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Just as Blacks in 1776 joined the revolutionary movement in a desire to extend the surge for freedom, Blacks recognized the liberating possibilities of the SAT. Previously, Blacks were almost universally denied access to the upper echelon American universities thanks to systematic and arbitrary discrimination. Hypothetically, after the invention of the SAT as a so-called meritocratic measuring tool, if Blacks were able to succeed on this one exam, they would be granted access to the university system and the concomitant network of opportunity. Yes, the tests were difficult, and the standards were high, but the standards were the same for all students, Black or White. When these possibilities unfortunately and predictably failed to materialize, just as emancipation did not immediately follow the American Revolution, and the constraining qualities of standardized testing were realized, Black discontent increased. Although Lemann's conception of meritocracy is extremely problematic, he does recognize some of the weaknesses of the SAT-induced meritocracy. For example, he writes, "If you create an organized system to distribute opportunity, then there might be complaining about its unfairness, complaining of a kind that is impossible when there is no system at all." Race, forever the ultimate contradiction between theory and practice in America, was not unexpectedly the central tension generated by SAT outcomes. From the beginning, Blacks fared significantly worse than Whites on the SAT.²³

But Blacks were not the only segment of the population unable to realize the promise of freedom that the SAT represented. Results invariably determined that socioeconomic status was the single most important factor in scoring well on the SAT. For example, it was recently estimated that every additional $10,000 earned by a household translated into a score of thirty points higher on the SAT, a significant result to say the least. Although over time there were attempts to reformulate the SAT to compensate for these types of bias, discrepancies continued. A recent study done at the University of Maryland reported that "the SAT is not as valid for women as for men (as it) consistently underpredicts" the future college performance of females. The study continues:

Whereas the SAT and other standardized tests tend to measure componential intelligence-the ability to interpret information in a hierarchical and taxonomic fashion in a well-defined and unchanging context-research findings suggest that individuals who experience bias tend to demonstrate their abilities through experiential and contextual intelligence.²⁴

According to Gloria Joseph, Black female culture counters and transcends these "biases," more aptly referred to by Joseph as "multiple structures of oppression." She constructs a Black, female pedagogy according to the following four alternative learning styles: the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, the centrality of personal expressiveness, the ethics of personal accountability, and concrete experience as a criterion of meaning. These Black female modes of learning as described by Joseph are antithetical to the learning styles that ensure success on the SAT.²⁵

This is telling: the SAT, although designed to more fully systematize and reorder U.S. society, and thus redefine American identity, failed to stray from past definitions of what it meant to be American. Sure, after the implementation of the SAT Blacks and other peripheral groups were able to gaze upon increased opportunity. But this gaze was merely an apparition for most. The SAT, consistent with other integration projects, did not accommodate Black or female identities-in this case, differing learning styles. In order for a more fully integrated society to emerge from the SAT, the onus was placed upon Blacks to accommodate to American identity. The SAT further entrenched a seemingly elusive White identity as the de facto American identity.

Lemann, although critical of the size and shape of the so-called meritocracy, and unimpressed by who was and was not allowed to "earn" their way into the new hierarchy, falters by framing the argument in terms of a concept as deceptive as "meritocracy." The men of the SAT, specifically Chauncey, believed that testing offered a scientific and rational method for organizing society more effectively. But Conant, Chauncey, and their like, who supported the notion that a single standardized test offered "proof" of aptitude, failed to recognize that a standardized "intelligence" test is every bit as biased against certain people as is a standardized "achievement" test. If a test is "standardized," that test is a measurement of a "standard" as defined by particular interests. Familiarity with language, style, and other subjective qualities unavoidable in the creation of a standardized test, is a clear advantage. More often than not in the United States, and the SAT is no exception, a standardized test represents the normalization of whiteness, richness, and maleness. For women, people of color, and poor Americans, not to mention people unfamiliar with the New England culture from which the test emerged, the SAT has been a cruel message of future tidings within the American "meritocracy." The SAT sets a standard that people then must strive for, and those who are better equipped to assimilate to the norm the test represents are also deemed better equipped to be successful in the larger economy. The truth is that the SAT became the method for weeding out the unwanted through "science" rather than prejudice. Despite recognizing some of the faults of the SAT, Lemann fails to explicitly designate this essential reality. A national testing apparatus may have eliminated some of the arbitrariness of teachers, administrators, and those who decided the fate of college applicants, but it replaced the old intolerance with a new form of arbitrariness justified as empirical, rational, and even scientific.²⁶

Civil Society: Liberating, Constraining, Disappearing

Understanding education to be one critical aspect of civil society is an essential component of my analysis. What is civil society? According to Michael Hardt, "civil society is proposed as the essential feature of any democracy: the institutional infrastructure for political mediation and public exchange." Communist political theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci highlighted the democratic characteristics of civil society, and theorized that civil society would eventually subsume the state and allow for the rule by the revolutionary class through democratic consent. Gramsci analogized "the superstructures of civil society [to be] like trench systems of modern warfare" that allow people to access power. In other words, Gramsci recognized and highlighted the liberating aspects of civil society as channels of democratic opportunity. In this context, education in general, and specifically a standardized test such as the SAT, could be utilized to overcome American historical constraints such as racial hierarchy. According to the Gramscian framework, resistance is part and parcel of civil society, and thus standardized tests can be utilized as a method of resistance.²⁷

By the 1960s, the SAT became more of a diagnostic tool than a tool for quantifying hypothetical innate ability. The SAT was refined as the predominant measuring stick that monitored the educational progress of racial minority groups-a potentially democratizing development and consistent with Gramsci's theory regarding civil society. This theoretically liberating possibility-that Black under- achievement on the SAT would underscore the consistently degraded capacity of the historically segregated schools that most Black children in America attended-was never realized. Instead, Black and White SAT discrepancies spurred the opposite, in the form of increased social scientific analysis, such as the Coleman Report, researched and written by sociologist James Coleman and funded by the Educational Testing Services (ETS), the organization that had produced, marketed, and sold the SAT from the outset. The Coleman Report findings emphasized family background and socioeconomic status rather than quality of schools in determining SAT scores. This apparently discredited the notion that increased funding would improve Black children's test scores. Without any policy provisions to increase funding, SAT measurement was an empty promise.²⁸

There was then, as there is now, overwhelming research (and common sense) that exhibited educational achievement to be a correlative of egalitarian educational financing. But paying for better schools was deemed too expensive as a solution to the Coleman report assertions, and busing became the policy of choice. This is not to say that desegregation is bad policy, per se. Theoretically, placing Black students from powerless families and communities in schools with White students from empowered families and communities ensures equality of educational resources. However, in practice, busing students in order to desegregate schools within America's staunchly segregated society-segregated according to the interrelated qualities of race and class-was akin to using a Band-Aid to stop the flow of blood from a severed limb. For example, after the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education mandated integrated schools, the White people in power in Prince Edward County, Virginia, rather than allow for integration, closed down their schools for several years and channeled public money into private, White-only schools. Black children in Prince Edward went without any formal education for as many as eight years. Perhaps this was an extreme case, but all over the nation, Whites systematically fled urban integration for suburbia and the legal protection from integration suburbia offered. In this instance, civil society failed to materialize for Black Americans as an access route to power.²⁹ But, if their access had been clear, and civil society had been operating for them as envisioned by Gramsci, would this have ensured revolutionary or democratic opportunity?

Michel Foucault conceptualizes a far different framework for civil society than does Gramsci. According to Foucault, civil society operates as part and parcel of the logic of his notion of bio-power-"it is the population itself on which government will act either directly through large-scale campaigns, or indirectly through techniques that will make possible, without the full awareness of the people, the direction of the population." In other words, everything political is organized around the population, including standardized testing, which should be viewed as a government intervention in the field of economics. Within this framework, standardized testing is a discursive formation, which emerges when social science and social practice become one and the same. Standardized testing then becomes more than measurement; it becomes truth, in the sense that it has the power to form that of which it speaks. Those who are measured are then organized according to the measurement.³⁰

The standardized test operates then on three levels: as social science, as social intervention, and as a mediator between science and intervention. In this regard, the power of the standardized testing regime is both totalizing and individualizing. It is totalizing in that it orders the entire population according to statistics, and individualizing in that it divides people according to the process of categorization. Standardized tests act as a disciplinary practice for dividing the population. Although Foucault differentiated between discipline, as a physical and material exertion on the body, and the regulatory apparatuses of bio-power, which ordered society at the species level, he also stated that the sovereignties of discipline and bio-power were inseparable. Standardized testing should be understood as both a disciplinary apparatus and a regulatory apparatus.³¹

Thus, according to the Foucault framework, civil society operates as more than a democratic and liberating entity. Civil society allows for a plurality of social flows, and these flows can move in a direction opposite to the one anticipated by Gramsci; they can be disciplinarian and authoritarian. Foucault, according to Hardt, "highlights the state's capacities to organize, recuperate, and even produce social forces" through civil society. This is, in part, done through the development and utilization of social capital. Social capital, as a sub-stratum of civil society, according to sociologist Robert Putnam, is a network of connected individuals. This term "social capital" was used in the 1980s by James Coleman (of the Coleman report) to highlight the necessary social context of education. Although both Putnam and Coleman argue that social capital, and thus the social context of schools, is democratic, social capital concurrently, and perhaps more importantly, operates as a form of discipline. Schools and standardized tests, as a disciplinary system, are not by themselves sovereign entities, but rather require a form of internal discipline. Discipline, according to Foucault, is the link between increased aptitude, such as a better score on the SAT, and increased subjugation. In other words, the further you work to improve your SAT score the more fully you are subsumed by the imperatives of the state and the economy, whose disciplinarian capabilities are enhanced by social capital.³²

The mission of attaining higher SAT scores, hypothetically undertaken by every American student, limits the space where movement outside the demands of social production can occur, particularly dissent and other types of subversive energy. A model of successful discipline observes all individuals, judges all of them according to a norm, and orders them all into a hierarchical structure. The SAT almost without fail has served to fulfill these requirements. Certainly not all students have historically sought to improve SAT scores; many young Americans never take the exam. However, there exist other aspects of government and civil society able to order these individuals, not the least of which is the prison system.³³