None of the Above

October 24, 1999

None of the Above

Does achievement testing create just the kind of elite
oligarchy it was intended to prevent?

By ANDREW SULLIVAN

t takes 349 pages to get there, but

eventually Nicholas Lemann makes
his point unequivocally in ''The Big
Test.'' It is that a democratic society
should provide -- as a national,
Federal matter -- free, excellent and
multifarious education to anyone on
demand, from high school through
college. The only important test of
ability should be one designed to
discern if a person has mastered a THE BIG TEST

nationally agreed-upon curriculum on The Secret History of the

graduating from high school. There American Meritocracy.
should be no testing of what Lemann By Nicholas Lemann.
regards as the phantasm of ''innate 406 pp. New York:
abilities,'' no SAT's and the like, and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
thereby no possibility of a putatively
meritocratic elite emerging out of
American democratic life. ''Decent
schooling, the absolute prerequisite to
a decent life in America today, should be thought of as something
that Government guarantees to every citizen as a matter of right. It
shouldn't be left to local authorities to screw up, any more than
flight safety should.''

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

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None of the Above

denigrates a system that helped open up higher education to millions

of previously excluded people, or that his account of the nave
idealists who genuinely believed in the promise of a meritocracy is
so pervaded by condescension and anxiety. The story he tells -- and
often beautifully -- seems such an obviously progressive one that
framing it as a case study in failure seems willfully perverse until
you reach the conclusion. And then it merely seems unpersuasive.

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.

And he does an excellent job of evoking characters in thumbnail

sketches and a few memorable scenes. The story starts with one
down-at-heels Henry Chauncey praying in a church. It was
Chauncey, descendant of Puritans and classic product of the old Ivy
League elite, whose fierce enthusiasm for the new science of
intelligence testing played such a crucial part in the early days of the
E.T.S. (He is a member of what Lemann nicely calls ''the
Episcopacy.'') At the other end of the story, in both time and space,
is Molly Munger, boomer, feminist lawyer in the era of Clinton,
whose dedication to the meritocratic dream came unstuck in the Los
Angeles riots of 1992. In between, there is, perhaps most
memorably, Clark Kerr, peerlessly political pioneer of the
University of California in the 1950's, epitome of that decade's
optimism in planning, growth and social science. Lemann captures
him artfully: ''Kerr presided over his utopia from a Japanese-style
house, plain but intricate, like him, that he and his wife had built in
El Cerrito, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. He often
worked from home, going through stacks of memoranda and
resolving whatever issues they raised by writing tiny, cryptic
messages in the margins in green ink. He traveled regularly all over
the world, a figure in an international community of modern
scholar-administrators. In his spare time he would pick a period of
artistic or literary history and master it.'' Kerr, of course, would later
be swept away by a wave of 1960's student revolt.

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None of the Above

If all Lemann were trying to do was to tell a fascinating and

heretofore underreported story about the role of educational testing
in forming modern American society, then this book would be a
qualified success. Although there are times when the author's
pretended omniscience can grate a little, the story belts along. The
cast of characters is sometimes bewildering -- some are introduced
for no apparent reason and then disappear -- but few are boring. To
be sure, the prose sometimes overreaches. Lemann leans over
backward to point out the lessons of various anecdotes just in case
the reader might have missed them, remarking at one point, for
example, that the Harvard president James Bryant Conant ''never
imagined that he and Henry Chauncey were actually creating a new
kind of class system even more powerful than the old one.'' The
book's subtitle, ''The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,''
is typically melodramatic. It might be better called ''The Obscure
Records of an Underrated Institution.'' Lemann unearths no
classified secrets from the archives of the Educational Testing
Service, and, as he points out, the organization was often very
receptive to outsiders and critics. Indeed, his sources seem to have
been more than generous with their time and records -- even thrilled
by the attention.

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.

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None of the Above

To be sure, the upper-middle-class game of getting one's children

into the best colleges is in danger of creating an entrenched elite;
elaborate prepping schemes somewhat undermine the promise of the
tests, and good public high school education -- especially for the
poor -- is an inarguable public good. But that doesn't mean that a
reasonably reliable means of scholastic testing is inherently
oligarchic and that it cannot sometimes help the less advantaged
leapfrog their socioeconomic superiors in the struggle for social
advancement.

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.

The Asian-American lacuna is particularly striking. Lemann's major

Asian-American characters are left-liberal activists, including Bill
Lann Lee, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, whose
attachment to old-liberal identity politics helped insure he never
won Senate confirmation. For some reason, we are denied the far
more typical story of poor Asian immigrants for whom the aptitude
test is an invaluable opportunity -- not an entrenched injustice. Why,
one wonders, does a test devised to perpetuate an upper-middle-
class oligarchy seem to suit these poor, bright newcomers so well?
To this, Lemann doesn't seem to have an answer. Given the
ambitions of this book, he surely needs to.

Andrew Sullivan is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine

and a senior editor at The New Republic.

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None of the Above

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