476 - Two Sanguine Samplers: Too Much Efficiency?

Two Sanguine Samplers:
Too Much Efficiency?
By James N. Lapsley

"Both Chauncey and Gallup are administrators in addition to being social scientists, and as such they find waste abhorrent. As heirs of a society dominated by economic theory and concern (shared also by communist societies), we share their abhorrence and applaud their aim of cutting waste in brain usage and politics. But perhaps we have come to the place in our history when we must seriously entertain the notion that waste may be constructive under some circumstances."

PRINCETON, New Jersey, has more venerable institutions than those associated with the authors of these two books (The Miracle Ahead, by George Gallup, New York: Harper and Row, 1964, 205 pp., $3.95; Testing: Its Place in Education Today, by Henry Chauncey and John E. Dobbin, New York: Harper and Row, 1964, 223 pp., $4.95), but none more influential in the lives of so many people. George Gallup, whose name is almost synonymous with public-opinion polls and research, has for many years been associated with a succession of institutions devoted to such activity, collectively and popularly known as "the Gallup Poll." Chauncey and Dobbin are President and Project Director, respectively, of the Educational Testing Service, which constructs and scores a large percentage of the standardized tests used in the American educational system, and hence is even more influential, although less well-known, than the Gallup Poll.

Both represent the impact of the behavioral sciences on cultural patterns, though the influence of neither is direct, since both are engaged in the systematic sampling of behavior and reporting it. Through these reports, however, a major election may be affected,

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or an educational career decisively altered. Hence our society is learning to listen with increasingly attentive ears to the pollsters and the testers, and to adjust its behavior accordingly.

I

The growing influence of these experts in the mass application of technology to the study of human behavior has not escaped the notice of critics who have complained of its dehumanizing and depersonalizing effects. This is especially true of Educational Testing, which has been under fire from the beginning of its history over a half century ago. Recently the attack has been stepped up, due largely to the emphasis placed upon test results in determining winners of large scholarship programs, such as the National Merit Scholarships. Charges that the tests are inadequate and unfair, penalizing the brighter students and rewarding inferior ones who are adept test takers, have been leveled. Further, it is charged that tests are becoming a dominant factor in the selection of students by colleges and graduate schools, and that this is an unfair and unreliable procedure, in view of the alleged limited, and often biased, nature of the tests. Personality and vocational tests have received even more harsh treatment than strictly educational tests, especially from writers critical of their use in business and industry. While the pollsters have been regarded with some skepticism both by experts and by the public, due to the extremely exposed position in which they operate, so that their occasional predictive failures are known by millions almost within the hour, they have not, on the whole, been under the heavy fire which the testers have been experiencing.

This accounts, in part, for the fact that Gallup's book is far more casual and relaxed in tone than is Chauncey's, which is actually a closely reasoned and carefully written defense of educational testing. Gallup, on the other hand, has produced a volume which ranges over vast stretches of human and pre-human experience (from the history of the human brain to how to induce people to spend time in libraries), and attempts to probe into the future in some crucial areas for the continued health of our culture, and of mankind generally. Since it is more general, thus affording a kind of umbrella under which Chauncey's narrower and more exacting effort may be seen in relation to some other issues in education, it will be discussed first.

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II

If the public and the social critics have been more neutral about George Gallup's opinion research enterprise, there is nothing neutral about Gallup himself as he views our society. Though the title of this volume, The Miracle Ahead, suggests that Gallup sees the "miracle" in all but actualized potential in the present, this is far from the case. Rather "the miracle ahead," he says, will only become reality if his own somewhat radical suggestions in four categories are followed. These categories are education, collective effort, the new methodology (by which he means the application of statistical method to reports of human behavior), and the problem of change. Actually, Gallup devotes more than twice as much space to the first two categories as he does to the latter two, so our attention will be centered on his suggestions regarding education and what he calls collective effort, by which he means more citizen participation in the affairs of local government, and the use of special committees to solve difficult problems.

American education is in a very bad way, according to Dr. Gallup, and, if one accepts his criteria, his documentation is irrefragable. Except for technical and scientific training, which is admitted to be excellent, he claims that all of the four major goals of education endorsed by leading educators, knowledge, skills (mostly language), citizenship, and intellectual curiosity, have been attained by so few Americans in such slight degree that the process of education must be called a failure. This contention is supported by citations from many studies, but primarily from one conducted by Gallup himself. One example from this pit of ignorance which he excavated is that only one high school graduate in six could correctly identify Sigmund Freud; another was that fewer than half of all graduates (high school and college) could name the Chief justice of the Supreme Court.

As a remedy for this appalling situation, Dr. Gallup proposes that our schools concentrate on the "direct training of mental abilities," rather than on the impartation of information, or any other standard goal. Such abilities he conceives as concentration, perception, organization, objectivity, problem solving and decision making, and creativity. He offers some concrete suggestions about implementing these which appear to have practical merit, such as the introduction of the case-history approach in the elementary and secondary

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levels, though the "direct" training of objectivity and creativity strike me as naïve. Here a too simple model of human functioning, restricted mainly to conscious and cognitive functions, appears to have blinded him. On the other hand, his call for a return to more reading and writing, though difficult to put into practice, has cogency.

His proposals in the category of "collective effort" are mainly aimed at getting more disinterested groups at all levels involved in the problems confronting our nation. Here the British Royal Commission, made up of experts in a given field under investigation, is one of his models (our own recently dismissed Surgeon General's Commission on the effects of tobacco might have served). Again these proposals sound in some instances naïve, but as he suggests, the costs of trying one, such as the kind of problem-solving committee on which the membership is temporary, but the committee is always reconstituted until the problem (such as delinquency) is solved, is many thousands of times less costly than continuing to live with the problem.

Gallup has really nothing new to say about the third and fourth categories. We have come to accept, warily, the uses of statistics, and we know that planned change must come slowly.

The book is marred by some questionable statements, such as the assertion that prefrontal lobotomy leaves persons able to lead a "nearly normal" life (p. 21), and that students who parrot back what the professors and the texts say always get the best grades (p. 67). Nevertheless, as a call to mankind, and to our nation in particular to begin to use more of the ten billion brain cells man has had since pre-history in more efficient ways, it has genuine bite and must be taken seriously.

III

Testing: Its Place in Education Today is by contrast much more narrowly focused, and to some extent is based on premises that are challenged by Gallup-the principal one being that the products of our present educational system are somehow capable of significant differential assessment. Moreover, the Educational Testing Service is an integral part of the educational establishment which Gallup is attacking. As the builder and/or scorer of such milestones and road forks in the educational process as the School and College Ability Test, used all the way from the fourth grade to college, the Scholastic

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Aptitude Test, administered by the College Entrance Examination Board and used by hundreds of colleges as an admissions screening device, and the Graduate Record Examination, used by scores of graduate and professional schools for the same purpose, ETS, as it is known in schools and colleges throughout the country, is virtually indispensable to the system. Thus we could, not expect Chauncey and Dobbin to be disinterested in their approach. We can expect that they would offer an adequate defense of testing, and this is what they in fact do, if certain premises, like the one mentioned above, are granted to them.

Further, and even more valuable, the book contains descriptions of the various types of tests now in use and of the various uses to which they are being put. Indeed, the stated purpose of the book is to give parents and teachers information about testing in plain English which is not available anywhere else. In this the authors succeed.

The various types of tests discussed are tests of learning ability, which includes both tests of "school" learning, like those mentioned above, and so-called "intelligence" tests, which purport to measure learning ability also in areas not stressed in the schools such as space relationships and perception. Achievement tests are used for measuring the progressive acquisition of skills and knowledge taught in the schools and are more closely geared to the curriculum.

The uses of tests are described as judging learning capacity, planning instruction, checking on progress, discovering learning problems, improving and assessing teaching (this to be used only with extreme caution lest the tests become arbiters of the teachers), admissions selection, and vocational guidance. The authors stress the general reliability (they yield a repeatable, predictable score) and the validity (they measure what they are intended to measure and correlate highly with the grade point average) of the better educational tests, as opposed to the lack of validity and reliability characteristic of personality tests. This point is true, but somewhat exaggerated in the book. On the other hand, they admit that when compared with tests done in the laboratories of the "hard" sciences, they are very inexact, like a mother "feeling a child's forehead to determine if the child has a fever."

Abuses in the use of standardized tests (so called because the contents have been fixed only after experimentation in many locales and

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situations, presenting the same tasks to each student; not, in theory at least, because they represent an absolute norm of knowledge) are acknowledged, especially in the earlier days of testing. Yet even today the authors admit that pin-point numerical scores are often treated as though they represented eternal verities, when in fact they represent the approximate result of a sample of the students' performance at a given time. Furthermore, tests are not always appropriately selected at the school level, so that students are sometimes examined on material with which they have little or no acquaintance. The authors further stress that standardized tests should be but one of several criteria to determine promotion and admission-though in fact such tests often become the decisive criterion, especially in scholarship competition, since they afford the only means of direct comparison of applicants. Additional abuses occur, not so much at cost to the students, as to the teachers and the system as a whole, when standardized tests are used to assess teaching without safeguards, such as teacher participation in the selection.

Chauncey and Dobbin think that all these abuses can be successfully avoided by the construction of good tests by teams of experts, and by responsible and intelligent use of tests by local authorities. Good tests are characterized by multiple samples of performance asked of the student and by skillfully constructed multiple choice questions, which are vigorously, and in the main successfully, defended in a lengthy appendix against those who insist that such questions are unfair and encourage indiscriminant guessing. The authors are completely opposed to the use of essays as a measure of learning (except for skill in essay writing), though presumably they would regard the use of essay writing as a learning exercise, which is advocated by Gallup, as another matter.

The continued stress in the book on the "right" way to use and interpret tests, as opposed to several "wrong" ways, suggests that the authors think that there is much irresponsible use of tests in the schools. Their repeated insistence that tests do not give an exact and absolute measure of "intelligence" or knowledge, but only an estimate, based on a relatively small sample, of the relative performance of certain tasks related to learning, suggests that this is the point at which much of the irresponsibility lies. The tendency of human nature to absolutize the relative gives further support to this view.

Urging teachers, administrators, and counselors to be responsible

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in the use of tests and having them become more responsible are unfortunately not likely to be related directly as cause and effect. Here is a place where the church, which has within its membership a very large percentage of teachers and administrators involved, can perform a genuine service in the realm of social ethics. Emphasis on the dangers inherent in standardized testing, unless conducted responsibly (which often means additional work for teachers and administrators, and certainly greater attention to detail) in various study groups can have great impact. In any case this book is worthwhile reading for pastors, teachers, and parents.

IV

There are two larger issues raised by these books, as I see them. They are related; and they are not new. They are generally raised whenever the application of behavioral sciences is discussed. Nevertheless it seems worthwhile to raise them, since some different perspectives are brought to bear by these volumes.

The first is the question of the model or image of man which seems to be assumed by both writers. Although neither explicitly states such a model or image, the cognitive, rational, conscious, and volitional aspects of man are those which are assumed to be dominant and functional. Gallup repeatedly expresses his impatience with people who are stubborn and irrational, and Chauncey indicates the difficulty of ascertaining the roots of problems in learning, but neither entertains the notion that emotional and drive factors may be at the root of these phenomena. This seems to be a serious defect in both works having important consequences for the programs offered by both. Gallup in particular seems oblivious to the fact that security needs lead to vested interest, even in "Impartial" committees, and Chauncey does not take sufficient account of the potential for vested interest of his own organization or discuss the question of safeguards against it. For in addition to the danger of having the testing services become the arbiter of the educational process, to which we have alluded, there is the danger that such enterprises as ETS -will become so identified with the system, even though they do not entirely shape it, that they will resist changes of the kind that Gallup suggests, or of any radical kind. Certainly if the proposals set forth in The Miracle Ahead in the field of elementary and secondary education were adopted, the present set of scholastic aptitude

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tests and achievement tests would have to be radically revised, if not scrapped altogether. (Hopefully the presumably more basic I.Q. tests would not require drastic overhauling.)

Perhaps the testers would be willing to assume this task cheerfully, but the history of human institutions suggests otherwise. Aggressive, possessive, and security needs are skillful generals in a battle between retentative conservatism and progressive change in the minds of those in established power structures. They often outflank good intentions and appear frequently in the uniform of the forces of enlightenment.

This leads us to the second of the two larger issues, that of how the mass application of behavioral science techniques can be -responsibly efficient. The aim of both Chauncey and of Gallup can best be described in general terms as increased efficiency--on the one hand, efficient in evaluation of the products and process of education and, on the other, of efficiency in the use of brains and talent in the betterment of society. The question must be raised whether maximum efficiency is compatible with sufficient responsibility to keep the balance of forces hitherto necessary to our society truly balanced. This is the familiar issue of the concentration versus the dispersion of power centers.

Both Chauncey and Gallup are administrators in addition to being social scientists, and as such they find waste abhorrent. As heirs of a society dominated by economic theory and concern (shared also by communist societies), we share their abhorrence and applaud their aim of cutting waste in brain usage and politics. But perhaps we have come to the place in our history when we must seriously entertain the notion that waste may be constructive under some circumstances. Aside from waste due to ignorance, inertia, and ineptitude deplored by us all, there are three main sources of waste in the social system. One is multiple (rather than single) centers of regulation and control. Both Chauncey and Gallup will allow that some of this is good, especially in view of the heterogeneous nature of our educational system, not to mention the various needs of municipalities. The other two are gaps in the regulatory system, which lead to evaluation of persons and performance which is apt to be personal and ideosyncratic, and competition, in which energy is directed by one segment of society at another, when it might have been used to further the common aims directly. (Readers will recognize some prin-

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ciples identified with conservative thinking, though conservatives seldom think of themselves as wasteful.)

Both writers are very much opposed to these two latter kinds of waste, and their books are largely directed toward their eradication. Yet I believe if we face the issue head on, we find that efficiency in the social system will be maximal, in the sense that the basic aims of society are carried out, if waste is not minimal but optimal. I intend no comfort in saying this to those who would retreat into the past, whether in church or state, or even to those who find the present not capable of improvement, but I think the irrational, slothful; and self-aggrandizing aspects of man's nature can best be dealt with by deliberately allowing for the possibility of waste in the system-though such "waste pockets" should be hemmed in by careful controls and limited to the "constructive" types of waste mentioned above.

Waste seems to have been always a terribly salient part of nature, and even the Christian interpretation of history hardly presents a picture of efficient productivity. Anyone intimately acquainted with the process of maturation in human beings knows that apparent waste is characteristic of childhood and adolescence. While these are not models for imitation in the social system, they provide clues that the organic universe doesn't operate by economic laws, unless these are construed very broadly.

Where are such "waste pockets" to be? To answer this question would require more space, research, and admittedly, thought. Perhaps more personal evaluation of student activity and political party realignment (which seems to be taking place) would be examples. At the present time, in spite of the foregoing caveat, both the church and society as a whole have much to learn from these two sanguine samplers, who have learned to put advances in human knowledge to work in the sphere of mass behavior. Though we may think them too sanguine at points, their responsible use of knowledge and power encourages us to trust them and hope that they can impart some such responsibility to their colleagues and successors.