Harper’s Kaplan Takedown Draws Company Ire Before Publication

This month’s Harper’s features a takedown of Kaplan’s SAT Advantage program written by Jeremy Miller, a former “coach.” The author, who spent nine years working on and off for the test prep company and now teaches high school in Colorado, offers a scathing assessment of the program that’s designed to help students pass state tests required by No Child Left Behind. He tells of pressing “ahead in order to cover as much of the Kaplan material as possible, well aware that students hadn’t grasped the concepts presented.” For this, he was paid $295/day and the SAT Advantage program helped Kaplan’s revenues more than quintuple since 2000.

During the fact checking process, Kaplan — without having read the article — sent a letter to Harper’s editor Roger Hodge attacking Miller’s credentials. FishbowlNY obtained a copy of the correspondence, dated July 24th, which called Miller, a former Harper’s intern, “a disgruntled former employee with a personal agenda, rather than a balanced writer who is abiding by the professional standards of journalism.” The test prep company would have known some contents of the article, but couldn’t have known the entire story, a fact we find both interesting and disturbing. Why so proactive?

More of the letter and some key quotes from the article after the jump.

“In a class taught by one of my colleagues that evening, a tutorial for the U.S. History & Government exam, just one of 20 students is present. So by the first critical measure of how many students we will potentially be able to help, we have failed before we have even begun… This vital piece of information — that we will be working not with over-aged and under-credited students but with over-aged under-credited ESL students — has somehow slipped beneath the notice of the administrative bodies overseeing the program.”

“I would also be paid nearly $1,800 to teach the nine hour-and-a-half classes, an astonishing $130 for each hour of my coaching time.”

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