Andrew Brusso Behind The SAT Analysis

“Behind the SAT” by Andrew Brusso tells the story of the test’s rise to importance and how a device meant to eradicate an American class system instead helped create a new one. James Conant, a former president of Harvard and the father of testing, believed that in the fifty years preceding 1940s the United States went from being a “classless, democratic society to one that was relentlessly falling under the control of a hereditary aristocracy” (Brusso 53). Finally, Jefferson’s dream of a natural aristocracy could be put into effect. Conant believed that the SAT would determine and then select this natural aristocracy, creating a “new frontier for opportunity” (Brusso 53). What he wanted was to choose these natural elites fairly and precisely, send them on to universities, and leave the rest of the public to “a more modest yeoman’s existence based upon education through high school...” (Brusso 54). So this school system, Brusso concludes, would decisively assess students’ abilities and assign them to roles at an early age. …show more content…
Now, due to the combination of public education and intelligence testing, it was possible to “scan the entire population and fit the natural aristocrats with the glass slipper” (Brusso 54). In an article that Conant wrote he described this aristocrat as “The American Radical”, and he predicted that they will be a defender of equality. In addition, he believed that the natural aristocracy could never become a hereditary one because the “American Radical” will reorder the haves and have nots to generate a fluid social