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With Pencils SharpenedTaking testing to task in Americaby Howard Gardner |
Obsessive readers of Harvard Magazine may recognize the name of Henry Chauncey, who has long served as secretary of the class of 1928. Some will recall that Chauncey was the founder and for many years president of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the institution best known for administering the SAT (long the Scholastic Aptitude Test, now the Scholastic Assessment Test). But journalist Nicholas Lemann '76 is probably the first observer to suggest that Henry Chauncey has been the chief (and not unwitting) architect of contemporary America's power structure.
Though his own family had squandered its wealth, Chauncey remains a member in good standing of what Lemann calls America's Episcopacy--the small group of families, resident in this country since the seventeenth century, who attended the best schools (Groton, Harvard) and became the unofficial aristocracy, financing and leading major institutions in the land. Novelist Louis Auchincloss recreates them in fiction; Time managing editor Walter Isaacson '74 calls them "The Wise Men." As a "baby dean" at Harvard in the 1930s and early 1940s, Chauncey fell in love with a distinctly American invention--the short-answer intelligence (IQ) test. He saw this instrument, increasingly utilized, as a way to broaden the basis of selection for elite institutions, thereby insuring that America's universities, banks, businesses, and political positions would be peopled by those most suited to lead them.
Chauncey's grand agenda needed powerful support. That support came from chemist James Conant, half a generation older than Chauncey, who had become president of Harvard in 1933. Not a card-carrying member of the Episcopacy--he had grown up in middle-class Dorchester, the son of an engraver--Conant was equally committed to broadening the population from which institutions like Harvard selected their constituencies. Working individually and synergistically behind the scenes, the two men first succeeded in instituting aptitude tests that drew public-school students from outside New England to Harvard. Then, aided by the events of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath, they were the two men most responsible for the creation of ETS: Conant serving as chairman of the board that oversaw President Chauncey.
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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, by Nicholas Lemann '76 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27). |
Although we now think of ETS as one of the axial institutions of the country, it was initially a small, struggling, and controversial entity. Chauncey led it brilliantly. To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on Franklin Roosevelt, Chauncey may not have had a first-rate intellect, but he had a first-rate entrepreneurial personality. He believed absolutely in the power and fairness of tests and was able to communicate that enthusiasm to others. He was able to deflect professional and lay criticisms with the skill of another American president, Ronald Reagan. ETS's big break came when it showed itself capable of creating a test that could be administered effectively to a million potential draftees at the time of the Korean War. This success soon translated into fresh and ever-expanding markets for the SAT--by then a short-answer machine-scored examination already patterned after intelligence tests for adults--which came to be administered to an increasingly large number of students during the next half-century. Chauncey was able to stave off competition from the for-profit Science Research Associates (SRA) of Chicago and the more populist American College of Testing (ACT) in Iowa. Making maximum use of still-powerful East Coast Episcopacy ties (Boston, New York, Princeton, Washington), Chauncey led his institution until it was clearly primum inter pares. During its heyday, ETS combined the excitement of a mission-driven institution in the "real world" with the attractive features of a research university.
Life at ETS has been less bracing and luxurious since the conclusion of the Chauncey era in 1970. The sheen of an idealistic new endeavor has worn off. Attacks by Ralph Nader, legal intrusions like "truth-in-testing," periodic dips in its fiscal health, and a series of executives who have lacked Chauncey's connections and bravura have taken their toll on the organization. ETS is now more properly seen as a profit-making test company, operating with the generous protection of a nonprofit status. Rather than seeking new glory, it strives to remain above the fray--or at least off the front page.
The story of Chauncey, Conant, and ETS is a riveting one, and Lemann tells it splendidly. If that story is not nearly as "secret" as he suggests, it is nonetheless true that ETS attained its power without much public debate, and that it continues to operate as secretly as its nonprofit status allows. In this respect, it resembles many other historically "Episcopal" institutions, including the major philanthropic organizations (such as the Carnegie Corporation, which helped to launch ETS) and the major universities (such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton).
Make no mistake about it, however: Lemann tells a very specific kind of history. It is Great Man History, or even Great Harvard Man History. This is a kind of history that many of us like to read (especially if it is written about Harvard, by Harvard, and for Harvard) and some of us even like to write, but it is certainly not the approach most endorsed by professional historians today. One could easily argue that ETS and the SAT (or their equivalents) would exist today even if Chauncey had become a minister in Newport and Conant had gone to work for DuPont. After all, IQ tests were already well ensconced in this country in the 1920s; pressures were building for a democratization of the great colleges and universities; the GI Bill was a creation of Roosevelt and the Congress, and not of the Eastern establishment, which regarded it nervously (Conant strongly opposed it); and Lyle Spencer of SRA and E.F. Lindquist of ACT were busy creating their respective testing companies. Conant and Chauncey are fascinating literary vehicles, but we should not attribute to them unique agency. A convincing history of America's love affair with mass testing could be written by economic, social, or cultural historians who do not give a fig for Great Men or Great Women.
 Henry Chauncy's central idea enhanced standardized testing in our society. Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives |
Chauncey's and ETS's romance with testing millions of students constitutes the major theme of Lemann's story, but there are wonderful subplots as well. Among my own favorites are the stories of Sam Chauncey, Henry's son, who in the 1960s helped to bring about a revolution in Yale's admission policies; two ambitious entrepreneurs, Stanley Kaplan (of Stanley Kaplan) and John Katzman (of the Princeton Review), each of whom built major institutions that teach test-taking skills; Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas's intense ambivalence about whether to oppose standardized admissions tests; and Henry Chauncey's strange attraction to the Jungian Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and his quixotic efforts to launch a nationwide Census of (all human) Abilities. More disturbing is the account of the efforts of Win Manning, a long-time ETS senior official, to develop a new way of scoring tests. Briefly, Manning's "Measurement for Academic Talent" (MAT) was a statistical manipulation: his ingenious procedure identified individuals who performed better than might have been expected, given their socioeconomic background. (Of course, it also identified those who performed worse than expected, given their background.) Once the powers-that-be at ETS realized that this new--and, in an important way, fairer--measure might alienate key constituencies, they effectively silenced Manning and his MAT. (Amazingly, ETS late this past summer announced a "Strivers" program that essentially enacts Manning's original proposal. Manning himself left ETS in 1993.) Assuming this story as told is basically true, it confirms one's worst suspicions about ETS.
In addition to A, the heroic tale about the rise of ETS (Lemann's book one), The Big Test contains a series of portraits of individuals--the mighty and the obscure--whose lives were affected by a test-drenched society. Many of these portraits feature individuals who became involved with meritocratic issues because of their membership in, or their attitudes toward, various racial or ethnic groups. This is history in the Bob Woodward, David Halberstam, and, most clearly, J. Anthony Lukas tradition. When such histories work well, the wholes are greater than the sums of their parts. For me, Lemann's portraits--distributed across the text and comprising book B--seemed chiefly a collection of convenience.
Book C reflects Lemann's own critique of the system created by Chauncey et al. As foretold in the subtitle, Lemann sees these individuals as attempting to create a new national and natural aristocracy--picking out from the entire population those individuals of intellectual talent who would best lead their country. Chauncey's peculiar idea was that intelligence--as measured by the "IQ-descended standardized tests"--was an instrument adequate for this purpose. Brought together in uneasy embrace were two actually competing notions: that the nation needs to have an elite, and that everyone ought to have an opportunity to compete for a spot in that elite. Policies designed to advance the first goal (a selective test of scholastic aptitude) inevitably collided with policies designed to achieve the second (affirmative action, "weighted" test results).
While Lemann's uneasiness with ETS and standardized testing can be sensed throughout the volume, only in a brief afterword does he explicitly reveal his own view. He feels that, whatever their intention, Chauncey, Conant, and their colleagues had embarked on an ill-conceived mission. We Americans do not really want a mandarin elite--a small group of individuals, selected early in life on the basis of a certain measure of the mind--to run our institutions. And we certainly don't want an apparatus designed for such a selection to be constructed in secrecy. It would be preferable if we recognized a far broader set of talents and selected people on the basis of those specific talents, rather than on some "general long-duration ticket to high status that can be cashed in anywhere." Lemann's alternative vision can only be achieved if we have a coordinated national system of schooling which seeks to reduce, rather than to fan, the differences in achievements across the population. In the end, we want to be led--if we have to be led--by individuals who are motivated to improve the society and not primarily to increase their fame, power, and disposable income. Looking back on the democratically inspired creators of ETS, Lemann ruefully concludes that "their creation looks very much like what it was intended to replace."
I share Lemann's aspirations for a world that honors a wider variety of talents. I agree that we should try to select individuals on the basis of their abilities to carry out specific tasks (write a brief, perform surgery, teach a group of second-graders), rather than on some putative general capacity or potential that may have little scientific rationale and that is in any case exclusionary. If someone can carry out the required task well, I should not care about her IQ or SAT score. If success in academics happens to correlate with such scores, that correlation should not be used as a pretext to prevent those who are not successful (for whatever reason) in the current academic environment from rising as far as they are able in other valued spheres.
What then can we say about ETS and its most fabled products? Accepting Lemann's history, it would be unfair to say that Henry Chauncey and his associates were ill-motivated. But it does seem fair to conclude that once they hit upon a product that was "successful," they felt little inclination to question that success. It would be wishful thinking to expect ETS--or ACT, the College Board, or Harvard--to rock the smoothly sailing ship.
But say that individuals like me (or Lemann, or the young Chauncey) decided that we did want to rock the boat. I would introduce two forms of turbulence.
Put succinctly, then, let a newly inspired college-selection institution go back to the drawing boards; dispense with artificial instruments that necessarily yield an intellectual mandarinate; and instead create measures that motivate the proper intellectual forms of thinking and habits of citizenship among future students.
Lemann and I agree that we must level the entry field by minimizing the advantages aħuence can provide in preparing for the Big Test. The current crazed competition for places in private preschools in our big cities and the steadily increasing enrollment in pricey test-preparing classes should not be allowed to evolve into further flexing of muscles by the already privileged. To counter such trends, Lemann favors a national curriculum. While I am not opposed in principle, I don't think that such a plan will fly in this country. I conclude that it would make more sense to offer students and families a choice of a dozen distinct K-12 pathways. As individual families and as members of groups, we have different value systems as well as different patterns of (and preferences for) talents. Rather than forcing us all to conform to one mold, it makes more sense to recognize this diversity (as we do in our colleges and universities)--while insisting on high standards within each of the several pathways.
Returning to The Big Test, the work would have been a more satisfying literary achievement if it had been only a history of ETS, or only a series of well-integrated portraits, or only Lemann's developed critique of where the ETS meritocracy had gone wrong. Still, as a serious and original attempt to grapple with important personal and political issues of our era, The Big Test deserves high praise and a wide readership.
Howard Gardner '65, Ph.D. '71, Hobbs professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is the author, most recently, of The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences in the 21st Century, just published by Basic Books.
