from that. I did not know that Yale limited the number of minorities and women up until the 60s. And that the children of alumni really were favored. You tend to think that things were always the way they are now ... And I also believed the testing service when they said that you can't cram for the SAT. Wrong.. And the discussion of affirmative action is right on target too. In a lot of ways people aren't given equal opportunities, and then when they are left behind the meritocracy says it is their fault...This book is very readable and thought provoking. The only thing I can say against it is like a previous poster, it is a little slow to start off with. But it picks up quickly enough, I thought.
8 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
De Tocqueville Would Find This Well Worth Reading
By Charles M. Wyzanski
When my daughters were just beginning the college admissions process a mere three years ago, I had no idea how things had changed or why--and the degree to which my own experience of the process had become irrelevant. This book does much to make that all clear, in prose which smacks of Tom Wolfe and is peopled with fascinating vignettes of characters, known and unknown: from Presidents James Bryant Conant, Clark Kerr, and Kingman Brewster to Henry Chauncy, "Inky" Clark, and Molly Munger, just to name a few. Lemann's thesis is essentially one of good intentions gone painfully awry. The Ivy League and other highly selective colleges have been debrided of old families and old money, only to be replaced by the narrowly proficient and unduly ambitious. It's not a pretty picture and one wants to believe it less important than Lemann and many applicants and their parents think. Much of the book appeared in a series of articles in the New Yorker and, unfortunately, is not much better than the sum of its parts. But I still heartily recommend this book. It puts our elite in focus and gives perspective to one of the most debated issues of our time--affirmative action.
18 of 32 people found the following review helpful.
Flawed Premise
By A Customer
If you read this book, please also read Thomas Sowell's recent Quest for Cosmic Justice. Lemann spends this whole book trying to figure out how some undefined "we" (by which he means people of his own academic and cultural background) can arrange life and society so that money, power, prestige, etc. are distributed and redistributed "fairly" without ever defining what that is.
This is a foolishe, authoritarian and doomed quest -- ultimately it leads to the Pol Pots of the world. Sowell's book explains the fatal flaw in this kind of arrogant reasoning.
By the way, I went to law school with one of the principal characters in the book. She wasn't nearly as interesting, then or now, as the author tries to make her.
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