Education: Inside The New SAT

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If that balancing act is awkward, Caperton relishes another part of his job--his nascent role as the nation's curricular impresario. "I didn't want to run a testing company," he says. "But when I saw what the College Board was and, more important, what it could be, I saw the power to do much more than they were doing in the past to improve education." Under his watch, the board is issuing quite specific recommendations about what schools should teach--for instance, math lessons should include radical equations (such as 5 (square root of x) + 14 = 20; x = 1.44). Also, the board says most students should double the amount of time they spend writing (a laudable but pricey goal: some schools will have to initiate a round of hiring, since their teachers barely have time to grade kids' work as it is). A recent College Board brochure expansively declares, "The skills evaluated by the new SAT are precisely those needed by all students today." All?

But in a historical sense, Caperton's ambitious agenda for the big test is appropriate: 77 years ago, the exam began life as a tool of social change. The most significant early champion of the SAT was Harvard president James Conant, who, Lemann writes, disliked achievement tests because "they favored rich boys whose parents could buy them top-flight high-school instruction." Conant helped the SAT grow into the behemoth it is today precisely because it was different.

Today Atkinson and Caperton have launched another great social experiment with the SAT. This time, the idea is that the test's rigorous new curricular demands will lift all boats--that all schools will improve because they want their students to do well on the test. Schools have long tried to prepare kids for the SAT, but education experts scorned the practice of openly teaching to the test. Now it's the mission of the College Board that every school should teach to the SAT. "I would say that the most important aspect of this test is sending a real message back to kids on how to prepare for college," says Atkinson. It's not clear what happens to students in schools that won't hear, or can't afford to heed, his message. --With reporting by Anne Berryman/Athens, Laura Randall/Cincinnati and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles