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The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy
What do we know about the history, origin, design, and purpose of the SAT? Who invented it, and why? How did it acquire such a prominent and lasting position in American education? The Big Test reveals the ideas, people, and politics behind a fifty-year-old utopian social experiment that changed this country. Combining vibrant storytelling, vivid portraiture, and thematic analysis, Lemann shows why this experiment did not turn out as planned. It did create a new elite, but it also generated conflict and tension—and America's best educated, most privileged people are now leaders without followers. Drawing on unprecedented access to the Educational Testing Service’s archives, Lemann maintains that America’s meritocracy is neither natural nor inevitable, and that it does not apportion opportunity equally or fairly. His important study not only asks profound moral and political questions about the past and future of our society but also carries implications for current social and educational policy. As Brent Staples noted in his New York Times editorial column: “Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts announced that prospective students would no longer be required to submit SAT scores with their applications. . . . Holyoke's president, Joanne Creighton, was personally convinced by reading Nicholas Lemann's book, The Big Test, which documents how the SAT became a tool for class segregation.” All students of education, sociology, and recent U.S. history—especially those focused on testing, theories of learning, social stratification, or policymaking—will find this book fascinating and alarming. .
Price: $8.48
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Meritocracy and Economic Inequality
Most Americans strongly favor equality of opportunity if not outcome, but many are weary of poverty's seeming immunity to public policy. This helps to explain the recent attention paid to cultural and genetic explanations of persistent poverty, including claims that economic inequality is a function of intellectual ability, as well as more subtle depictions of the United States as a meritocracy where barriers to achievement are personal--either voluntary or inherited--rather than systemic. This volume of original essays by luminaries in the economic, social, and biological sciences, however, confirms mounting evidence that the connection between intelligence and inequality is surprisingly weak and demonstrates that targeted educational and economic reforms can reduce the income gap and improve the country's aggregate productivity and economic well-being. It also offers a novel agenda of equal access to valuable associations. Amartya Sen, John Roemer, Robert M. Hauser, Glenn Loury, Orley Ashenfelter, and others sift and analyze the latest arguments and quantitative findings on equality in order to explain how merit is and should be defined, how economic rewards are distributed, and how patterns of economic success persist across generations. Moving well beyond exploration, they draw specific conclusions that are bold yet empirically grounded, finding that schooling improves occupational success in ways unrelated to cognitive ability, that IQ is not a strong independent predictor of economic success, and that people's associations--their neighborhoods, working groups, and other social ties--significantly explain many of the poverty traps we observe. The optimistic message of this beautifully edited book is that important violations of equality of opportunity do exist but can be attenuated by policies that will serve the general economy. Policy makers will read with interest concrete suggestions for crafting economically beneficial anti-discrimination measures, enhancing educational and associational opportunity, and centering economic reforms in community-based institutions. Here is an example of some of our most brilliant social thinkers using the most advanced techniques that their disciplines have to offer to tackle an issue of great social importance. .
Price: $20.00
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Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations (Studies in Legal History)
The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale's past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education. Inspired by Yale's legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school's academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale's current celebrity possible..
Price: $36.99
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The Meritocracy Myth
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Meritocracy: A Love Story
"Meritocracy is a dramatic, riveting novel of our times."—Elizabeth HardwickIt is the end of the summer of 1966 and a small group of friends, recent Yale graduates, gather in a Maine summer cottage to say good-bye to one of their own, Harry Nolan, who is joining the Army. Harry and his bride Sascha represent to their friends the apex of their generation. Sascha has men falling for her "up and down the eastern seaboard," and Harry, a rich and fearless Californian, son of a senator, has his friends convinced that he will one day be president. That is, until their love and Harry's ambition unleash a spiral of events that becomes as fateful for all the characters as it is emblematic of the times they grew up in. Meritocracy is the story of a generation when it was young, caught at the moment when history arrived to exact a tragic and inevitable price..
Price: $7.65
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The Rise and Rise of Meritocracy
Fifty years after the term “meritocracy” was coined, this book asks where the idea of meritocracy has led.
- A team of commentators consider diverse topics such as family and meritocracy, meritocracy and ethnic minorities, and what is meant by talent
- Contains commentaries by a selection of researchers, activists and politicians, from Asa Briggs to David Willetts, on the origin, meaning and future of meritocracy
- Demonstrates that Michael Young, who wrote The Rise of the Meritocracy, was right to question the viability of political systems trying to organise themselves around the idea of meritocracy
- Essential reading for everyone interested in where we are going, and the future of New Labour itself
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Price: $25.33
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The Politics of Meritocracy in Malaysia
This is a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA DEPT OF NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A342024. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: The effort to achieve development in Malaysia raises the question of how to develop a country where inequality between racial groups is significant. Of the various efforts made to achieve this goal, the most important is the New Economic Policy (NEP) , a corrective policy to assist the Malays in socio- economic development. In essence, this was an affirmative action policy for a majority of the population that was economically behind the minority Chinese- Malaysians. However, the racial-oriented policy cannot respond effectively to the new problem of intra-racial inequality, which results from the policy itself. Although sustained through the rhetoric of racial equality, the NEP has created other implications, the intra-racial inequality and an uncompetitive community. In order to develop a more competitive economy, a meritocratic system emphasizing personal contributions rather than privileges should he investigated. This paper weighs the merits of affirmative action policies and meritocracy as approaches to national integration in Malaysia, and subsequently towards Malaysia's goal to he a fully industrialized country by 2020. This study finds that, due to the continuance of inter-racial disparity, Malaysian society is not prepared to implement total meritocracy within the next few years. The thesis identifies various steps needed to "level the playing field," that will require firm decisions by the government and sacrifices by the population..
Price: $35.95
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Voting on meritocracy [An article from: European Economic Review]
This digital document is a journal article from European Economic Review, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser. Description: This paper considers a setting where a resource such as education budget is to be distributed among agents. The latter differ in their ability to make use of the resource, and the issue is that of determining the allocation rule whereby the individual shares of the resource (may) depend on their relative efforts of obtaining it. The paper's focus is on endogenous determination, through voting, of the degree of meritocracy in the resource allocation system, which determines the marginal productivity of one's effort. It is found that a meritocratic system is expected to be supported by highly productive individuals and opposed by those with low productivity. When the decision making becomes less elitist and involves broader participation of population groups the support for meritocracy decreases. .
Price: $8.95
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