After 1968 there was a demand on Education to solve specific, immediate problems. It became difficult to obtain funds for curriculum development unless a proposal could be shown to be relevant to these pressing problems.

By 1968 Zacharias and most other scientists had moved off the Washington DC stage. Nixon dismantled the President’s Science Advisory Committee and put nothing in its place. Science Advising never again achieved as significant a role in the upper levels of government. The most scientifically sophisticated, technologically dependent nation on Earth has not since had a useful mechanism to provide its leaders day-to-day policy advice on science and technology.

Jerrold deeply believed “that the country will falter if Public Education fails.” The prospects were dark. Years later, Zacharias testifying before Congress, commented on the failure to follow up on the educational innovations of the period 1958-1968.

“Any farmer knows not to pull up the seedlings to look at the roots. Not to desiccate and impoverish the healthy plants as they are beginning to grow. The jobs that remain to be done are ten to one hundred larger than what had gone on in the first ten years.”

Jerrold moved his base of operations to the Education Development Center in a reconditioned red brick factory building in the town of Newton Massachusetts.

There was a massive obstacle on the road to good education. The standardized examination. All the effort that could be mustered. All the ingenuity, skill, cleverness and good taste would be useless if students still had to pass traditional examinations that stressed the wrong aspects of learning. The examination was still the tail that wagged the dog.

“I feel emotionally toward the testing industry as I would toward any other Merchant of Death. I feel that way because of what they do to the kids. I’m not saying they murder every child. Only 20% of them. Testing has distorted their ambitions. Distorted their careers. 95% of the American public has taken an ability test. It’s not something that should be put in the hands of commercial enterprises. I have often referred to tests as the Gestapo of education systems. Uniformity and Rigidity require Enforcement. So I have chosen a most denigrating title for the enforcement agency. Its hallmark is arbitrariness, secrecy, intolerance and cruelty.

Those tests control what goes into the textbooks. And what is in the textbooks is what goes on the tests. It’s what I call a vicious circle. It isn’t vicious because the people are vicious. They’re not vicious. They’re just stupid.”

The achievement tests were culture bound. Children of other cultures, minority children, inner-city children, the “deprived and the segregated” all were placed at a permanent disadvantage by a system that pretended to measures something with precision that was far more complex than the would-be measures understood.

Jerrold did not claim that education should do without tests of some kind. Children, teachers, schools, principals, school systems, curricula all need some kind of evaluation. Both to improve the overall system through feedback and to enable decision-making processes to take place.

“You can’t make tests unless you know a way to find out what a student DOES know and does NOT want to do and is PROUD of. The present testing arrangements are just ordeals with pencil and paper to try to find out what the student CAN’T do. Now I can’t play the saxophone and I can’t speak Russian and I can list more things that I can’t do than I can do, by a lot.”

Jack S. Goldstein’s A Different Sort Of Time: The Life Of Jerrold R. Zacharias/MIT 1992.