Merit (1920-1945)
Testing and Secondary Education
Testing began to serve a growing number of purposes in the high school beginning in the 1920s. Supporters of intelligence testing believed that tests could determine what a student had learned, how much more he could learn, and how much more he would learn.
- Sorting and tracking students: The general use of testing in schools was to sort and track students into specific curricular tracks.
- As an aid in high school guidance: Tests like the Scholastic Aptitude Test could aid in high school guidance.
- As an objective measure of students: Tests external to the secondary school system, like the College Board's entrance examinations, were considered vital to objective and standardized college admission standards.
Critics of the use of intelligence tests to sort students argued that such a use threatened democratic ideals and principles by labeling people. Almost always, racial or ethnic minorities received lower test scores and therefore were typically tracked into vocational courses of study.
As historian Paula S. Fass has noted, intelligence testing and the science of individual differences allowed schools to adapt to a changing population. However, it did so by providing the foundation for differential curricula, expectations, and rewards. In so doing, schools as institutions diluted their understanding and enactment of the democratic principle in education. (Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989))
