Tag Archives: standardized testing

Press patting itself on back today . . .

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. . . and every day, lately. Amid the self-glorification of U.S. media outlets comes today’s program at the Newseum, “The President and the Press: The First Hundred Days.”  In honor of the occasion, if not in the same spirit, re-posted below is the article I published in a small local community newspaper on January 21, 2002.

The topic: how the Washington Post Company benefited, to the tune of $billions, from the Bush ‘education reforms’, mainly standardized testing offered by Kaplan Learning–which the Post Co. had purchased during the last years of the Clinton administration.

Enjoy.

Washington Post Company to benefit from Bush education bill
By Margie Burns

January 21, 2002—Supporters of social programs may consider George W. Bush a grinch, but he’s been a Santa Claus for the Washington Post Company. With Bush’s “education reform” legislation, now signed into law, the company stands to reap a bonanza in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

As both critics and supporters have noted, this education bill chiefly promotes standardized testing in the schools, and certification programs beyond school, in every state and at virtually every level.

This is where the Post comes in. The company, most famous for its eponymous newspaper, has several subsidiaries in education and lists “provision of educational services” in public record filings among its “principal business activities.” One principal subsidiary is Kaplan, Inc, the tutoring and test-prep company, which “publishes course materials, books, software, and Web content to help prime students for standardized and licensing examinations.” Kaplan, Inc., in turn owns other education businesses, including Quest Education (acquired in May 2000), which provides post-secondary programs; Score! Prep, which provides tutoring programs; and (in Texas) Leonard’s Training Programs, Inc.

The numbers are impressive. In January 2000, operating revenues for the company’s education segment (Kaplan and the rest) were $240,075,000—third, behind revenues for advertising and circulation, but about 11 percent of total operating revenues of $2.2 billion. In December 2000, education segment revenues were $352,753,000—a 40 percent increase in the year, to about 13 percent of the total $2.4 billion. Operating revenues for 2001 are not yet filed, but sources including the Post have reported that its education segment is growing, while circulation and advertising have declined (a Business Wire in May, 2001, reported Kaplan as making “good progress,” with advertising businesses “weak”). Advertising has remained lower in the late-year recession and in the aftermath of the September attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Kaplan and its subsidiaries have been booming, comparatively speaking—perhaps with some help from the press; one Newsweek cover article touting the new era of standardized tests was titled “The Tutor Age.” As of December 2001, Hoover’s Company Capsule Database estimated Kaplan’s sales for the previous year at approximately $535.8 million. Press releases over the past two years have heralded acquisitions, publications, and additional software and training in states including Texas, Massachusetts, and New York. (Kaplan, which also has numerous part-time employees and no union, publishes books on the SAT, the PSAT, and ACT, as well as parents’ guides to proficiency tests including the Ohio test.)

Should the company’s education segment expand by a third, it will generate at least $110 million more in operating revenues, per year, for the company as a whole. However, the expansion will probably exceed 30 percent: with the acquisition of Quest Corporation in May 2000, Kaplan’s educational offerings are now eligible to participate in Title IV programs. According to a spokesman in the office of Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), who supports the education bill, current authorization for Title IV funding is “nearly doubled” by the bill, which will further increase it from $1.9 billion the first year to $2.1B, $2.4B, and $2.65B in the coming years.

No prediction is certain. But if the projected expansion in standardized testing continues for the next five years—accompanied by dizzying expansion in tutoring for the tests, software and publications for the students, teachers and parents preparing for the tests, and publishing and software for the tests themselves, etc.—then the Post stands to accrue the largest financial windfall for a single paper in the history of American newspapers, at least from legislation.

You can’t accuse the Post of bragging about it, though. The sole reference to the Post’s interest in the education bill occurred in two sentences about Kaplan on August 16, 2001, by reporters Michael Fletcher and Neil Irwin, who have yet to respond to phone and email queries. Media commentator Howard Kurtz has not mentioned the connection. Indeed, last May 7, Kurtz hosted a live online interview with Douglas Reeves, author of a book co-published by Kaplan that touts standardized tests, without mentioning the Post’s interest.

This is not to imply that the current federal legislation is the first time Bush education proposals have benefited the Post. Kaplan also offers publications and services for students preparing for the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), a previously experimental program beefed up to mixed reviews by then-Governor Bush into an annual make-or-break for students.

The results? A quick overview (WATN)–

  • The newspaper that ran the column, the Prince George’s Journal, is now long defunct. The Clinton administration gave big media a pass on anti-trust concerns, and few small newspapers could compete well enough to survive. (The Post Co. bought up and destroyed the DC-metro Gazette chain of small newspapers. Meanwhile, the Reverend Sun Moon’s then-empire was gobbling up many other small chains around the U.S., a pattern not reported in the Washington Post newspaper. The erstwhile community papers became part of the then-powerful right-wing GOP noise machine, now fractured.)
  • Shortly after my column ran, then-media commentator Kurtz ran a counter-argument of sorts on the Post’s op-ed page, though without mentioning my name or the title of my article (or the Prince George’s Journal). Same page, same day, the Post also ran a column by a NYTimes editor–an apologetic for corporate newspaper parents’ owning other interests. Quite the response–if they had had the decency to name my column, and me. (I spoke briefly by phone with Executive Editor Len Downie, who embarrassingly suggested that the Kaplan purchase represented a loss for the Post Co.) Nothing from the Post’s ombudsman.
  • Sure enough, the Post Co.’s education sector became by far its biggest earner. While its newspaper was losing money, the company pulled in so many $billions from its education sector that it ended up re-branding itself as an education and media company. SEC filings tell the story. And by now, of course, the paper itself has changed hands.
  • The Post newspaper has run quite a few good articles on the ills of excessive ‘standardized’ testing. But to this day, the Post has still not acknowledged its financial stake in Bush’s federal education ‘reforms’–or in the Bush brothers’ lucrative deals to Kaplan, supported through their governorships in Texas and Florida. The late David Broder prodded the Bush administration, in print, to follow through on the education promises–without mentioning that the Co. owned Kaplan.
  • No other journalist in the D.C. region followed up in 2002–no one on the left, no one on the right, no one in the middle. I thought that this purportedly liberal paper’s stake in GWBush was newsworthy. I still think so. But while the Post gave Bush a pass (on invading Iraq, for example), other media largely gave the Post a pass. Then they wonder why people don’t trust the news media.
One hand washes the other

One hand washes the other

It is difficult not to write satire

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Media and Washington, part I

A short reminiscence: soon after first moving to the D.C. area, in 1982-83, I happened to read a piece in the Style section of the Washington Post that puzzles me to this day. I can’t remember who wrote it–just as well–but a key line was  something about being “at a [Washington-area] dinner party and finding that you’re sitting next to an English professor.” Being new to the region, and heavily under the influence of All the President’s Men and books about journalism by authors such as David Halberstam, I read the Post appreciatively. I was also a recent English professor myself, relocated to do research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I was a reader. (I still have my Folger reader’s card but now do research mainly at the Library of Congress, for a book I am writing.)

Years later, I still do not see what’s wrong with being seated next to an English professor. Not that there isn’t the occasional prof rudeness, of course. At an academic dinner party years ago, after winning an essay contest and delivering a talk to an audience of psychoanalysts, I was seated next to a professor who refrained from speaking to me throughout dinner.

Oedipus and Apollonius

He was prominent, and senior, and I was a very non-senior and non-prominent member of the extreme opposite sex, as Dave Barry once put it; those were the operative factors, so far as I know, since I had not wronged the man or offered provocation. Other people in the party, including his wife, compensated for him, without saying anything overt, and anyway that kind of thing does not crush me. Unlike the Bushes, my family actually was from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about “Have you got the wrong vampire.” Professor Deborah Tannen might find it an example of electric-blanket conversation (or non-conversation). Still, for my money, that’s the kind of English professor you’d rather not be seated next to, and admittedly it is ironic when conservatives, status-ridden individuals, and others of purported refinement and blahblahblah engage in the kind of conduct satirized by the greatest writers in the traditional literary canon–Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Bronte–but that’s an aside. The thrust of the Style piece, whoever wrote it, was not to satirize solipsistic arrogance, snobbishness, and rudeness but to imply that there’s nobody more devoid of status than an English prof. (Sad to say, some English professors of the old school probably felt the same way about journalists.)

On the 'electric blanket'

Water under the bridge by now, of course–except that the Style attitude pretty much reflected that of the national political press, going far to explain why the national political press missed every significant national story from before the Iraq invasion to after the mortgage-derivatives debacle. At the moment, the nyah-nyah-nyah crowd is hot on the web site for the Affordable Care Act, bypassing the development that the U.S. is at last on the threshold of entering the twenty-first century. More on that later. For now, suffice it to say that some self-conceived intellectuals are in unholy alliance with those who greet every bit of bad news about the president with ugly smiles. I have seen those smiles elsewhere–not only in the South–in contexts unrelated to health insurance.

Some of this is temporary. As said, more later.

Back to the topic of lizard-brain behavior. I was not brought up to it, nor were my close friends. When it crops out intensely in a group of well-educated people, or nominally well-educated people, it does seem to be a sign of highly insecure times for the world of letters.

Academic job market

There is a peculiar sting in our present situation–by ‘our’ I mean the present situation of humanity, including Americans. All our lives, most of us have been told of an overlap between education and employment. The lesson is still being taught–do well in school, and you will do well in life. I love education. Doing well in school means learning to appreciate the inestimable privilege of reading and writing. It boosts the immune system. It means enjoying a work and play experience, an opportunity, and a window onto a larger world that millions of people around the globe can hardly dream of. Every reliable statistic also shows a correlation between education and income, between education and employment, and between education and financial stability–up to a point. The rub comes when that point is reached, and I am not referring either to the fact that most billionaires and millionaires lack post-professional degrees, or to the fact that most PhDs are not millionaires. I refer to the fact that education, even good education, is not a guarantee of ‘success’. Many well-educated people have to struggle daily, or at least yearly, to stay in the middle class. We have seen the phenomenon in college teaching and in writing for years (decades), particularly in the humanities; we also see it in more tech-oriented occupations that involve knowledge–particularly the kinds of knowledge found in outsource destinations in India. (Simply eschewing the humanities is a palliative, not a cure.)

One reason why education sometimes seems to succeed best in the classroom is that in the classroom there is an operative principle of fairness. All people are fallible, including teachers, but in the classroom the operative model is that students (people) get their fair share of time and attention, they get an equitable share of resources including books, and at least according to theory, they get the grade they earn. In the classroom model, furthermore, everyone gets to hear the rules, including the guidelines on how to do the work and thus how to earn the grade. You might call it training and supervision–the very activities, ironically, not required of ‘management’ in Wall-Street-oriented corporate rewards or reinforcement. (N.b. the classroom model of fairness, i.e. getting the grade you earn in the class, is exactly the model under assault by the corporate product of externally imposed standardized testing and test-prepping.)

No wonder a certain breed of politico eagerly disparages the ‘nanny party’. The good shepherd is the figure who keeps some individuals from imposing on others.

 

Corporate culture

Looking at the bigger picture from another perspective, the reason the fairness model is used in the classroom is that it works. It conduces to learning, keeps students (people) alive and well, and keeps them engaged. So much the worse when well-educated people, or nominally educated people, jettison it when they leave the classroom or when they graduate from college or graduate school. Lizard-brain behavior inside the world of learning does the world of learning no good.

Lizard brain model

On a related topic, consider the study below re-posted by Daily Kos:

  • “Demographics: National Journal has compiled some interesting data on how intensely clustered well-educated people are becoming. In 1970, 24.6 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in 20 major metropolitan areas… but in 2010, 43.4 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in those same 20 major metropolitan areas.

That has large economic implications (as the trend toward “two Americas” continues apace), but also political ones, with even further clustering of likely Democratic voters into fewer places (which is fine from the presidential level, but bad when thinking about Congress). The accompanying interactive graphic shows clearly the link between increasing share of college-educated people and overall local economic health… and, though the graph doesn’t specifically address it, also a pretty clear relationship with which areas are trending toward and away from the Democrats. (David Jarman)”

To the couple of lines of thought expressed here, that the study has economic and political implications, add a third: there are too few jobs for educated people, any more, outside the 20 major metropolitan areas. This simplification contains more than a grain of truth. Outside major metropolitan areas, good jobs for educated people have shrunk. Teachers, college teachers, attorneys–and a glut of attorneys on the market has already forced law school enrollment down–physicians and dentists, yes; but do journalists or chemists, engineers and architects, make a living working full-time at their occupation in small towns or small cities? When they do make a living, working full-time in their chosen field, do they also have the option of another job in the same town, should they need to find one?

Not new, but recommended: As written elsewhere, one illuminating book on the enormous changes in the U.S. since 1973 is Wallace Peterson’s Silent Depression. Its title makes it sound like a psychology tome, but it’s not; the subtitle is Twenty-Five Years of Wage Squeeze and Middle-Class Decline. (Note that Mr. Peterson also knows how to hyphenate correctly.) It reads like an autobiography for college graduates from 1968 through 1988.