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| James Solomon arriving to take the GRE From State and the Columbia Record, July 28, 1963. |
In my article on James Solomon and the desegregation of the University of South Carolina, I wasn't able to include the above photo in my AMS Notices article (photo permissions...). This is a real shame because it played in an important role in researching the article. This news item was the first time I found a documentation about Solomon as a mathematician. (Most of the written material focuses on his work in public service: Director of Social Services, member of a School Board,....)
The photo also captures a lot about desegregation. On a first viewing, I thought this just showed a normal if stressful experience that most math students go though. Upon more careful consideration, I think Solomon's experience was totally different.
First, consider why Solomon had to take the exam. Right now our PhD program requires general GRE scores and makes Subject GRE scores optional, but prior to 1954, the situation would have been different: the university essentially had an open-enrollment policy for white South Carolina residents. What happened in 1954? Brown v. the Board of Education made it illegal for U of SC to reject applicants on the basis of race, so university officials implemented a policy of requiring standardized admission scores, in part, to create a tool for restricting the admission of African American students.
A friend of mine asked me, how do I know this? I know this because the officials themselves wrote that this was their purpose. While the policy was presented to the public as an innovative policy that would help the university maintain academic standards in the face of increasing enrollment, there was a second line of reasoning that was kept private. Check out the following excerpt from a report to the president about using standardized tests:
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(The C. E. E. B. is the College Entrance Examination Board or what's usually called the College Board today.)
So one of the purposes of the exams policy was to make it less likely for the NAACP to intervene if the university denies admission to Blacks. The other "whites-only" schools in South Carolina implemented similar policies around the same time. The university archives have correspondence between the different university presidents expressing concern over desegregation and exploring implementing standardized tests as a way to mitigate the impact.
An interesting question that I can't fully answer is, how did school officials figure out how to do this? This use of standardized test is a relatively complicated scheme, and anyone who has interacted with university administration knows that universities often struggle to implement very basic policy changes. (I think U of SC has spent a semester and counting trying to figure out whether students should be allowed to miss 10% of their classes or if 10% should be increased....).
R. Scott Baker's book Paradoxes of Desegregation sheds important light on what happened. The idea of using standardized tests to maintain racially discriminatory practices originated in the 1940s in response to a lawsuit over public school teacher salaries. The state government had separate pay scales for Black and White teachers with Blacks being paid substantially less than Whites. The NAACP filed a lawsuit and the courts found this policy failed the "equal" part of "separate but equal". State officials responded by replacing the old pay scale with one based on scores on a national tests (the NTE which has evolved in the current Praxis test).
By setting test cutoff scores appropriately, state officials found out that they could essentially reproduce the old racially discriminatory pay scale system while complying with the law.
The above table shows how the scores were used. The grades "A, B, C, D" correspond to pay grades. The cut-off scores are set so that 98.85% of Whites received higher salaries than 49.14% of the Blacks. The table is taken from the University President's archived papers on university entrance exams. Consider why the table is in the archives. The data doesn't have anything to do with college admissions or anything else the President is for responsible. Presumably the President had collected this material since it served as a model for how university officials hoped to use the SAT and GRE scores.
A lot of the specifics of how university officials developed out the exam policy are unclear to me. For example, did university officials develop the policy themselves or did they collaborate with other people? With the earlier N.T.E. exams, the pay policies were created by the South Carolina School Committee which, despite its name, was a committee within the state government charged with maintaining segregation in education. Baker argues that the policy was largely developed by a prominant lawyer, David Robinson. I did not see any material related to Robinson in the President's papers, but President Russell (who was a career politician) would have known Robinson socially, and may have worked with him earlier (in, for example, creating the teacher pay policy).
It is also unclear to me how involved the testing organization ETS was in all this. The chair of the exam committee traveled to New Jersey to meet with ETS officials and learn more about how their exams worked, but I can't find any documentation about what was discussed. On one hand, ETS's public record on segregation is quite positive: Wheeler's book A Campaign of Quiet Persuasion documents how ETS officials worked hard to ensure that their testing centers in the South were integrated. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that ETS officials wouldn't have figured out what U of SC was trying to do and I find it easy to believe that they would have comprised on politics for the sake of their business (expanding testing to the South represented a big financial opportunity). Baker was able to document that this was the basic dynamic with the NTE score (which organized by an organization that was later incorporated into ETS).
South Carolina's policy of requiring SAT and GRE scores for admission was innovative. They were the first school in the South to do this, and the idea quickly spread to other schools in the region. Presumably this was done for the same reason it was done in South Carolina: it provided a mechanism for restricting the admission of Black students. T. D. Russell's article "To keep negros out..." shows that this was the case at UT Austin, but situation at other schools seems largely unexplored. Great work for future researchers.
So one of the purposes of the exams policy was to make it less likely for the NAACP to intervene if the university denies admission to Blacks. The other "whites-only" schools in South Carolina implemented similar policies around the same time. The university archives have correspondence between the different university presidents expressing concern over desegregation and exploring implementing standardized tests as a way to mitigate the impact.
An interesting question that I can't fully answer is, how did school officials figure out how to do this? This use of standardized test is a relatively complicated scheme, and anyone who has interacted with university administration knows that universities often struggle to implement very basic policy changes. (I think U of SC has spent a semester and counting trying to figure out whether students should be allowed to miss 10% of their classes or if 10% should be increased....).
R. Scott Baker's book Paradoxes of Desegregation sheds important light on what happened. The idea of using standardized tests to maintain racially discriminatory practices originated in the 1940s in response to a lawsuit over public school teacher salaries. The state government had separate pay scales for Black and White teachers with Blacks being paid substantially less than Whites. The NAACP filed a lawsuit and the courts found this policy failed the "equal" part of "separate but equal". State officials responded by replacing the old pay scale with one based on scores on a national tests (the NTE which has evolved in the current Praxis test).
By setting test cutoff scores appropriately, state officials found out that they could essentially reproduce the old racially discriminatory pay scale system while complying with the law.
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| Table of data on teacher exam scores From the University President's archives in the South Caroliniana Library |
The above table shows how the scores were used. The grades "A, B, C, D" correspond to pay grades. The cut-off scores are set so that 98.85% of Whites received higher salaries than 49.14% of the Blacks. The table is taken from the University President's archived papers on university entrance exams. Consider why the table is in the archives. The data doesn't have anything to do with college admissions or anything else the President is for responsible. Presumably the President had collected this material since it served as a model for how university officials hoped to use the SAT and GRE scores.
A lot of the specifics of how university officials developed out the exam policy are unclear to me. For example, did university officials develop the policy themselves or did they collaborate with other people? With the earlier N.T.E. exams, the pay policies were created by the South Carolina School Committee which, despite its name, was a committee within the state government charged with maintaining segregation in education. Baker argues that the policy was largely developed by a prominant lawyer, David Robinson. I did not see any material related to Robinson in the President's papers, but President Russell (who was a career politician) would have known Robinson socially, and may have worked with him earlier (in, for example, creating the teacher pay policy).
It is also unclear to me how involved the testing organization ETS was in all this. The chair of the exam committee traveled to New Jersey to meet with ETS officials and learn more about how their exams worked, but I can't find any documentation about what was discussed. On one hand, ETS's public record on segregation is quite positive: Wheeler's book A Campaign of Quiet Persuasion documents how ETS officials worked hard to ensure that their testing centers in the South were integrated. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that ETS officials wouldn't have figured out what U of SC was trying to do and I find it easy to believe that they would have comprised on politics for the sake of their business (expanding testing to the South represented a big financial opportunity). Baker was able to document that this was the basic dynamic with the NTE score (which organized by an organization that was later incorporated into ETS).
South Carolina's policy of requiring SAT and GRE scores for admission was innovative. They were the first school in the South to do this, and the idea quickly spread to other schools in the region. Presumably this was done for the same reason it was done in South Carolina: it provided a mechanism for restricting the admission of Black students. T. D. Russell's article "To keep negros out..." shows that this was the case at UT Austin, but situation at other schools seems largely unexplored. Great work for future researchers.
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