The Times does not spell this out, noting in passing that “because of its tax designation [Crossroads GPS] is supposed to focus primarily on issues rather than candidates,” but not finishing that thought (and if doesn’t, it could lose its tax designation, i.e., that which allows it to keep its donors secret.) The only account I found that makes this point explicitly is at Salon, from Alex Pareene, who put it this way:
I am always in favor of more document dumps and FOIA requests and damning information about our government, but the obvious purpose of Wikicountability is to foment misleading talking points.
Well, actually, the point of Wikicountability is to allow Rove’s nonprofit “educational” 501(c)(4) to maintain its nonprofit status by pretending to be doing something nonpolitical with 50 percent of the money they’ve raised from secret donors.
If not “the point” of Wikicountability, this—that Crossroads GPS must do “social welfare” work in addition to funding attack ads during elections in order to keep on keeping its donors secret—is certainly a point, and one that should be mentioned in any report on the group’s non-election-related activities. This is the second time I’ve noticed the Times failing to do so.
My email to Jonathan Mahler, author of the cover article on education in The New York Times Sunday Magazine this week, with my comment on the lead Kaplan story at The Washington Post.
Jonathan:
The Washington Post is playing games with its Kaplan coverage by not responding to email and failing to post reasonable comment. (If you see anything wrong with my comment below, I would like to know what it is). The Kaplan formulas are dangerous for American education. Ironically, WikiLeaks, which has done the US a favor by exposing the ineptitude in International Relations thinking in the country--vividly manifest in Yemen--is being punished, while Kaplan goes free. Reckless endangerment of national security. A Kaplan specialty. Cheap writing formulas. Goofy parasitic trash in teaching and test prep. The worst company in America. The fact is that in America excellence is being driven out by such junk as American school rhetoric. At the epicenter of the frauds in education squats Kaplan.
Clayton Burns PhD Vancouver 604 222 1286.
[It should be possible for reporters to understand why Kaplan is unworthy of any association with The Washington Post.
It should be, but it is impossible. It is called a vicious circle: Despite the elaborate and endless reporting of The New York Times on education in the city, the editors and reporters just can't get to square one.
The cover story in The NYT Sunday Magazine this week is on Middle School 223 in the South Bronx. Yet if the reporter had been able to think at all he would have realized that since the principal believes in Kaplan, his ideas on education are ridiculous: "Saquan...qualified for a prep course...for New York's specialized high-school test...(Run by Kaplan, the six-week course cost [principal] Gonzalez $8,000.)" (55)
(Now, $8,000 would buy a lot of books and high-quality tutoring time, if the tutors existed.) New York should be ashamed of test design without a sound curriculum, and Kaplan should be investigated for fraud.
What reporters can't grasp--and probably never will in one billion years--is that these systems are pathological at the root. If we take the best weekend text I saw this week in Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times--a one-page "Lives" by Elizabeth D. Samet in The NYT Magazine--we will see a deceptively simple portrait of a coincidence: Just as the West Point English professor was about to send out a package to Lt. Christopher Goeke in Afghanistan, she got a call that he had been killed: now a man in a "mercilessly tiny box," bureaucratically ordered into another military illusion against chaos. Samet's powerful technique in the first column of her narrative is "interrupted past": It all came back to her as she sat in her office "trying to figure out what I ought to do."
If we begin with an excellent reading cycle--the best short novels in English, "The Scarlet Letter," "The Turn of the Screw," and "Heart of Darkness" are superior for analysis of time, result, manner, and conditional clauses--adverbial subordination--and study the forms in the new COBUILD English Grammar, we will be able to understand that once we have identified a pattern, there is a way to study it. In the second edition of the COBUILD English Grammar, a number of sections--including 8.17 on sentences such as "Hardly had I started back for the house when Jack arrived"--explain interrupted past.
Some day--one billion or trillion years from now--you would have to measure the time in Gyr (gigayears), an editor of NYT, WSJ, or WashPost will wrest the COBUILD English Grammar, the best product of the corpus revolution in Linguistics, from a bookstore staffer and read it in cycles--after five or six, the editor will see the grammatical systems of English whole. Until then, we will have more circular education reporting, churning. The easiest aspects of sound symbolism--"undamaged," "destruction," "dea
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 11 Apr 2011 at 06:21 PM
The Washington Post needs to make changes at the highest levels. As if illiterate Kaplan trash has nothing to do with the collapse of American foreign policy, as seen in The New York Times's new article on Pakistan clamping down on the CIA, and this chilling story from CNN in Bahrain:
The harrowing story of a CNN crew's detention in Bahrain, after interviewing people allegedly wounded by security forces, belies the official line that all is returning to normal after pro-democracy demonstrations. FULL STORY
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Clayton Burns
Date: Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 10:13 AM
Subject: How are these articles related?
To: claytonburns , jim.huang.edu@gmail.com, jonah.lehrer@gmail.com, yangjl@washpost.com, mufsons@washpost.com
Rising worry over al-Qaeda in Yemen
Greg Miller 8:30 PM ET
In cold and unflinching language, cables highlight stakes as nation’s anti-terror efforts stall.
Hard lessons for Washington Post Co.
Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang 9:20 PM ET
Kaplan brings unwelcome scrutiny to a family-run company that prided itself on public service.
How is the Kaplan story related to the Yemen story? For someone who has been degraded by Kaplan Trash Education, there is no relationship. But anyone who understands the toxic legacy of American "realism" in foreign policy knows that there is every connection.
I believe that the Kaplan-Washington Post story is a matter for the police in Washington.
#2 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 11 Apr 2011 at 07:29 PM
The Washington Post should be able to penetrate the manifest confusion and obsolescence of The College Board 45 Columbus Avenue New York, NY. If the paper were to have a partner study minutely the Ivy League student newspapers, and perhaps those at MIT and NYU, while The Washington Post itself focused on the Washington-area student press, patterns would emerge in a few weeks, or in a few months, at least.
The students at these universities are failing to conduct a media reading cycle, even to the extent that would allow them to pick up on the major education stories in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post on the weekends. They just pay no attention. To important articles on the broken college admissions industry, and revelations about the SAT, GRE, and Kaplan. One of the most chaotic cases is at Harvard, where the President is helpless. At LSE, there will be a thorough investigation of Libya links to the university.
It is just as important to have an independent investigation of Harvard and Monitor Consulting Group links to Libya. The Harvard Crimson could coordinate investigative work with The Beaver at LSE, but there has been no apparent action of any consequence. These distracted and inept students are victims of the College Board, admissions deans, and Kaplan. Kaplan is a parasite on mediocrity, meaning that students cannot assimilate good reading cycles, cannot write, cannot concentrate, cannot stay off "cognitive enhancers," and can't think for themselves.
It is demeaning to treat students as cash machines, feeding them trivial formulas instead of struggling to help them learn. The idea of College Board-Kaplan multiple-choice tests is dead. It has been extinct for years, but only now that the complexity index is soaring do we see the magnitude and opportunity costs of such feeble teaching and testing. The President of Harvard, the leaders of College Board and Kaplan, the admissions deans who can't bear to part with their cardboard boxes--they should all have to pay the price. People get fired for being incompetent. That is the right solution in these cases.
There has been no response to my comments here or at CJR on the depredations of Kaplan. These high-flyers imagine that they have the privilege of bringing American education to its knees so that they can make their miserable and undeserved profits. I strongly encourage The Washington Post to shed any association with Kaplan, and to initiate a determined investigation of College Board and all of the obsolete racketeers in American education.
If we were to replace all of the trash--SAT,TOEFL, GRE--with one good book that students would have to absorb in grades 11 and 12, and again in first-year college, we might choose Mark Ashcraft's "Cognition"--students would not be as stressed out if they had a better grasp of this subject, and they might be able to stay off the dope. You don't need to take drugs to stimulate your mind. Try ideas.
#3 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Mon 11 Apr 2011 at 09:57 PM
Perhaps this story will be a watershed event for The Washington Post (Let's hope that it is not the Watergate crossroads).
To a degree, the fragility of American education is being mirrored in The Washington Post's flimsy website--probably not an infection to be attributed to Kaplan Think, but who knows? The UK Guardian has a superior site--probably an even better model than The NYT's or The Australian's sites. The editors should put together a committee to solve this problem.
The comment boxes are stiff and slow. I hit Print for this article, but the correction seemed to get stripped off. IT is very important in education--one of my students bought the new Adobe Creative Suite and is working on design. The message being sent by The Washington Post's site is that industrial-strength design--squaring the anti-aesthetic--is passable enough. (For a second rate paper, maybe).
Among the indicators of Kaplanesque and College Boardesque ineptitude: atrocious English. It smells to high heaven, the trash in the SAT and in AP. Why doesn't The Washington Post declare the COBUILD English Grammar and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English official for the next four years as a test period so as to escape the Plato's cave of goofy English? We can't have any more of Kaplan's warped doors of perception.
The Washington International Relations catastrophe: Isn't it possible for the editors and reporters of The Washington Post to help structure a live curriculum for International Political Science, beginning with the weekend Post, NYT, and WSJ? Including the sections in bookstores, so that banks and businesses could fund live curricula?
In Psychology, in Cognition, we need to grasp that there is a reason students are resorting to dope instead of training their minds on Mark Ashcraft's "Cognition," which should be the target for grade 12. What are targets anyway? For IT, English, IR, and Cognition? Do we have any idea?
#4 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Tue 12 Apr 2011 at 02:37 PM
Most of the criticism listed below is very valid. Too many teachers, principals and news reporters don't give the students enough credit and constantly expect watered down materials. Every one seems to think all students must have A's or they don't know anything and the teacher or materials were wrong. Every student varies in his/her ability to learn, think, respond, ask questions, take tests etc. etc. One teaches the students how to think critically by discussing the materials in novels as listed below--esp for the sophomores and up. Again it depends on the general ability of the total class and distance between the smartest and the weakest. But many try to teach only to the weakest and everyone else follows along. Instead the teacher needs to teach to the upper middle ability level in each class and the smartest will help the weakest get the ideas and how each applies in human nature's way of thinking and living then and now.
High school kids in the small town can take the ideas of Conrad and apply them to their surroundings and the man's attitude to nature. The student may know about rabbits, deer and quail but that just makes it easier for them to apply those ideas to whales and other animals of the sea and man's inhumanity to man as Conrad uses so often. Often time the city student may have little experience with animals but that's where the teacher applies domesticated ones and wild birds work very well.
Kaplan as most mention is in it for the money they can get from the state or federal government by having pretty items that catch one's eye but once the book or box is opened the material is exceptionally simplistic. Very few publishers--education only or others can set up a total plan for all teachers for each class and make it be used all year and/or for years to come. Students are too variable and need additional materials and various explanations depending on their past experience in school and life.
These things are why the beginning teacher is seldom the best one to be kept if numbers fall. The experienced one--3 or more years--usually has more experience and more material to use to enhance the class's needs. The dropping of experienced teacher is almost always to the the students' disadvantage. The students have enough to worry about in getting used to each new teacher in each of their new classes, let alone having to help train an brand-new teacher with no past experience. But few superintendents and politicians look at schools as being the means to prepare the next generation. That's too far in the future. Woe to the students and schools because of them.
#5 Posted by Trish, CJR on Tue 12 Apr 2011 at 06:49 PM