Testing and Politics in the United States: a historical perspective from Conant to No Child Left Behind

Abstract

The paper investigates the evolution of the role of standardized tests in the US school policy. Its analysis spans from the establishment of SAT in view of a merit-based selection of college students, on the initiative of Harvard president James Bryant Conant in the 1930’s, to the emergence of tests as administrative regulators during the presidency of George W. Bush. It focuses on three aspects:

• The institutional role of testing, from informal controller in a decentralized system to binding mechanism for the approval of practices and performances;
• Its social role, from opportunity for students to emerge regardless of their conditions of origin to sanction of the inequalities in access to quality education;
• Its role in ethnic relations, for its effects on desegregation and on the emergence of Asian American identity also based on school results.