Word: caperton
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...that balancing act is awkward, Caperton relishes another part of his job--his nascent role as the nation's curricular impresario. "I didn't want to run a testing company," he says. "But when I saw what the College Board was and, more important, what it could be, I saw the power to do much more than they were doing in the past to improve education." Under his watch, the board is issuing quite specific recommendations about what schools should teach--for instance, math lessons should include radical equations (such as 5 (square root...
...historical sense, Caperton's ambitious agenda for the big test is appropriate: 77 years ago, the exam began life as a tool of social change. The most significant early champion of the SAT was Harvard president James Conant, who, Lemann writes, disliked achievement tests because "they favored rich boys whose parents could buy them top-flight high-school instruction." Conant helped the SAT grow into the behemoth it is today precisely because it was different...
Today Atkinson and Caperton have launched another great social experiment with the SAT. This time, the idea is that the test's rigorous new curricular demands will lift all boats--that all schools will improve because they want their students to do well on the test. Schools have long tried to prepare kids for the SAT, but education experts scorned the practice of openly teaching to the test. Now it's the mission of the College Board that every school should teach to the SAT. "I would say that the most important aspect of this test is sending a real...
...months ago, TIME asked the College Board if we could sort out some of these conundrums by following the development of the New SAT from inside. To our surprise, board president Gaston Caperton III agreed. Renouncing his predecessors' often combative p.r. approach, Caperton allowed me to attend a series of meetings at which New SAT items were previewed and debated. An experienced politician--he was elected Governor of West Virginia in 1988 and '92--Caperton knows the old adage about making laws and sausage. Designing tests is also a messy process, and he deserves credit for laying it bare...
...insistence, the goal of influencing school curriculums has become the overriding preoccupation of the new test's developers. Caperton speaks with less enthusiasm about the traditional mission of the SAT: to help colleges predict how well applicants will do if they are admitted. To be sure, Caperton believes the notion (actually, he's staking his career on it) that the SAT can both improve high schools and still remain useful to colleges as a predictor. But the first goal is a political aim; the second, a psychometric one. And Caperton has surrounded the New SAT with dozens of educators...