Word: lemann
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...TEST by Nicholas Lemann. Each year, the Scholastic Assessment Test determines where hundreds of thousands of high school seniors will go to college. Lemann shows how this process developed and casts a gimlet eye on the concentration of so much power in so few hands. Is this any way to run a meritocracy...
...Nicholas Lemann, author of The Big Test, a look at the SAT and educational meritocracy, says Achieva's success is the result of crazed but confused parents. Only nine universities take less than a quarter of applicants. In fact, 1,900 of the 2,100 four- year colleges accept at least half those who apply. Thus it is the families, more than most schools, that can afford to be selective. But then there is the perception that unless a kid goes to Harvard, his life is over. "The parents get obsessed, which makes the kids obsessed," says Lemann. "It turns...
...nation where blacks were shut out of decent schooling for generations, the SAT ran straight into the complications of race. The second half of Lemann's book is largely the story of how the arguments for affirmative action collided with the presumptions of the meritocracy. What to do? Abandon the idea of an elite created by the universities, says Lemann, though he doesn't altogether define what should take its place. All the same, he's right when he describes the predicament of the ETS: "an institution in charge of individual opportunity" in a country where opportunity is "the thing...
...life very iffy. Right answers put you on your way to Prestige U. The wrong ones could give you a lifelong personal stake in the debate over the minimum wage. In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 406 pages; $27), Nicholas Lemann describes the rise to power of the SAT and the keepers of its flame at the Educational Testing Service. Lemann is especially good at describing the "quiet coup d'etat" that the SAT accomplished in the 1950s and '60s, when it booted the Wasp elite by substituting classroom skills...
...Nicholas Lemann wants educational opportunity for everyone. He wants less emphasis on the "right" colleges and less hysteria about and dependency on standardized testing. He wants a society in which achievement need not be academic or youthful to be rewarded. In short, he wants students who are learning rather than earning grades. I absolutely agree. But in trying to reach these goals, he advocates a system at once even more divisive based on educational background and even less adept at providing young Americans with the opportunity to work hard and reach their potential later in life. In any case...