Abstract
The effort expended in the gathering, analyzing, and disseminating of educational data on a national level has waxed and waned since the 1867 establishment of a federal agency for these purposes. The issues which prompted the 1866–1867 Congressional debates—fear of federal control of education, state, and local accountability for expenditure of federal funds and quality of data collected at the national level—are still with us. Events such as the launching of Sputnik in 1957 and the report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983 yielded increased public attention to the performance of the educational system.
This Paper was presented as part of the Educational Testing Service “Statistics Day” on April 27, 1985. It draws heavily from the earlier work (Wainer et al., 1985) that was done in collaboration with Paul Holland, Paul Rosenbaum, Spencer Swinton, and Minhwei Wang.
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Wainer, H. (1986). The SAT as a Social Indicator: A Pretty Bad Idea. In: Wainer, H. (eds) Drawing Inferences from Self-Selected Samples. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4976-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4976-4_2
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