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.