Professional Documents
Culture Documents
By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Anyone reading ''The Big Test'' would be well advised to read the
afterword before embarking upon the engaging but also deeply
frustrating narrative it follows. What the afterword does is provide
the essential context to Lemann's long, episodic history of the
Educational Testing Service and its role in creating the structure of
American education today. For unless you share Lemann's view that
the testing of academic ability is unacceptably narrow and elitist,
that sorting students according to their capacity to profit from
college is impermissibly exclusionary and that the Federal
Government is the right institution to run our educational system,
you might be a little bemused by the tone of the book you have just
read. You might find it mystifying that Lemann constantly
Lemann is a staff writer for The New Yorker and former national
correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, and his literary skills pay
off in this story. His access to the archives of the E.T.S. gives him
an unrivaled insight into the thoughts and motives of many of the
players, and he is also lucky enough to have been able to interview
many of the characters involved. So the book is part social history
and part Bob Woodward -- with the sources on the record. It begins
in the old Ivy League of the prewar years and ends with the passage
of the California Civil Rights Initiative (better known as Proposition
209) to abolish government-sponsored affirmative action in 1996. It
tells the unlikely story of the way in which scholastic aptitude
testing came to dominate the process of educational selection in the
United States, and how education itself came to play an increasingly
important part in deciding who wins and loses in the American
economy and class system. Throughout, Lemann is alert to the role
of personality and serendipity, as good historians are. And he is
sharp in his judgments of class and status, as good journalists are.
He knows the difference, for example, between test prepping à la
Stanley Kaplan and test prepping à la Princeton Review. The former
buys into the notion of meritocracy; the latter mocks it.
As well they might be. But the book's real flaw is not its loving
inflation of somewhat recondite events but its propelling argument.
What Lemann wants to show is that American education's thralldom
to intelligence testing -- specifically in the form of Scholastic
Aptitude Tests -- was neither inevitable nor desirable. He shows
how the Educational Testing Service won critical Government
contracts in part because it offered a quick and effective way of
sorting out vast numbers of people during periods of great stress --
during World War II and the cold war. He then shows how it used
these footholds to gain acceptance among some influential colleges
by a measure of cunning, chance and politics. It had competitors and
plenty of critics, internal and external. It dodged plenty of political
and cultural bullets. But once it had established winners, they
themselves had a vested interest in perpetuating the system and so,
despite the odds and growing injustice, it prevailed. The result, in
Lemann's view, is the accident of an oligarchic elite that ''looks
more and more like what it was intended to replace'' and, in fact, for
Lemann, is almost morally indistinguishable from its predecessor.
This is a nice irony to give shape and direction to the narrative -- but
it is an obviously overdone one. America wasn't alone in embracing
some form of testing in the middle of the century -- the British went
far more overboard in the 1940's, as Lemann notes. And it seems
more than a little strained to pretend that a system that sees
thousands of children of Asian immigrants dominate California's
universities in the 1990's is as iniquitous as an Ivy League peopled
by wealthy, not-so-swift WASP's in the 1890's. It is easy to point
out flaws in the aptitude testing system, and plenty of people have --
until one imagines a viable alternative. Lemann's vision of tests
based on a national curriculum would seem to be even more
susceptible to favoring the well-prepped children of the wealthy and
well educated.
One suspects that Lemann's deepest worries about the system stem
from the problem of race, not class. The most original part of the
book is its very perceptive analysis of the links between the rise of
an educational meritocracy and the race debate in America. Lemann
is surely right that without the dominance of testing, the shockingly
poor performance of African-Americans in higher education would
not have become such a pressing political issue, which is why the
battle against affirmative action is a fitting climax to the book. As it
is, low test scores among blacks have been fuel for both sides in the
argument: for those who suspect that undeserving blacks are being
admitted over whites to institutions of higher education and for
those who suspect that the entire system is rigged against African-
Americans in the first place. For Lemann, it is a virtual given that
low black scores further prove that the system is unfair. But he
oddly fails to account for how low black scores endure high up the
socioeconomic ladder and how poor, and often newly immigrant,
Asian-Americans seem to have made such a success of the system
despite high economic and linguistic hurdles to achievement.