Few books have the scope and sweep of Nicholas Lemann's The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). In 400 pages the author takes up five large topics. The first third is a history of the rise of standardized testing, especially the origins of the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the largest and best known nonprofit testing corporation in this country. The second part traces the post-World War II expansion of higher education, with detailed case studies of the California system and Yale University. The final third features a series of snapshots and essays on affirmative action. Running throughout the entire book are the interrelated topics of college admissions and economic mobility—(the universities supposedly became a “national personnel department” p. 345, which “grant the high scorers a general, long-duration ticket to high status that can be cashed in anywhere p. 347.”)

In 1995, Nicholas Lemann wrote an essay for the American Historical Review (AHR) in which he called himself a “non-academic historian” and described the rewards and challenges for that tribe. The Big Test should be scrutinized as the work of an historian, as this Forum does (and as I have done elsewhere, taking issue with his account of the formation of the Educational Testing Service in 1946 and 1947.) Here I will focus on the nonacademic part of Lemann's identity by comparing his work with several dozen books from his profession on American education.

The history of school reform has continuously fascinated historians of education, but their study of the subject has acquired a new urgency in the last quarter of a century as national political discussions have given an increasingly important place to educational policy. The recent publication of Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform (Harvard University Press, 1995), by David Tyack and Larry Cuban, offers the latest comprehensive study of the subject. We have invited four distinguished scholars to comment on the book. They are Robert L. Hampel of the University of Delaware, William R. Johnson of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, David N. Plank of Michigan State University, and Diane Ravitch of the Brookings Institute. Professors Tyack and Cuban have, in turn, agreed to respond to the comments.