The Social Production of American Identity: Standardized Testing Reform in the United States

By Andrew Hartman

Introduction

When White northern teachers flocked to the South after the Civil War to educate the newly emancipated Blacks, there seemed to be one common sentiment among the educators in regard to their new pupils, made clear by the following assertion from a White female teacher: "they need so much instruction." Slavery did not, despite a master narrative that until recently had us believe otherwise, construct an undifferentiated mass out of Black people. However, it did render most of the millions of those subjected to chattel slavery illiterate, despite heroic efforts by many slaves to learn and teach literacy. The illiteracy, in and of itself, was an enormous problem in slavery's aftermath. However, the former slaves lacked far more than literacy. In the eyes of their northern instructors, slavery had inculcated primitiveness. Their teachers were idealistic in that they typically, though not universally, presumed a common humanity that allowed them to perceive the former slaves as their potential equals. However, this common humanity did not extend to a common American civilization. To be American was to be the binary opposite of primitive; to be American was to be civilized. The northern White teachers were mandated to civilize, and thus Americanize, the former slaves. The term "civilization" was to the American colonial project as it was to European colonialism as a whole: it summed up in a single term American pride in the significance of their own notions of progress and humankind.¹

Organized education in America, although it has differed across space and time, has consistently acted as an agent of Americanization, and thus, standardization. The above narrative of the northern White teachers and their southern Black students exemplified the agency of standardization, and signified the following: standardization was, and still is, theoretically both liberating and constraining. This dynamic-the tension between liberation and constraint-is what forms power and knowledge. For the Black former slaves, being granted the opportunity to learn how to read and the possibility of being allowed participation in American civilization must have been truly emancipating,ntrast to their then recent servitude. Thus, rather unsurprisingly, large numbers of African Americans gained literacy in the aftermath of emancipation. On the other hand, a standard American identity assumed a boundary between American and un-American, and it presupposed that, if the American standard were to become that of an integrated society, Blacks rather than Whites would have to accommodate to this standard. This burden was, and still is, constraining in theory, and it formed the link between power and knowledge. In practice, a culture of segregation, as described by historian Grace Elizabeth Hale, became the violent manifestation of American standardization being equated with the standardization of Whiteness. Yet Whiteness in American culture has carefully avoided being pinned down to something beyond amorphous definitions.²

But, as historical change has altered standard American identity, so too has it altered the way education acts to standardize this identity. Standardized testing, as an education reform effort, needs to be posited within this broader context. Standardized testing has become an ingrained cultural entity, seemingly as natural as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The goal of this paper is to historicize American education reform efforts to increase the use of standardized testing. Rather than accepting standardized testing as an essential entity, and argue for or against increasing it, my intention is to unmask standardized testing as an important form of social production that has served the American political economy. As a method of social production, as well as social reproduction, standardized testing has had serious cultural implications, not the least of which has been the eternal question of American identity. For Whites, the only identity of any consequence was the "American" identity. For Blacks, who suffered from what can be described as "double consciousness," their racial identity was always a barrier to American identity. Consistent with notions of American identity, standardized testing, as an opposition to a cultural other, represents the normalization of whiteness, richness, and maleness.³

So, to state the obvious, education reform efforts in American history did not occur in a vacuum. Standardized testing reform, gathering momentum directly after World War II, was part and parcel of the new techniques for ordering human beings, and America was at the forefront of these new social scientific approaches. For example, the development and implementation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) was one component of an American response to the Great Depression and World War II, developments that fundamentally reworked ways in which American society was planned, without radically altering the hierarchical structure. The seminal text on the origins of the SAT is Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, which is discussed below in detail.⁴

Like the efforts to establish the SAT, the more recent exertions to impose standardized testing nationally can be unmasked and historically situated as one aspect of the global march of neoliberalism, which can also be described as unfettered capitalism. Neoliberalism has entailed far more than the proliferation of free trade agreements and investment deregulation, although these have both been vital components of its ideology and practice. This new era of capitalism, in part ushered in by the Reagan-Thatcher "revolution," demanded the deconstruction of New Deal-style institutional organization. This has in large part contri- buted to what theorist Michael Hardt refers to as the "withering of civil society."⁵

Although the dismantling of public education as a vital institution of civil society is not yet a certainty by any means, there is evidence of cracks under the weight of the incredible tensions inherent in neoliberalism. Civil society, much like standardized testing, can be both liberating and constraining. This paper neither romanticizes civil society as an invented tradition of democratic utopia, nor rejoices in a withering of civil society in favor of the logic of the market. Rather, the very real disappearance of civil society is important to my argument because the role of standardized testing is shifting. In this context, standardized testing has taken on a new and even more important role in American public education, helping to explain the recent stan- dardized testing craze. Standardized testing has become, more so than before, a necessary external apparatus of control. There is a litany of texts-some arguing for or against the standardized testing reforms, some attempting to explain these reforms-examined at length below.⁶

Although racial categories, and thus racism, have been exploded (within the academy) as social constructs that serve larger purposes in American society, ignoring these fabrications and their contemptible results is not the correct response. A neutral position on racial identity- reducing all members of society to mere abstract citizens-obviously favors the dominant, majority race. Within this inquiry into the nature of standardized testing reform, Blacks, historically the group most consistently categorized as outside an acceptable norm, serve as the control group. An assessment of standardized testing must include an account of how it has both served and failed Black Americans. At the same time, however, it must recognize the broader context of stan- dardized testing: as a form of social production, and thus American- ization. For while charges that the system fails are an understandable and reasonable response to the standardized tests that have neglected the Black student population, these charges ignore the broader picture. When African Americans and other marginalized groups do not fare as well as their White counterparts, perhaps the system of standardized testing is operating exactly as intended. Black educators such as Anna Julia Cooper and Fanny Jackson Coppin, as I shall show, understood the possibilities and constraints of education for Blacks and other "peripheral" identities. The goals of this paper are to further such an understanding and extend a just conceptualization of education, standardization, and standardized testing to the current context of reform debate.⁷

Early Standardization: The Logic of Capitalism and Racism

Prior to an analysis of standardized testing specifically, a basic understanding of early standardization developments in American education reform is helpful. The U.S. system of organized education, despite seemingly always existing as a decentralized entity, underwent systematic standardization rather early relative to other industrialized nations. The reformers who fomented this change in education ideology-a transformation from libertarian notions of local control to progressive ideas of central bureaucracies-were nationalists interested in preserving the American hierarchical order. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the rapid metamorphosis from an almost entirely rural nation to a burgeoning set of urban communities, accompanied by massive immigration from previously non-traditional locales such as Southern and Eastern Europe, permanently altered America. This coincided with a radical shift in economic organization, toward corporate concentration. In the eyes of the educational reformers, among other elite segments of society, these transformations introduced mass chaos to a previously orderly "agrarian" society. Education was part and parcel of progressivism's rationalization of American society, and rationalization was based on the tension between "social order" and "social justice." Yes, going to school rather than working in a sweatshop was a far more just life for a young immigrant; however, schools were more than a respite from the brutality of industrial society. Schools were sites of coercive reprogramming. More mechanized forms of discipline were deemed necessary, and pedagogical methods were standardized to quickly and rigidly Americanize the immigrant. Not coincidentally, the systematic mobilization of police forces across America coincided with the mobilization of disciplinary forces in the urban schools.⁸

Rural schools were not exempt from the processes of stan- dardization. As farming techniques became more mechanized, so too did more standard forms of education, including basic literacy peda- gogies-a requirement enabling future farmers to operate modern agricultural machinery. Whether urban or rural, the impressively efficient and centralized networks constructed by modern American industry (the railroads being the foremost example) struck the school reformers as excellent models of system building. Education became just such a system, institutionalized as the disciplinary apparatus of an urban-industrial order. School reformer William T. Harris argued that "the modern industrial community cannot exist without free popular education carried out in a system of schools." Students, particularly immigrant children, were indoctrinated with the incentives of the so-called Protestant work ethic, an important component of American and capitalist ideology. The progressive rationalization of American society demanded that non-Protestant immigrants be taught what Max Weber described as the "spirit of capitalism." This "spirit"-perfectly represented by the activist and interventionist "worldly asceticism" of Protestantism-ensured both a disciplined labor force and the regularized (re)investment of capital. Punctuality and other forms of orderly behavior became increasingly valued forms of knowledge. The Americanization of the immigrant, a concomitant aspect of progres- sivism in general, could perhaps be labeled the largest standardization program in the history of American education reform.⁹

For White immigrant children, and even more so for the parents who witnessed their children being driven from their traditional cultures, the Americanization process was difficult and sometimes constraining. But immigrant loss of tradition was certainly not an unusual cultural development. The following John Rawls observation communicates this process: "The culture of the poorer strata is impoverished while that of the governing and technocratic elite is securely based on the service of the national ends of wealth and power." But this standardization program was not solely a constraint, as it included some liberating qualities, particularly in comparison to what Blacks were offered during the early centralization of American schools. Immigrant children, theoretically, were granted an equality of opportunity, however narrow and limited this opportunity was in reality. Some immigrants, through education and Americanization, were able to improve their standards of living and gain more access to the growing culture of mass consumption. Many immigrant groups were able to accomplish this by "earning" their Whiteness, including Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants. In fact, when immigrants entered the Black-White binary of America, often the first slang they learned was the word "nigger." Most Black children, never able to "earn" Whiteness, were also never afforded the theoretical equal opportunities of the early American education system.¹⁰

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