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The industrial standardization of the American public schools occurred at the same historical moment as scientific racism-the pseudoscientific classification and ordering of race according to White supremacist ideology. Eugenics, scientific racism taken to its extreme, combined industrial notions of technological innovation with assem- bly techniques of efficiency in attempts to modify and control humanity's composition. In many cases, eugenics was a method of enforcing White supremacist policies through sterilization of the "unfit," more often than not a label attached to non-Whites. The early use of standardized testing was an education reform response to the scientific racism and eugenics movements. Early American standardized tests-referred to as intelligence tests-were a method of tracking, classifying, and ordering students. The Stanford-Binet test, an intelligence test developed by psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford University (built on the work of French researcher Alfred Binet), was widely applied in schools. Intelligence testing became recognized as acceptable practice during World War I when the United States Army organized itself according to the results of intelligence tests. In the schools, the Stanford-Binet test planned education, funneling students according to presumed innate ability. The results were predictable: Blacks were placed in the lowest tracks, often vocational schools, and were thus further marginalized. Terman believed that the role of the intellectual (in this case, the psychologist/ intelligence tester) was to rationalize the world according to scientific methods of intelligence. His tests would, in his words, "bring tens of thousands of high-grade defectives under the surveillance and protection of society. This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness." In other words, "high-grade defectives," which more often than not was a metaphor for racial and class distinctions, were institutionalized and sterilized due to poor test scores. To restate and emphasize this point, in the era of scientific racism and eugenics, the liberating aspects of standard- ization that benefited some immigrants eluded most Black students.¹¹

In this context, the heated early 20th-century debate on edu- cation between two of the more prominent African American intellectuals, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, can be more easily understood. Unfortunately at the time, Black educators were often forced to choose on which side of the Washington-Du Bois fence they stood. The politically powerful Washington, who advocated a utilitarian model of industrial education for Blacks, embodied by the Tuskegee Institute he founded, gained the support of both White southern segregationists and White northern in- dustrialists. Washington's philosophy of industrial education, conceptualized by his infamous 1895 Atlanta Compromise, in which he stated that "there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem," was lauded by southern and northern Whites alike. White southerners supported it for its adherence to the fortified racial hierarchy; powerful northerners endorsed the plan in accordance with the exigencies of the growing industrial economy. Washington theorized that for Blacks, "it is at the bottom of life we must begin, not at the top."¹²

On the other side of this vexing contest, a young W.E.B. Du Bois questioned the industrial strategy of Washington as being the best mode of education for the Black population. Du Bois argued that a sole reliance on industrial education would preclude the possibility of a future Black leadership. He advocated the need for a classic, liberal academic education as the best route for Black liberation. According to Du Bois, this type of education would allow for the development of a Black "talented tenth" who would then be situated to lead the Black population out of its imposed state of despair. With respect to his "talented tenth" he asked in 1903:

Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of this aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God's fair earth civilized from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.¹³

The Washington-Du Bois debate shaped the struggle of Black education, but it presented a false dichotomy. Although Du Bois saw the difference between his educational design and that of Washington as significant at the time, he later realized the immaturity of his stance. He came to understand that the differences between the two were, in the words of philosopher Cedric Robinson, "insignificant when compared to what they did not comprehend."¹⁴ In his autobiography, written years after Washington had died and the debate had subsided, Du Bois the Marxist comprehended that both were fighting for scraps from the master's table. He wrote:

These two theories of Negro progress were not absolutely contradictory. Neither I nor Booker Washington understood the nature of capitalistic exploitation of labor, and the necessity of a direct attack on the principle of exploitation as the beginning of labor uplift.¹⁵

In other words, Du Bois had come to realize that both he and Washington were involved in a narrowly defined struggle, and that perhaps both of their educational approaches were useful for Blacks. But neither theory would be a liberating force without a more encompassing and radical understanding of the interrelations of American capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, and of how education was one component in the systematic reproduction of a compliant labor force.

Black feminist educator Gloria Joseph, in response to the theory that education in America acted merely to produce and reproduce the labor force (beyond Du Bois, further conceptualized by political econ- omists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis), argued this framework to be wrong because it ignored the dimension of race. Joseph theorized that because a disproportionate number of Blacks were not included in the workforce, education did not act as an apparatus of social production and reproduction. Joseph's assessment is at once true and misguided, as will be made evident throughout this paper. The charge that schools do not offer Blacks the same opportunities as Whites is valid and serious, and demands rectification; however, this also ignores the broader context of the American political economy.¹⁶

Blacks were, and are, less often included in the American workforce, but this is not proof that the economy, nor the education system, has failed. Rather, the opposite is true. A capitalist economy requires a "flexible workforce," including unemployed and partially employed segments of the population. More often than not, although with differences by period and region, the poor in America have been people of color. For example, in the Jim Crow South, which can be described as the extreme manifestation of the national culture and economy rather than an anomalous outgrowth, Blacks were the segment of the population that bore the brunt of unemployment. The culture (and economy) was constructed so that poor Whites, although socio-economically more similar to the vast majority of the Black community, affiliated themselves with the wealthy White community. This relationship benefited the wealthy because class alliances were not formed between Whites and Blacks-a dangerous possibility in a region with stark economic polarities. However, this relationship also benefited the poor Whites in that they were much more likely to fill the job openings that paid a living wage.¹⁷

Early standardization reforms, much like later standardized testing reform, played a key role in the American political economy. When farmers needed to be able to read directions in order to operate new machinery, the schools provided standardized literacy. When rising immigration brought in large groups of people unfamiliar with the American economy, the schools provided standardized industrial discipline. Because the conditions that drove education reform also compelled the continued marginalization of Blacks, examples of educators interested in liberating educational experiences for African Americans were few and far between, and were the product of people working on the figurative periphery. Historian David Tyack paraphrased just such an early 20th-century educator, Doxey Wilkerson: "the task of 'differentiating' education for Black children was to discover what (they) should know and do about such injustices as job discrimination, economic exploitation, denial of civil liberties, high rates of disease and death, stereotypes of inferiority, and inadequate opportunities for education." Unfortunately, this early model of teaching for social justice was not included in the standardization reforms. Educators who wished to apply it remained at the margins; we shall look at some of them in this essay's concluding section.¹⁸

SAT: Apparatus of Americanization

In response to the capitalist crisis of the 1920s and 1930s, he United States empowered the state to be a social and economic force through regulation and the beginnings of centralized planning, without ditching capitalism in favor of socialism and without the opportunistic utilization of fascism to protect capital from socialism. The U.S. thus ensured the survival of capitalism as the preeminent economic system through an expanded state and a Keynesian political economy. This massive reform effort-the New Deal-along with the immense planning efforts required after American entry into World War II, allowed the U.S. not only to endure the harsh global economic depression, but also to take advantage of its unprecedented postwar global dominance. The United States, constituting 5% of the global population, controlled access to 50% of the world's natural resources, estimates made by the American governing elite itself, including George Kennan.¹⁹

One result of the New Deal was that civil institutions became more powerful than ever in the United States-before or since. Government planning and regulating necessitated a place between the state and society where planning and regulating could be mediated. A strong civil society, including the education system, served this role; but due to the decentralized nature of organized education in the U.S., institutional education as an agent of national change came later than most other New Deal-style projects. Education reform was, and is, a slow mechanism for organizing.

The New Deal, employing the state as an active economic regulator, gathered and positioned the labor of Americans in a much more organized and systematic fashion. Of course, this was as much a reaction to labor resistance to the standardization of capitalist production as it was a preemptive action, but this is consistent with capitalism in general. As theorist Slavoj Zizek writes, "the history of capitalism is a long history of how the predominant ideologico- political framework was able to accommodate-and to soften the subversive edge of-the movements and demands that seemed to threaten its very survival." As a result, more so than ever before, Americans became components of the larger industrial (and military) machine. In this context, a program of standardization equipped to more efficiently funnel the young masses according to their utility was inevitable. Through the sheer will and political savvy of those who advocated the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the SAT became the mode of measurement most often used. The SAT, as the standardized test ideally equipped to coordinate the nation's young people according to the new mandates, filled a vacuum.²⁰

The primary SAT advocates-test enthusiast Henry Chauncey and Harvard president James Conant¾were not unaware of the political/economic exigencies of the nation. These men explicated the need for a better-trained and more organized class of managers to replace the American leadership system-described by them as a stagnant, New England-style aristocracy-which lacked the prerequi- site imagination and authority for such a massive task. Chauncey and Conant helped devise and enact the SAT as the regulatory apparatus of this plan-first at Harvard, and then later expanding it to almost the entire American university network. When Conant became president of Harvard in 1933, he anticipated the post-war mandate to reorganize the managerial classes, and wanted a new crop of students whose primary focus would be intellectual growth. In order to achieve this he deemed it necessary to expand admission beyond the traditional New England nobility, specifically because most of these traditional Harvard students were thought to be unmotivated scholars. With the help of Chauncey, Conant sought an exam that would determine whether or not a future student would succeed intellectually at Harvard. He wanted his test to be an "intelligence" test rather than an "achievement" test, for he believed an achieve- ment test would be biased against students with disadvantageous regional and class backgrounds. His overall stated aim is summed up nicely by journalist Nicholas Lemann: "to depose the existing, undemocratic American elite and replace it with a new one made up of brainy, elaborately trained, public-spirited people drawn from every section and every background."²¹

The theoretically liberating possibilities of the SAT, with Conant and Chauncey as the vanguard of this new radical freedom, were fashioned thus: Americans would now be able to advance socially through the access accorded them by this test, rather than through an anachronistic system of heritage. Lemann's thesis, although somewhat flexible, conceptualizes the SAT as the historical agency of a new American hierarchy based on merit. In this regard, the historical context of the SAT was similar to other historical instances in which the rhetoric of democracy and opportunity spearheaded change. For instance, the American Revolutionary War included Black participation on a number of different fronts, including military battle-the last instance of American troop integration prior to the Korean War. To effectively counter the retrogressive monarchical forces of Great Britain, the ideology of democracy actuated a broad enough popular base of support for a successful rebellion. Blacks were impelled to join the war effort, in the expression of historians James and Lois Horton, in the "hope of liberty."²²