Standardized Testing

The roots of the testing obsession date all the way back to the eugenics movement of the late 19th century. Frances Galton, the founder of the Eugenics Society and often referred to as the "father of mental measurement," advised that "wherever you can, count." His colleague, Charles Spearman, spent many years in a Massachusetts school numerically measuring and ranking students' "general intelligence abilities." Toward the end of his life, Spearman proclaimed, "Here would seem to lie the long wanted rational basis for public examinations."

Decades later, Alfred Binet, France's Minister of Public Instruction at the turn of the century, created the first practical intelligence test. His Binet-Simon scale is the original version of today's common IQ tests. Binet is also rather notorious for admitting that, "It matters very little what the tests are, so long as they are numerous."

In 1922, Princeton professor Carl Brigham teamed up with Robert Yerkes, the Army's head psychologist, to pursue a "national inventory of our own mental capacity." The tests were administered to 81,000 members of the military, and Brigham later declared that even though American-born Europeans proved to be the smartest, "Nordic blood" was superior to "Alpine blood," which was superior to "Mediterranean blood" within that category. Just four years later, Brigham would administer the first-ever SAT to 8,000 students who were seeking admission into Ivy-League schools.

Over the next few decades, the SAT would become the premier tool of mental measurement for the children of the elite, while state-sponsored examinations would become the norm and the requirement for all. In 1960, Yale's Dean of Admissions Art Howe confessed to The New Yorker that, "Sometimes I lie awake nights worrying about whether we've been kidding ourselves into taking a lot of brainy kids who are too egocentric to ever contribute much to society. Or have we been taking a lot of twerps who have read the how-to-get-into-college books, listened to their counselors, and learned to take tests and to give the right answers?"

At this point, 49 states have core standards around which standardized tests are implemented. Twenty-seven of those states back up the standards in a high-stakes environment, meaning students can be held back or denied graduation based on their test scores alone. Most recently, George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act has mandated high-stakes testing in grades 3 through 8 across the country and guaranteed that more testing under more pressure is well on its way. One might hope that the education bureaucrats of our day would listen to the words of Carl Brigham, the creator of the SAT. Near his death, Brigham wrote a five-page letter to the president of Harvard, stating, "If the unhappy day ever comes when teachers point their students towards these newer examinations, then we may look for the inevitable distortion of education in terms of tests." Yet neither his words nor the progressive education movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s could stop the political steamroller of testing. In 1983, the Reagan administration published the report, A Nation at Risk, which went on to push for more exams as the answer to education's shortcomings and the global economic trends of the time. From then on, there was nearly uninterrupted support for widespread testing. In the last few years, however, voices challenging standardized exams have become louder.

Photo by Ellen Senesi