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Notes on the Origins of Meritocracy in American Schooling

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Arthur G. Powell
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Extract

In The Big Test Nicholas Lemann argues provocatively that the seemingly benign use of academic merit as a principal criterion for admission to selective American colleges has had perverse effects. Selection devices like SAT scores may have given a previously under-advantaged group an admissions advantage, but that advantage cannot be fairly characterized as helping to equalize educational opportunity. Those who cannot play the academic merit game fall behind. Opportunity for all is thus not really broadened.

Type
Book Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , Spring 2001 , pp. 73 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Originally the Scholastic Aptitude Test, now the Scholastic Assessment Test.Google Scholar

2 In his autobiography, My Several Lives: Memoirs of a Social Inventor (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), James B. Conant mentions that his papers are closed until 2003—the so-called fifty-year rule following his departure from Harvard in 1953. I don't know to what extent this rule was relaxed for Lemann. By vote of the Harvard Corporation in the mid-60s, through the intervention of Paul Buck and luckily before the student disruptions of 1969, I was granted access to those Conant papers which dealt with school-related issues and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. My relatively modest reservations about some of Lemann's interpretations of Conant are derived from this early reading of his papers, as well as from my own examinations of Conant's influence on the Graduate School of Education (in The Uncertain Profession, [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980]) and of Harvard's involvement in the College Board decision in early 1942 to abandon essay exams in favor of the SAT (in Lessons from Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996]).Google Scholar

3 Conant, James B. “The Function of the Secondary School and College in Educating for Social and Cultural leadership,“ Harvard Alumni Bulletin xxxvii:11, December 7, 1934, 311; James B. Conant, “The Selective Principle in Education in a Democracy,” speech at University of Iowa, February 24, 1937, 9, Conant Papers, Harvard University Archives; Conant to Carleton Washburne, November 15, 1935, Conant Papers.Google Scholar

4 Lemann, The Big Test, 45.Google Scholar

5 Conant's infatuation with the potential of the social sciences was deeper and longer-lasting than his infatuation with psychological tests. He consulted with Harvard colleagues such as Samuel Stouffer, Talcott Parsons, and Clyde Kluckhohn on the meaning and use of concepts such as social mobility, social structure, stratification, and visibility. See his Sachs Lectures at Teachers College, Columbia University, Public Education and the Structure of American Society, (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, 1946).Google Scholar

6 Conant, James B. “A Free Classless Society: Ideal or Illusion,“ Harvard Alumni Bulletin, October 24, 1939, 6.Google Scholar

7 Conant, My Several Lives, 425.Google Scholar

8 For example, Talcott Parsons to Conant, February 21, 1946, Conant Papers.Google Scholar

9 Conant, My Several Lives, 431–432.Google Scholar

10 Powell, See The Uncertain Profession, Chapter 9. It is often forgotten that the first recommendation in his 1950s report, The American High School Today (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1959), 44–46, emphasized individual guidance and counseling as the most needed improvement in secondary education.Google Scholar

11 Powell, Lessons from Privilege, 144.Google Scholar

12 Powell, The Uncertain Profession, 232.Google Scholar