The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy by Nicholas Lemann (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999).
Students usually consider the SAT something to be endured not studied. Reading Nicholas Lemann’s The Big Test, an alarming history of the rise of American meritocracy, usually changes their minds. Lemann uses the history of the Educational Testing Service and its most famous product, the SAT, to chronicle tectonic shifts in 20th-century American society: the displacement of a WASP-y elite by a striving professional class, the rise and fall of affirmative action, and the ongoing question of how to confront entrenched social and educational inequities.
Though the book was published in 1999, my students still love to read it, thanks to Lemann’s deft prose and beautifully rendered characters. And I still love to teach with it, for Lemann’s expansive history raises evergreen questions for class discussion: How should we apportion scarce educational resources? Is meritocracy possible or desirable? Is our current system of higher education fair — and if not, what will we do about it?
Victoria E.M. Cain’s latest Kappan article:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Victoria E.M. Cain
VICTORIA E.M. CAIN is an associate professor of history at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, and author of the forthcoming Schools and Screens: A Watchful History .
