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| THE BIG TEST | |
 November 2, 1999 
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DAVID GERGEN: In your new book, you argue that the scholastic aptitude test, the SAT which is such a cultural landmark in this society, has basically in the last 50 years gone off-track from what it was intended to be. Help us understand what it was supposed to be and what's happened. NICHOLAS LEMANN, Author: Well, I'll sort of answer in reverse if I could. DAVID GERGEN: Sure. NICHOLAS LEMANN: The SAT now is taken now by about 2 million kids a year. There's a very kind of creepy national obsession built around it, including test prep, very expensive test prep. Now we have super test prep that lasts years and costs much more than the regular test prep. High schools teach to the test academically. There is social conflict around it. You know, there are initiatives and lawsuits. DAVID GERGEN: It's the passport into college. NICHOLAS LEMANN: Because it's regarded as the one thing that is most likely to determine where you end up in life in America for everybody -- that is not what the test was intended to do. It would horrify the founders to see what's happening now. What they were up to was kind of...it's an interesting and untold chapter in American history. What they wanted to do was a bit of social engineering. They wanted to get rid of the then national elite, which is what we would call roughly speaking, preppies -- get them off the center stage and bring in a new kind of elite which would be people of very, very high academic ability. So the test was supposed to discover a few people like this, send them to college on scholarship, and then slot them into the establishment. DAVID GERGEN: This is what they intended. Who is they and when did they do it? NICHOLAS LEMANN: The key figure really is James Bryant Conant, who was the president of Harvard in the 1930's and 40's, a name people don't know now, but a highly influential citizen. He is also responsible for the atomic bomb - among his accomplishments. He was the driving force in selecting the SAT as a scholarship test and then creating the educational testing service of which he was the first chairman as a kind of big single, sort of benign monopoly agency to manage the transitions in life for everybody. DAVID GERGEN: From Conant's point of view hasn't an institution like Harvard, which once did have a lot of preppies become much more of an institution where public high school graduates, many more public high school graduates, there are many more blacks, there are many more Asians. NICHOLAS LEMANN: Conant, of course, had no thoughts about race and ethnicity when he was setting up this radar screen. That was not on his radar screen. Class was on his radar screen. Geographical diversity was, too. He won-- and he deserves credit for this because the character of the Ivy League elite universities has definitely changed. It's changed in the direction he wanted it to change. We forget, when he started, you know, a college kid at Harvard or Yale wasn't supposed to be very brainy or academic. They were suspect if they were. He changed who is at these schools. He changed who controls the sort of establishment institutions and professions that these schools track into. And he changed the definition of merit that operates in this whole world. That's a big change. On the whole, it's a change for the better. DAVID GERGEN: So, what's wrong? NICHOLAS LEMANN: There's two things. One is, the people selected in Conant's view... he called them American radicals in one of his writings. He wanted them to be selfless public servants, the leadership class of the country. They wouldn't try to pass on what they had to their kids. They wouldn't look like an aristocracy. They would like, you know, public servants. That's not the feel of it today. There's a tremendous competition for college admission. And that's a competition because people think college admission to an elite college equals status. So that's what people are trying to get. The people who go to these college, by and large, do not go on to devote themselves to public service. They're not regarded by the rest of the country as leaders. But the real issue comes in when you go from saying we're going to select 500 or a thousand kids a year to groom them for leadership positions - no problem there -- to saying we're going to grow this organization and this system to where it processes 2 million kids a year and it feels to them like it's assigning all of them to a permanent place in life. DAVID GERGEN: So where would you go? What alterations would you recommend? NICHOLAS LEMANN: This system... let's divide it into 50-year chunks, since we're end of the century. The last 50 years is the half century of this system that I write about, the SAT meritocracy. The design principle is let's not worry about the quality of American education. Instead, let's find the few of very high ability and kind of nationalize education for them, pull them out of the education system, and get them into a university system whose quality we trust and put many opportunities in their way. So that worked. What should be the goal and I think will be the goal and is already the goal for the next 50 years is let's fix the public school system in this country. Let's make sure that, you know, everything from kindergarten through 12th grade in public education is reliably good for everybody. Let us guarantee that no kid is going to have to go to a school that just doesn't teach, because one thing that has happened as a kind of accidental result of this system is if you don't go to college, you're out of town. There used to be a lot of elaborate opportunity for people who hadn't been to college. When this system was set up, we had our last President who had not been to college .. Harry Truman. Now you can't get any white-collar job without having gone to college. So the country really has to deliver on the mass opportunity side of the equation through improving the education system and not worry so much about elite selection. Conant thought, if I take care of elite selection, everything else will take care of itself. That did not happen. DAVID GERGEN: Instead of reforming the test, you would reform curriculum and reform the way we help kids meet the standards of the curriculum. NICHOLAS LEMANN: Tests are tools. There's a lot of cart-and-horse going on here. You don't start by writing a test and then ask the world to adapt to it. You start by deciding what you want to do and then devise a test to accomplish that thing. The SAT is devised to pull the superstars out of the public school system and not affect the public school system at all. Instead, what we should do is have, you know... we should phase in over time, I think, a replacement for the SAT which would be a national achievement test based on a national curriculum. So you'd say to the kid, yes, you still have to take a college admissions test at the end of high school, but it's going to be test a on what you actually learned in school. DAVID GERGEN: There are a lot of folks that try to go down the road of a national curriculum, national testing. There is an awful lot of resistance, as you know. NICHOLAS LEMANN: First of all, there really is a prairie fire going across this country to do this very thing on the state level. All the big states have done it. It's the hot thing in state government. It's the centerpiece of Governor Bush's campaign for President, which is going quite well. Once all the states adopt their own state curricula based on state tests, they're not going to billion that different from each other. I mean, it's a fairly minor point whether you trump them all with the national curriculum. Colleges can look at the state tests and see what they mean without a national test. The other thing I'd ask people to remember is we have a national curriculum. The SAT, in effect, other tests like advanced placement and SAT 2's, the achievement tests, textbook sales, there's all this stuff going on in the private sector that in effect, creates a national curriculum. But it works a lot better for the most prosperous and studious kids than it works for everybody. So if we have one already, let's go all the way and say we're doing it and do it right. DAVID GERGEN: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. Nick Lemann, thank you very much. NICHOLAS LEMANN: Thank you. |
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