OK, I'll answer
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_12_31/ai_58170294/pg_2?tag=artBody;col1
James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard University and one of the most influential men of his day, wanted to replace this aristocracy of birth and wealth with what Thomas Jefferson called a "natural aristocracy" of the intellectually gifted from every walk of life, who would be educated to high standards and then be given the responsibility of governing society. The creation of what Conant called "Jefferson's ideal," a new intellectual elite selected strictly on the basis of talent, and dedicated to public service, would, he believed, make America a more democratic country.
In 1933, he gave two Harvard administrators the job of developing a nationwide scholarship program for gifted students. The key to the administrators' work would be the creation of a single standard for evaluating the astonishing diversity of the country's high-school students. And the test Conant ultimately selected for that purpose--the newly developed Scholastic Aptitude Test--would become for many students a narrow path to the best opportunities--and richest rewards--in American society.
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Conant selected the SAT, which he believed to be a "mental" or intelligence test, over acheivement tests, created by the developer of the New York Regents exams, to measure a student's grasp of course content. Achievement tests, he argued, favored unexceptional rich boys (girls weren't part of Conant's meritocratic equation) whose parents could buy them top-flight high school instruction.
But there was no national debate over Conant's drive to create an education-based meritocracy, or to make education "the official repository of opportunity in America" that it is today. Conant achieved his coup with the help of a handful of close colleagues. Ironically, they were all members of what Lemann neatly terms the Episcopacy, the social class whose defining institutions were the Protestant Episcopal Church, country clubs, New England boarding schools, Ivy League colleges, and, in their working lives, investment banks, major foundations, the foreign service, and university faculties--the very same crowd whose duller members Conant was trying to lock out of the garden. Key among them was Henry Chauncey, a square-jawed Harvard assistant dean and descendent of Puritan clergy who would later serve as the founding president of the Educational Testing Service, the giant testing company that Conant created to administer the SAT. Another was Devereaux Josephs, a classmate of Chauncey's at both the Groton School and Harvard who, as the President of the Carnegie Foundation, funded the creation of ETS for Conant. Together, they substantially redefined the nature of and route to success in America. Writes Lemann: "It was like a slow-motion, invisible constitutional convention whose result would determine the American social structure."
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To Lemann, Conant's meritocracy has been a decidedly mixed blessing. It has certainly produced opportunities for millions of gifted students who wouldn't have had them by dint of birth. He notes that among the very first group of ten Harvard National Scholars graduating in 1938 was James Tobin, the son of the sports-information director at the University of Illinois and a senior at Champaign High School, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Economics. In more recent years, Asian students have benefited tremendously from the SAT.
But Conant's vision of a governing elite selected through a new, education-based system and devoted to public service in a largely classless society was hopelessly naive. Not surprisingly, the new educated aristocracy has embraced the trappings of its newfound social superiority. Today's educated elite are disproportionately lawyers, bankers, and doctors, not the dedicated, European-style civil servants that Conant had hoped for. As Lemann says, the American meritocracy has become largely "a means of handing out economic rewards to a fortunate few."
Much more troubling is the perverse influence the SAT has had on the nation's elementary and secondary education system. Adapted by Carl Brigham, a Princeton psychology professor, from crude intelligence tests used to sort U.S. Army recruits in World War I, the SAT was first published in 1926. It was a multiple-choice exam emphasizing word recognition (as is the test's verbal section today; the math section measures students' ability to reason mathematically and requires knowledge of basic arithmetic, geometry and algebra). But Lemann reveals that as early as 1934 Brigham repudiated the basic premise that the tests measured solely native intelligence. "The test scores very definitely are a composite including schooling, family background, familiarity with English, and everything else, relevant and irrelevant," Brigham wrote in an unpublished manuscript which Lemann dug out of the ETS archives. ETS and the College Board, the organization of schools and colleges that sponsors the exam, acknowledged as much in 1994, when they finally changed the exam's name from Scholastic Aptitude Test to Scholastic Assessment Test.
