A Faithful Mirror: Reflections on the College Board and Education in America (review)

"The institutions of . . . education in any nation are always a faithful mirror in which are sharply reflected the national history and character" (Inaugural Address of Charles William Eliot, President, Harvard College, October 19, 1869). A Faithful Mirror: Reflections on the College Board and Education in America is a collection of eleven essays commissioned to celebrate the College Board's centennial in 2000. The volume uses the board as a lens through which to view American higher educational history throughout the twentieth century and before.

Critical issues are explored, for example: how to preserve merit and academic excellence while ensuring equity and access, how best to organize the transition from secondary to higher education, the relative place of worthiness and need in student aid, the balance between educational mission and institutional survival, and the relative importance of achievement versus intellectual promise. As editor Michael Johanek states in the introduction, answers to these and other dilemmas have shaped American higher education over the past century; and we can learn from the trade-offs made by earlier generations.

These essays are valuable reading for scholars of higher education and for all who participate in and/or care about American colleges and universities and, indeed, about the entire K-16 system. The essays cover from colonial and even medieval times to today. Each provides insight into the topics covered. I am not a historical scholar and therefore cannot definitively evaluate the unique contributions of each chapter. However, my direct experience as a long-time college researcher and administrator and the thorough documentation each author provides convince me that each essay in its own way carries an important message. As Ellen Condliffe Lagemann states in the foreword, "The essays look to history to provide powerful reminders that, for all the urgency of the questions facing us now, there is a record of generations before us struggling with issues that were once just as urgent and just as compelling" (p. x).

The book is divided into five parts. Section 1, "The Struggle to Define the Educated Person," includes three essays: David L. Angus and Jeffrey E. Mirel's "Presidents, Professors, and Lay Boards of Education: The Struggle for Influence over the American High School, 1860-1910," Harold S. Wechsler's "Eastern Standard Time: High School —College Collaboration and Admission to College, 1860-1930," and Robert Orrill's "Grades 11-14: The Heartland or Wasteland of American Education?"

These three address the complex interconnections between K-12 and higher education from early times. Angus and Mirel examine the period when high schools were growing and solidifying into their current shape. Declining college enrollments and nonexamination admission in some colleges reduced the influence often attributed to higher education, reduced the dominance of the classics, and increased the control of high schools over curricula. Lay boards of education dominated the curricula of high schools until the 1894 report of the Committee of Ten began a movement toward professionalization of curricular planning.

Wechsler examines the progression in college admissions from the 1870s to the 1930s—from oral exams to written exams to certificate programs to the College Entrance Examination Board exams to the Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs).

Robert Orrill describes the Ford Foundation-supported school/college collaboration among Andover, Exeter, Lawrenceville, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, which was the origin of what in 1955 became the Advanced Placement Program (AP). He argues that college admissions had to struggle with the rapidly developing high schools (from below) and the growing research mission of graduate schools and research universities (from above).

Section 2, "Merit, Minorities, and Admission Debates," is the most timely of the sections during this summer of 2003 with the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions about affirmative action at the University of Michigan. The three essays are Joseph F. Kett...