The big test : the secret history of the American meritocracy / NicholasLemann.

Includes index.

Bk. 1. The Moral Equivalent of Religion -- 1. Henry Chauncey's Idea -- 2. The Glass Slipper -- 3. Native Intelligence -- 4. The Natural Aristocracy -- 5. Victory -- 6. IQ Joe -- 7. The Census of One Ability -- 8. The Standard Gauge -- 9. In the System -- 10. Meritocracy -- Bk. 2. The Master Plan -- 11. Rah! Rah! Rah! -- 12. Chauncey at Yale -- 13. The Negro Problem -- 14. The Fall of Clark Kerr -- 15. The Invention of the Asian-American -- 16. Mandarins -- 17. The Weak Spot -- 18. Working -- 19. The Fall of William Turnbull -- Bk. 3. The Guardians -- 20. Behind the Curtain -- 21. Berkeley Squeezed -- 22. Molly's Crisis -- 23. The Case of Winton Manning -- 24. Surprise Attack -- 25. No Retreat -- 26. The Fundis and the Realos -- 27. Changing Sides -- 28. Defeat. Afterword: A Real Meritocracy.

"This book shows us for the first time the ideas, the people, and the politics behind the fifty-year-old system that determines the course of Americans' lives." "It began as a utopian experiment - launched by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, and Henry Chauncey, head of the brand-new Educational Testing Service (ETS) - to use the then-young science of intelligence testing to assess and sort American students fairly and dispassionately in order to create a new democratic elite that would lead postwar America to progress, strength, and prosperity. No writer before Nicholas Lemann has gained access to the archives of the all-powerful ETS, and none has understood the significance of this extraordinary drama." "Lemann describes the consequences, for individual lives and for society as a whole, of this effort to create a new meritocracy." "For the utopian experiment didn't turn out as planned. It created a new elite but also generated conflict and tension, particularly over the issue of race, and America is now a society whose best-educated, most privileged, and most powerful people seem to be leaders without followers - prosperous, resented figures who don't hold the country together around their ideas yet who are trying, like the old elite, to perpetuate themselves down through the generations. Lemann shows that this American meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly."--BOOK JACKET.