DIANE RAVITCH
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things as the effects of nuclear testing, birth order, junk food, and other
exogenous factors, the panel concluded that students were reading less
than they had in the past and writing less than they had in the past; that
homework had been substantially reduced; that textbooks had been
dumbed down; and that solid academi c courses had been replaced by a
proliferation of flurry electives in non-academic areas.
The panel implied, but did not say outright, perhaps for fear of giv–
ing offense, that the reforms of the 1960s produced a sharp decline in
academic achievement and in academic standards. Then as now, there was
reluctance to say anything critical about the 1960s, which is now seen in
retrospect as a fabu lous era, remembered for its idealism, its passion, its
sense of liberation and community. What the College Board's review
panel found, sadly, is that students are economic animals; they respond to
expectations, to requirements, and to rewards. Remove those, and most
students do not study, do not do their homework, do not take ad–
vanced courses, do not read more than they have to, do not write
much, and - compared to students who do all of those things - do not
perform well on academic tests.
Well, that was one way of understanding what happened in the
1960s, but there were other ways to make sense of it. One distinguished
educator wrote an article asserting that we should welcome a decline in
test scores because it reflected the increased number of minority students
who were applying for college; the more the scores fell, he reasoned, the
more successful we were as a society! This argument presumed that it was
somehow axiomatic that minority students could not be educated to
higher levels of achievement and that their participation in the test-tak–
ing pool wou ld necessarily - and happily - drag down the overall aver–
age scores. His argument also ignored the fact that the number of high–
scoring students had declined precipitously, both in absolute numbers and
in proportion, even though the number of students taking the SAT was
stable. Was this too a cause for joy? He didn't say.
Another response to the falling scores was to say that the test was
irrelevant and also culturally biased, so it didn't matter what the scores
were. Objective tests became a punching bag during the 1960s, and took
a pummeling from critics from which they never fully recovered. There
was reason enough to dislike multiple-choice tests, even if one is not on
the left or politically correct; Jacques Barzun was one of the fiercest
critics, because of the mechanical, anti-intellectual presentation of
knowledge that is central to the multiple-choice test. The critics on the
left shared Barzun's complaint but went further: the tests were no good
because there were widely disparate outcomes for whites and blacks, and
for boys and girls. It became a cardinal principle that any test that pro-
