COLUMNISTS Stanley Kaplan, the self-taught educator who died at 90 this week, can lay a claim to having reshaped American society. He is a large part of the reason that the majority of American schoolchildren are back behind their desks this week and not running around on beaches and baseball fields until mid-September, as was traditional until quite recently. The school year starts earlier because the main project of much public education in the US is to prepare students for big standardised tests given each spring. The more time to prepare, the better. It was Kaplan who showed that huge standardised tests could be effectively studied for.
Historically, the most important of these have been the SATs, or Scholastic Aptitude Tests. The SATs are the motor of the top half of the US social system – or so they appear to nervous 18-year-olds on the verge of getting sorted into professional and social niches through the process of college admissions. Yet long after Kaplan began helping teenagers prepare for the SATs in 1946, the view persisted that cramming was pointless. The tests were supposed to measure innate aptitude rather than anything teachable. Practically everyone except Kaplan’s students believed this, even the Federal Trade Commission. After years of Kaplan’s boasting that he could raise scores significantly, the FTC decided in the late 1970s to investigate him. The implication was that Kaplan was engaged in false advertising. But the FTC’s report, published in 1979, turned into an advertisement beyond Kaplan’s wildest dreams. The body found that Kaplan’s system raised scores by about 25 points on both mathematical and verbal tests – a decisive margin in many college admissions decisions.
