FEED: Your book has three interlocking themes, all related to the concept
of meritocracy: the history of standardized testing, personal histories of
the first generation to benefit from the SAT's new path toward success, and
the political debates over affirmative action that have resulted from
attempts to jibe the twin ideals of equal opportunity and meritocracy. How
did you conceive of these ideas linking?
LEMANN: I start with a theme and drill down to the story rather than start
with a story and try to find a larger theme. The theme I had in mind was
success in America, or opportunity in America. I settled on the SAT and its
children and its political consequences as the vehicle to explore that
theme.
I was always interested in the SAT. I grew up in the system myself and
spent lots of time observing the obsession with it. If you define the book
as being about success and opportunity, you need some kind of structure to
hang it on. So I looked for some system for deciding who becomes
successful, who gets opportunity. The book would begin by showing that
system being set up -- the history of the SAT. The stories of specific
individuals are there because if you are writing about success in America,
you need to show people individually seeking success. You want to show the
"system" doesn't just sit there abstractly -- it affects people's lives.
The only way to communicate that is to show people living within the system.
Affirmative action is in there to show the meritocratic system generating
political conflict. I settled on the long set piece in the end on
[California's anti-affirmative action ] Proposition 209 because it pulled
all of these themes together in one long scene. I wanted to show that the
Mandarin class does not have political power in this country. Lifers and
Talents are more abundant, more important politically. The lesson of the
whole Prop. 209 drama is that stuff that is a central obsession for
Mandarins doesn't light the fire of those most active in politics and who
vote in America.
Was the Prop. 209 vote purely about meritocracy? That's complicated. What
the Prop. 209 folks really don't like are the excesses of the left, and in
particular the minority left, more than they love any kind of pure SAT
meritocracy. Tom Wood [one of Prop. 209's authors] is a political genius,
and part of his genius was figuring out that the way to win was to couch
Prop. 209 as a replay of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. He was careful not to
say he's doing this for meritocracy. He just said "I'm against
preferences." He didn't talk about any big social vision. Bob Dole once or twice used the word "meritocracy" in speeches but he
choked on it. It was stuck in by speechwriters. I think people were voting
anti-preferences more than pro- meritocracy -- "I don't like special things
being done for you just because what color your skin is."
FEED: You make the point that the two big systems you discuss -- the
meritocratic system and affirmative action -- were imposed from above
without open discussion or democratic vote. What does this say about
American politics?
LEMANN: The country has changed, and it probably wouldn't work the same way
today. Particularly, the whole meritocratic system was extremely top down.
It used to be easier for a small group of Establishmentarians to put across
hugely consequential changes without asking anybody. The result is a
delayed debate -- they first devise and institute the system, then many
years later we're having the debate which may lead to altering the system.
But the debate has a rougher character because we're debating something
already there that people have built their lives around.
FEED: You describe the meritocratic system as "the organized way we have of
deciding who winds up where in American society." The popular myth of
America is that of many different routes to success. How monolithic is the
meritocratic system?
LEMANN: Well, I call it the "organized way" -- there's also the
disorganized way to success, the old Horatio Alger novel stuff. In the
course of wrestling with this question, a good and important one, I came up
with this schema of three tracks to success in America: Mandarins, Lifers,
and Talents. This system doesn't own the whole real estate of the United
States. People in the Mandarin track overattribute the power of the
Mandarin track. It doesn't control everything. It's stronger in big cities
and on the coasts rather than the middle of the country. Its highest
strength is in the professions: Wall Street, management consulting, things
like that.
But there are lots of ways to get rich without taking the Mandarin track.
Indeed, these people aren't the very richest because they are too
risk-averse to start businesses. Real estate agents, auto dealers, people
who build subdivisions outside medium sized cities -- these are Talents. Of
course, there are also the more famous members of the Talent track,
professional entertainers and Bill Gates. But the cultural debate tends to
be controlled by Mandarins. People in big-time media and the intellectual
world tend to overattribute power to Mandarins and not get what's going on
in other tracks.
FEED: You say that Reagan was anti-Mandarin, while Clinton is in some ways
representative of the Mandarin meritocracy -- a poor boy from Arkansas
rising through the Rhodes scholarship to the presidency.
LEMANN: If you want to be an elected politician, to be 100 percent Mandarin
is death. Hillary is more pure Mandarin than Bill. Mandarins running as
Mandarins cannot be elected to national office in America. You have to be
able to present your self, maybe falsely, as something else. Another
example is George W. Bush. You have three leading presidential candidates
from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and George W. plays as the least Ivy
League and he's the most popular.
FEED: Why don't Americans like the Mandarin class?
LEMANN: If you want to take a pro-Mandarin spin, it's anti-intellectualism.
I'm more with the American people on this. Mandarin types seem to have gone
through life doing for themselves, not doing for others, or serving the
country. They come across as self-interested. Also, the essential Mandarin
vision as outlined by Conant is one of big government -- the Western
European social democrat political vision -- something this country has
never bought into.
Also, a puritan moral elitism is still the operative attitude in Ivy League
universities. Picking just the right elite doesn't get you that far. If you
want a good society for all, just make a good society for all instead of
trying to do so through a two-cushion shot of picking the right elite who
will then craft a good society. Elites will form, but we don't need
elaborate systems for picking them.
FEED: There's a lot of debate over whether the SAT really tests anything
meaningful. ETS used to consider it an aptitude test, but they've shied
away from that term. Is there such a thing as valid aptitude tests?
LEMANN: I suspect there isn't any aptitude or IQ test that you couldn't
prepare kids for and raise their score. I definitely don't believe there's
a physical property of the brain that is expressed in IQ test scores, which
many psychometricians do believe. IQ tests produce a reliable score ["reliable" meaning that the same
people tend to get similar scores over time], that's their great boast, but
that doesn't necessarily mean they are measuring native intelligence.
FEED: With Texas and California having eliminated affirmative action in
their higher education, they are leaning toward a system of admitting all
who graduate in a certain high percent of their high school class
regardless of the SAT. Does this trend mean the SAT may be on the way out?
LEMANN: In 50 years, will the system be the same? I'd guess not. The
direction of change is away from the SAT, but it won't happen tomorrow.
I've gotten intriguing little hints from ETS people along the lines of,
"Watch us for a major announcement in the next couple of years." I think
ETS people would love it if they could think of a way to move beyond SAT
without putting themselves out of business.
FEED: Without the filtering system of SATs and good colleges how should
employers decide who can or should be capable of doing what?
LEMANN: I like the audition principle better than the selection principle.
You should make judgments about people not prospectively based on a score
but in real time based on how well they perform the activity for which they
are being selected. That creates administrative inconvenience, but I think
it's a better way to run the world. On testing in particular, I believe
national achievement tests and curriculum standards would be a better
system than SATs. You should test more bodies of knowledge. We should
decide in a democratic manner what we want kids to learn, design a
curriculum to teach it, and then design tests based on that curriculum to
see if they learned what they were supposed to learn. That way test prep
becomes studying in school. This is much healthier than first picking the
test and having all these bizarre adaptations that people make to life
under the regime of whatever test is dominant. National achievement tests
would also serve as a quality control mechanism on public education in way
the SAT doesn't do and was specifically designed not to do.
FEED: You're admirably circumspect about your own opinions and conclusions,
but at the end of The Big Test you come out with some policy
proposals, like increasing the number of kids who go to college. But isn't
part of our problem that we already take the credential of a college degree
too seriously?
LEMANN: That's a totally legitimate point. If you could create a good route
out of high school, you wouldn't need to send everybody to college. I'm
strategically thinking it's too late for that. Over the past few decades
the private and public employment world settled on a college degree as a
proxy credential for access to white collar jobs. To do it your way, which is intriguing, you'd have to decredential
the world enough so we would be willing to accept high school diplomas and
you'd have to build a genuine link between high school and employment. This
exists in many countries, all Asian ones have that, major Western European
nations have that. That's something we could do.
But I'm taking my position about expanding college attendance instead
because there's something to be said for liberal education and its
benefits. It's like spinning plates on a stick -- if they start to wobble,
the way you get one to straighten is to turn it in the direction it's
already turning even faster, rather than stop it and turn it in the
opposite direction. The best way to achieve Conant's original vision of a
meritocratic aristocracy of talent is to use education not as a personnel
selection office but as a way of getting as many people as equipped as
possible to go out and succeed in the world.