Retooling Education: Testing and the Liberal Arts

America has a long history of searching for educational tools that will open up opportunities for ordinary people. For over a century, standardized testing has been at the center of such policy initiatives. From the widespread adoption of IQ tests in the 1920s, through the testing regime promoted by No Child Left Behind, and recent announcements by colleges that are abandoning the SAT as an admissions tool, standardized tests have been variously extolled for helping students overcome social disadvantage, criticized for imposing artificial hierarchies, and condemned for reifying social inequalities. The history of such tests is illuminating in several ways, not least because of the migration of test-enthusiasm through the political spectrum. In short order, testing went from being a progressive nostrum to a conservative idée fixe, and from democratic leveler to an elitist swindle.

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