Non-compete agreements
Opus the Penguin
time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go work
for the competition (or set myself up as the competition) for a period
of one year following termination. I also agree to be bound by the laws
of the state of New York in this matter.
But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right to
Work laws, the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose even in
that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the agreement. That stinks
because it means if I choose to work for Kaplan now, I'm effectively
burning the Princeton Review bridge later.
Any of you have spouses who are labor lawyers who know about this
stuff?
--
Opus the Penguin
I vehemently believe in both sides of the argument. - Greg Goss
Lars Eighner
lovely and talented Opus the Penguin broadcast on alt.fan.cecil-adams:
> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a part
> time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
> guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go work
> for the competition (or set myself up as the competition) for a period
> of one year following termination. I also agree to be bound by the laws
> of the state of New York in this matter.
> But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right to
> Work laws,
'Right to Work' laws don't touch this issue --- not even close. The name is
just window dressing for union busting; it has nothing to do with a 'right
to work.'
> the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose even in
> that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the agreement. That stinks
> because it means if I choose to work for Kaplan now, I'm effectively
> burning the Princeton Review bridge later.
> Any of you have spouses who are labor lawyers who know about this
> stuff?
--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> use...@larseighner.com
Nothing wrong here a MacArthur grant wouldn't cure.
Blinky the Shark
> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a part
> time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
> guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
What is "test prep for Kaplan"?
--
Blinky
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project: http://improve-usenet.org
Need a new news feed? http://blinkynet.net/comp/newfeed.html
Opus the Penguin
> Opus the Penguin wrote:
>
>> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a
>> part time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton
>> Review guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this
>> area.
>
> What is "test prep for Kaplan"?
>
Kaplan is a company that runs test preparation classes for standardized
entry tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT.
--
Opus the Penguin
I too generally dislike inspirational or religous or irreligious
messages accompanying my purchase of fungible consumer products. -
Richard R. Hershberger
mike muth
wrote:
> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a part
> time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
> guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
>
> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go work
> for the competition (or set myself up as the competition) for a period
> of one year following termination. I also agree to be bound by the laws
> of the state of New York in this matter.
>
> But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right to
> Work laws, the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose even in
> that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the agreement. That stinks
> because it means if I choose to work for Kaplan now, I'm effectively
> burning the Princeton Review bridge later.
"right to work" is not at issue. That deals with union membership
issues when hiring/retaining workers.
Non-competes are enforceable. It would likely not be necessary since
the competition would be aware of the company's non-compete clauses
and would probably not hire you until the clause had expired.
--
Mike
M C Hamster
Well, my son, who provides services for (but doesn't work for,
directly) pharmaceutical companies has a non-compete clause in his
contract. It appears that that is not a big impediment to his
changing employers, should he choose to do so, even with the
pharmaceutical companies being so highly secretive and competitive
with one another.
It always comes down to whether the company really wants to incur the
legal costs of suing a former employee or not. It seems rather
unlikely, in your case, but I can't say for sure of course. Were my
son to leave his company, and then begin stealing former clients from
them, that could provoke action, but merely working for another firm
apparently is not a concern.
There are also non-disclosure agreements which simply say you cannot
share information from your prior employer with your new one. But you
wouldn't do that anyway, I know, being the person you are.
Unfortunately, non-competes are all the HR rage these days and done
just cuz.
--
M C Hamster "Big Wheel Keep on Turning" -- Creedence Clearwater Revival
xho...@gmail.com
Based on the news stories I heard about a recent California Supreme Court
decision, it seems like they are almost never enforceable in California.
Do I get the vague,unreliable, and irrelevant trifecta?
Xho
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the
payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked
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this fact.
Dover Beach
news:Xns9B1E8E568DB9Cop...@127.0.0.1:
Funny you should ask. And he deals with non-compete clauses all the
time, though he'll probably hedge about it being Kansas instead of
Colorado, Arizona, or the Feds. But right now he's on his fishing trip
with his dad (the one that annoyed his mom) and he won't be back for a
few days. Can it wait til Monday?
--
Dover
Reunite Gondwanaland (Mary Shafer)
Depends on where you live. In California, non-competes are pretty
much unenforceable. You should be able to find this out about New
York laws from a local lawyer for very little money. You should have
the non-competition contract looked over by a lawyer, too.
Mary "Local laws may count, too"
--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
reunite....@gmail.com or mil...@qnet.com
Visit my blog at http://thedigitalknitter.blogspot.com/
Charles Bishop
<moon.b...@gmail.com> wrote:
[snip previous]
>
>Funny you should ask. And he deals with non-compete clauses all the
>time, though he'll probably hedge about it being Kansas instead of
>Colorado, Arizona, or the Feds. But right now he's on his fishing trip
>with his dad (the one that annoyed his mom) and he won't be back for a
>few days. Can it wait til Monday?
How many dads does he have?
--
charles
Opus the Penguin
> Opus the Penguin <opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote in
> news:Xns9B1E8E568DB9Cop...@127.0.0.1:
>
>> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a
>> part time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton
>> Review guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this
>> area.
>>
>> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go
>> work for the competition (or set myself up as the competition)
>> for a period of one year following termination. I also agree to
>> be bound by the laws of the state of New York in this matter.
>>
>> But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right
>> to Work laws, the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose
>> even in that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the
>> agreement. That stinks because it means if I choose to work for
>> Kaplan now, I'm effectively burning the Princeton Review bridge
>> later.
>>
>> Any of you have spouses who are labor lawyers who know about this
>> stuff?
>>
>
> Funny you should ask. And he deals with non-compete clauses all
> the time, though he'll probably hedge about it being Kansas
> instead of Colorado, Arizona, or the Feds.
I'm in Kansas, but the contract asks me to agree to be governed by
the laws of New York.
> But right now he's on
> his fishing trip with his dad (the one that annoyed his mom)
And now it's annoying me. Is there no END to that man's selfishness?
> and
> he won't be back for a few days. Can it wait til Monday?
>
Yep. I don't have to turn the contract in until Wednesday. (Even then
I could fake forget it and buy another week.) I doubt it'll change my
decision anyway. It's more my curiosity than anything.
--
Opus the Penguin
I try to not get too involved in the details of doll/dinosaur sex. -
groo
David Friedman
Opus the Penguin <opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Blinky the Shark (no....@box.invalid) wrote:
>
> > Opus the Penguin wrote:
> >
> >> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a
> >> part time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton
> >> Review guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this
> >> area.
> >
> > What is "test prep for Kaplan"?
> >
>
> Kaplan is a company that runs test preparation classes for standardized
> entry tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, and MCAT.
My memory from when my daughter was getting ready for SAT exams was that
the Princeton Review book was the worst--questions having little to do
with the ones that are actually on the exam, and often with ambiguous or
wrong answers.
That would have been about a year ago, perhaps a bit more.
--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/ http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
Author of
_Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World_,
Cambridge University Press.
David Friedman
Lars Eighner <use...@larseighner.com> wrote:
> 'Right to Work' laws don't touch this issue --- not even close. The name is
> just window dressing for union busting; it has nothing to do with a 'right
> to work.'
>
More precisely, a right to work law makes a union shop contract, a
contract requiring the employer to hire only union members,
unenforceable.
The mirror image, a contract by which the employee agrees not to join a
union, is I think unenforceable in all states.
Les Albert
><opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a part
>> time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
>> guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
>> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go work
>> for the competition (or set myself up as the competition) for a period
>> of one year following termination. I also agree to be bound by the laws
>> of the state of New York in this matter.
>> But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right to
>> Work laws, the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose even in
>> that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the agreement. That stinks
>> because it means if I choose to work for Kaplan now, I'm effectively
>> burning the Princeton Review bridge later.
>> Any of you have spouses who are labor lawyers who know about this
>> stuff?
Here is something that may be of some help:
Les
Dover Beach
news:ctbishop-190...@dialup-4.246.69.212.dial1.sanjose1.level3.
net:
If you knew his mom, you'd know that pretty much any of the dads would
annoy her.
--
Dover
Dover Beach
>> But right now he's on
>> his fishing trip with his dad (the one that annoyed his mom)
>
> And now it's annoying me. Is there no END to that man's selfishness?
>
>
I know, right? If he's not working 80-hour weeks, he's off taking his
elderly father on last-chance vacations. Bastard.
>> and
>> he won't be back for a few days. Can it wait til Monday?
>>
>
> Yep. I don't have to turn the contract in until Wednesday. (Even then
> I could fake forget it and buy another week.) I doubt it'll change my
> decision anyway. It's more my curiosity than anything.
>
>
Did you read that article about the guy who taught Kaplan workshops in
NYC for a year? It was in Harpers. I'll email it to you.
--
Dover
Lee Ayrton
> Dover Beach (moon.b...@gmail.com) wrote:
>> Opus the Penguin <opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote in
>> news:Xns9B1E8E568DB9Cop...@127.0.0.1:
>>> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go
>>> work for the competition (or set myself up as the competition)
>>> for a period of one year following termination. I also agree to
>>> be bound by the laws of the state of New York in this matter.
>>>
>>> But I have the feeling that, at least in states with strong Right
>>> to Work laws, the agreement wouldn't be enforceable. I suppose
>>> even in that case I'd feel ethically bound to honor the
>>> agreement. That stinks because it means if I choose to work for
>>> Kaplan now, I'm effectively burning the Princeton Review bridge
>>> later.
>>>
>>> Any of you have spouses who are labor lawyers who know about this
>>> stuff?
>>
>> Funny you should ask. And he deals with non-compete clauses all
>> the time, though he'll probably hedge about it being Kansas
>> instead of Colorado, Arizona, or the Feds.
>
> I'm in Kansas, but the contract asks me to agree to be governed by
> the laws of New York.
A question that you might want to get the answer to is "If I do work for
someone else and they sue me, will I have to appear in a court in New
York to defend myself"? If the answer is "yes" it could be very expense
to defend, even if the clause is unenforcable in your state.
Boron Elgar
Interesting article in Harper's written by a Kaplan coach.
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/09/0082166
Boron
Boron Elgar
wrote:
HA! I just linked it in a post.
Great minds...
Boron
Kajikit
It may be an interesting article but they won't let anyone read it
unless they're a subscriber :( Only seventeen dollars a year! (shakes
head...)
Rick B.
news:ddfr-C056F7.1...@newsfarm.ams.highwinds-media.com:
> In article <slrngd7tio...@debranded.larseighner.com>,
> Lars Eighner <use...@larseighner.com> wrote:
>
>> 'Right to Work' laws don't touch this issue --- not even close. The
>> name is just window dressing for union busting; it has nothing to do
>> with a 'right to work.'
>>
>
> More precisely, a right to work law makes a union shop contract, a
> contract requiring the employer to hire only union members,
> unenforceable.
>
> The mirror image, a contract by which the employee agrees not to join a
> union, is I think unenforceable in all states.
"Yellow-dog contract." Unenforceable in Federal courts since the Norris-
LaGuardia Act of 1932.
Boron Elgar
wrote:
I am a subscriber, but I have no memory of registering on the site. I
went right to the article, without even noticing an need to sign in.
Ah well, then...
Tyranny of the test:
One year as a Kaplan coach in the public schools
By Jeremy Miller
Jeremy Miller is a writer and high school science teacher living in
Denver.
A bell sounds, and students tumble out of rooms and into the gray
corridors of George Washington High School. Eight a.m. lethargy has
given way to the Brownian motion of the day’s first passing period. A
tall boy beside me wraps his arms around a small, pretty girl,
backpack and all, picking her up from behind and twirling her roughly.
The girl tucks in her feet, tilts back her head, and shrieks giddily,
“Yo, who the fuck is this? Who the fuck is grabbin’ me?” A male
teacher with a buzz cut and the build of a wrestler claps sharply.
“Enough. Second period. Move.” The boy drops the girl, and the two
bounce away, laughing down the hall.
I am here because the High School for Health Careers and Sciences, one
of several small schools in what was once a single large high school
in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, has purchased
Kaplan’s SAT Advantage program, an abbreviated version of the SAT prep
course offered by the testing company at any of its 150 centers
nationwide. (“Higher test scores guaranteed or your money back.”) As
one of Kaplan’s roving “coaches,” I will spend the day helping math
and English teachers kick off the test-taking course by modeling the
“Kaplan method” for their classes. Depending on the number of students
it serves, a Kaplan program like this can cost a school well into the
tens of thousands of dollars. For my efforts each day, which cannot
exceed six hours of instruction, I will receive a fee of $295. At this
rate, a full school year’s pay would exceed a starting teacher’s
salary by more than $10,000.
I glance down at the schedule that Kaplan’s “implementation” team
emailed me a few days before. “8:55, Semidey. Room 320.”
Disorientation is an unavoidable part of the job. In general, I don’t
know the physical layout of the schools I parachute into. I don’t know
whether Semidey is a Mr. or a Ms. I don’t know this teacher’s students
or whether he or she already uses some kind of test-prep curriculum in
the classroom. I don’t even know how “Semidey” is pronounced. Although
Kaplan’s assignment sheets include school contact numbers, coaches are
instructed not to call ahead; if we cannot resist this urge, we have
been told not to expect busy teachers to talk to us. Rather, Kaplan
coaches are taught to handle the strangeness of each new workplace by
falling back on their highly scripted lessons and by quickly
identifying school faculty as one of several possible archetypes;
e.g., whether they are “trailblazers” within their schools or dreaded
“saboteurs.”11. Kaplan’s handbook for coaches suggests that saboteurs
be dealt with in a counterintuitive, Sun Tzu-esque way: by keeping
them “on the inside where they can be watched rather than on the
outside where they can cause trouble without it being detected until
their effects are felt.”
Inside room 320 a young woman with long dark hair and olive skin is
studying papers spread across a long science-demonstration table.
Definitely _Ms. _Semidey. The room looks just big enough to seat
fifteen comfortably but includes chairs for twenty-five or thirty,
with desks facing one another in configurations of four or five,
filling up almost all the floor space. I still have a few moments
before the bell, so I walk down the hall to fill my water bottle at
the drinking fountain. No water comes out.
I pause in the hallway at a bulletin board fringed with
red-white-and-blue bunting and featuring a picture of an exploding
ship. The vessel is the U.S.S. Maine, and tiny crewmembers are being
thrown hither and yon by the blast. Of the several essays stapled
around this image, the top grade has been awarded to a paper inscribed
in blunt pencil by a student named Zeeshan Pervaiz. In what is
otherwise a sober reflection on the Spanish-American War, one of
Zeeshan’s paragraphs, focusing on the media, strikes a more strident
tone. “The practice was called ‘yellow journalism.’ It was called
yellow journalism because the materials used to make the newspaper
were basically garbage and the odds of it being true were the odds of
the Knicks going to the playoffs: bullshit.” His history teacher has
written along the margin in red ink: “Avoid expletives. Also, the
stories had an element of truth.”
I return to Ms. Semidey’s class, my water bottle empty. Most of the
students have filed in but few have found their seats. The student
population of Health Careers is 90 percent Hispanic and 8 percent
black, and the twenty-five students milling about fairly accurately
reflect these proportions. “Ms. Seh-MY-dee?” I say softly, trying to
get her attention, sure that I’ve butchered the name. She looks up
from her papers, startled. She smiles. She is very pretty, in her mid-
twenties, with large brown eyes and full lips colored in bright red.
“Yes. It’s Seh-meh-DAY.” Introducing myself, I say that I’m from
Kaplan and here to “demo” the first lesson from the SAT materials.
“No,” she says emphatically. The smile has faded. She explains that
she is supposed to be observed by the assistant principal this period,
that the observation is part of her ongoing certification. I look down
stupidly at my schedule.
I understand her anxiety. Just a few years earlier, I was a rookie
teacher in a New York City public school, struggling to manage my
classes while working toward a teaching license. I also know that many
teachers equate the presence of test-prep coaches like me with the
more insidious aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act. Because Health
Careers has been able to meet certain testing benchmarks, it hasn’t
been required under the law to purchase test-tutoring services from
outside providers like Kaplan. But nearly 90 percent of its student
body falls below the federal poverty level, and the school’s principal
likely decided to use a chunk of Health Careers’ NCLB
low-income-schools funding to pay for our test-prep materials.22. And
to say there is room for academic improvement at the school is a vast
understatement. Only 58 percent of its students graduate in four
years. Of all graduates, 41 percent leave with a full “Regents
diploma,” which is conferred if a student scores 65 percent or higher
on five subject-proficiency exams. A mere 3 percent of Health Careers’
students graduate with an “advanced” diploma, which can be earned if
they take three additional Regents exams and an increased credit load.
The state average is 36 percent. (Kaplan’s SAT program is one of an
array of test-prep courses that the company is contracted to “deliver”
in schools nationwide. In New York City, Kaplan provides NCLB-
mandated tutoring for the high school Regents exams and the subject
exams administered to students in the third through eighth grades.)
Many educators argue that the gains from prep courses are negligible
and the programs themselves ultimately harmful, since they drain
precious funds and class time. A recent Chicago Public Schools study
examining student performance on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills found
“little difference between tutored students and those who were
eligible but did not receive tutoring.” The price tag for supplemental
tutoring in Chicago, which 60,000 students received in the 2004–2005
school year: $50 million.33. When I emailed my Kaplan supervisor, Katy
Shannon, to find out if the company had any stats showing the
effectiveness of its test-prep work in schools, she said that they did
have someone working to collect that data but couldn’t show me
anything at that time. “It is difficult to do,” she wrote, “because we
sell the program to a school and it is up to them to maintain
fidelity, which doesn’t always happen, therefore that data tends to be
unreliable.” Teachers also are aware that Kaplan’s presence will
continue to be felt long after its coaches have moved on: completion
of the thirty-six-lesson SAT Advantage program, which includes three
abbreviated tests and one full-length practice exam, requires a full
forty hours of instruction time.
I tell Ms. Semidey I can teach the class tomorrow, since I’m scheduled
to be in the school for two days. A little smile returns to her lips.
“I’ve worked my ass off on this lesson,” she says. As I turn to leave,
I am met by a small, perky woman. “Are you Jeremy?” she asks. It is
the assistant principal, Ms. Campeas. She listens as I explain the
conflict and the proposed resolution. “No,” she says. “This is Kaplan
day. We will do the observation another day.” She calls Ms. Semidey
over and firmly tells her the same.
By the time Ms. Campeas has issued her decree, class has been in
session for five minutes. I quickly distribute Kaplan workbooks to the
students. I toss one Frisbee-style to a student whose corner desk is
so thoroughly barricaded I cannot reach him. With a little sideways
lurch, I wriggle between the groups of desks into the small hollow
that seems to be the room’s dramatic center point. Students observe me
quizzically (though some must look over their shoulders or turn around
completely to do so). One rangy boy slumped heavily in his chair
notices the Kaplan logo on the book, covers his face with
long-fingered hands, and announces, “Not this again. Not Kaplan. I
hate this shit.” Ms. Semidey stands between the science table and the
chalkboard at the front of the room, a pair of scissors gripped
tightly in her hand. Her Kaplan teacher’s manual lies unopened on the
table before her.
Over the past nine years, I have worked on and off for Kaplan in
numerous capacities. My first job with the company came soon after
college, when I traveled to the manors of Westchester County, New
York, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, offering their
university-bound residents tips on ways to boost Board scores. In
2004, after two years of teaching biology at an alternative public
high school in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, I joined Kaplan
again. I was dispatched to several of New York’s worst- performing and
most dysfunctional high schools—William Howard Taft, Jane Addams,
Evander Childs. My job, ostensibly, was to help students pass the New
York State Regents exams. A few days a week, three or four of the
strongest students in each school would leave their classes, where
they were stabilizing forces, and attend my mini-workshops of packaged
prep lessons. Although they seemed to enjoy the exercises, these kids
were already more than capable of passing their exams with high
scores. At Taft, I was placed in a room with juvenile offenders and
nineteen-year-old sophomores. “Just keep them in the classroom,” a
science teacher instructed me. “That is your job.” A police officer
was stationed outside the door, in case things got rough. Things never
did. But Kaplan’s test-prep manual offered little that these wayward
youths could use.
I began my current stint last September. I was eager to return to the
classroom, where I felt I might be able to do something meaningful.
But my wife had been negotiating a job transfer to another state for
the better part of the previous year, and I didn’t want to commit to a
school I quickly would have to leave. So I settled for the stopgap
work as an ancillary. With Kaplan, I knew at least that there would be
none of the duties outside the classroom that comes with being a
full-time teacher: no grading papers, calling parents, ordering
supplies, or attending meetings. I also was curious to find out how
the company had changed in recent years. No Child Left Behind had
opened up new vistas of opportunity for testing companies, and I had
heard that Kaplan had charged forward by radically expanding its
services within schools.
Although hailed by its advocates as a step toward institutional
accountability and full student proficiency, No Child Left Behind is,
at its core, a highly punitive act. Ratified in 2002, the legislation
mandates that states create a system of tests and other academic
indicators that measure whether students meet “the minimum level of
proficiency.” Schools that repeatedly fail to meet these benchmarks
can be closed, taken over by private corporations, or restructured.
Schools with high-poverty populations that receive federal aid (known
as Title I funds) and fail for three straight years to demonstrate
“progress” toward full proficiency are required to spend up to 20
percent of this federal money on tutoring or transportation costs for
students who choose to transfer out of their current school. In New
York City, the transfer option is derided by critics as a hollow
provision, since other city schools generally are no better and
successful ones are already oversubscribed.44. New York City’s handful
of high-performing high schools, like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science,
and Stuyvesant, require that students pass rigorous entrance exams and
navigate a complicated enrollment process. Several of the city’s
middle schools with gifted and talented programs also require testing.
Not surprisingly, Kaplan and other testing companies offer prep
courses for all these entrance exams. Thus, failing students become
trapped in a foundering system, and the schools where students land en
masse are left to carry out the test-heavy requirements of NCLB. For
the New York schools “in need of improvement,” this means preparing
students—many of whom are utterly lacking in basic academic skills and
subject knowledge—to pass a battery of standardized exams. Toward this
end, it also means paying money to outside entities (often private
companies such as Kaplan, the Princeton Review, and Newton Learning)
up to $2,000 per student for courses focused not on improving content
knowledge or on intensive educational counseling but on strategies for
a “particular testing task.” (The total annual government expenditure
per student in New York City is $15,000.)
The failure of schools serving low-income students has been a windfall
for the testing industry. Title I funds earmarked for test tutoring
increased by 45 percent during the first four years of NCLB, from
$1.75 billion in 2001 to $2.55 billion in 2005. With the ever growing
stream of funding flowing through the nation’s schools, the number of
supplemental-service providers nationwide has exploded. In New York
City, the number of providers approved by the state’s department of
education jumped from forty-seven in 2002–2003, the first full school
year of NCLB, to 202 today. To capitalize on these new revenue
opportunities, Kaplan has acquired Achieva, a provider of online
course materials to schools, and SpellRead, a national
“reading-intervention” company. In 2003, Kaplan hired former N.Y.C.
Chancellor of Education Harold Levy as an executive vice president and
general counsel, and in 2006 relocated its headquarters for Kaplan
K12, the division of the company that works in schools, from Midtown
Manhattan to luxury offices downtown. According to Crain’s, the
company made the move “to be closer to the New York City Department of
Education.”
Not wanting to be limited in its offerings to schools, Kaplan recently
entered the business of selling content-based lesson plans. Although
the shift from testing strategies to classroom content is a departure
for Kaplan, the company sees little difference between the two.
Earlier this spring, I designed a genetics class for Kaplan’s “Lesson
Bank,” an online repository of short lessons that, for a fee, teachers
can download in PDF form. As writers of the curriculum, we were
repeatedly told that the materials had to provide hassle-free prep for
teachers. When I submitted a first draft of a high school lesson on
Mendelian genetics, the Kaplan staffer overseeing production, Tyler
DeWitt, told me it was too complex. “We’re really trying to almost
script lessons,” DeWitt wrote via email, “so that teachers who may be
new or not the greatest (or smartest) teachers in the world can follow
the ‘script’ and still give a great lesson.” For $35 an hour, I
obliged and watered down the material, removing all “advanced” content
points, such as co-dominance and pleiotropy (though these were
subjects that I covered in the basic biology classes I taught a couple
of years earlier).
Kaplan’s increased workload has produced some remarkable results,
though not necessarily in the classroom. The company’s revenues have
jumped from $354 million in 2000 to more than $2 billion today, and it
is now the most profitable subsidiary of its parent, The Washington
Post Company, accounting for almost half of the conglomerate’s income.
More telling are the margins: in 2003, Kaplan posted a loss of $11.7
million; in 2007, the company reported a $149 million profit. Because
the revenues from Kaplan K12 are folded into the test-prep operations,
it is impossible to say with precision how much of the company’s
income comes from Title I funds.55. Kaplan’s communications director,
Carina Wong, said the company’s recent growth has come largely in the
area of higher education. “I can’t provide specific numbers,” she
wrote in an email. “But NCLB has not been the driver of Kaplan’s rapid
expansion.” In New York City schools, Kaplan contracts and purchase
orders (which run to over 300 pages on the city’s “Vendex” contract
database) have totaled $73 million since 1999, with the overwhelming
number of these contracts awarded to the company after the passage of
NCLB. (Princeton Review, Kaplan’s chief rival, has taken in $50
million in city contracts since 2005, when its Vendex records begin.)
The K12 division’s fiscal success in public education, a realm long
seen as resistant to profitability, has added a sense of swagger to
Kaplan’s corporate culture. The company now considers itself more than
a waypoint for the college-bound and the budding professional. During
training, coaches are often reminded that Kaplan’s mission transcends
the dysfunction and malaise that we’re told we will find in failing
schools. “Good schools succeed for many reasons, but bad schools fail
for all the same ones” is repeated like a mantra in these sessions.
Shannon Bryant, Kaplan’s academic director, who peppers his speech
liberally with SAT words, prefers the prefix “über-” in describing our
work. At training pep talks and orientations, he utters phrases like:
we go into the school, we’ve got to maintain an image of
übercompetence,” or, “Since many of you are young and intelligent,
many [students] will see you as übercool. It’s important to remember
to keep a safe distance, to remain überprofessional. . . . Let them
know you could be working toward your Ph.D. But you’re not. You’re
here teaching them.”
The assignments given to Kaplan coaches are doled out largely based on
experience—and responsiveness. In order to get work with some
frequency, coaches must stay in constant contact with Kaplan’s
implementation staff and confirm assignments almost immediately. The
work is also tied to the ebb and flow of the school year. In the early
fall, when the sales team is busy pitching its services to principals
and most schools have yet to decide how to integrate these (often
mandated) materials into daily operations, coaches frequently find
themselves leading professional-development seminars. The “P.D.”
meetings are intended to give teachers a thorough tutorial in the
Kaplan materials, including an overview of lesson structure, key
strategies, and, most important, how the curriculum should be taught.
One of my first P.D. assignments was at Harry S. Truman, a high school
beside the sprawling towers of Co-op City, in the Bronx. I was
supposed to talk up the merits of Kaplan’s SAT Advantage to the
school’s math department. But early in the delivery of my P.D. script,
I was cut off after I asked the teachers what the SAT was designed to
do. It was a lame question, I admit, but the vehemence it unleashed
surprised me. “It’s designed to keep people in their places,” a
teacher shouted from the back of the room. “It serves the status quo.”
There were approving snickers. “Are you saying there are things in the
Kaplan prep book we aren’t already doing with our classes?” asked a
teacher who began to rise threateningly from his seat. (Although I saw
other indications of this antagonism at Truman—e.g., in a flyer tacked
up in the main office that announced a meeting with the headline
students corporations first—this last teacher’s hostility came from a
different source. He had worked for the Princeton Review. During a
short break in my presentation, he apologized for seeming upset. “It’s
not you,” he said. “But Kaplan’s materials are weak compared to
Princeton’s.”)
I agreed with many of the standard criticisms leveled against Kaplan
and the other for-profit companies peddling test-prep methods in
schools. Because of an ill-conceived and poorly executed federal
policy, they were able to function like so many private contractors
operating amid chaos and disarray—benefiting from the crisis but doing
nothing to change the nature of the problem. Yet as I came under
attack at Truman, I found Kaplan’s training reflexively surging into
my chest. We had been told in practice seminars to diffuse criticism
by acknowledging complaints and then responding with an array of
talking points intended to play on teachers’ anxiety over metrics and
accountability. As a kind of disclaimer, we were to emphasize our
transient and limited role in schools: We, Kaplan, could not
ultimately be held accountable for whatever inadequate form of
instruction was taking place at the school. Other seasoned presenters
I had been required to observe used more creative and provocative
methods to evade criticism. One Kaplan representative, a longtime
teacher in New York City public schools, invoked the renegade
geneticist and scientific entrepreneur J. Craig Venter as a way to
reconcile the seemingly contradictory ideas of profit and public
service. At the end of his presentation, he held up Venter’s
autobiography, A Life Decoded, and urged teachers to get their hands
on a copy.
“You guys are doing a great job in your classes,” I said calmly to the
math teachers assembled before me. “But this book will help you
translate the content and help your students bridge that
knowledge-performance gap.” To another teacher who said he already
taught SAT problems in his class, I asked if he used a “consistent
methodology.” Do you teach your kids ways to seek out the right answer
without actually knowing the answer? Do you use the results of
diagnostic exams to customize your lesson plans? Do you have them
practice in real test conditions? Do you track student progress in a
uniform way? Is that data centralized and easily accessible to the
entire staff?
A solemn, gray-haired teacher said, “with all due respect,” that the
test prepping would surely take away from his already limited teaching
time. Another teacher, a large stack of papers piled in front of her,
cut him short. “I personally don’t see what the big deal is,” she
said. “We can just pick and choose lessons, exercises, and questions
from the book. We can work it in.”
“We’re not ‘just working it in,’” the head of the math department, Ms.
DeSimone, said with finality. “We’re supposed to be teaching SAT
curriculum once a week. We didn’t pay all this money for this program
for it not to be done right.”
The math faculty of Truman High School was no easy mark. A tough sell.
But it didn’t matter. They were already owners.
“Customization” and the educationally in vogue “differentiation” are
two of Kaplan’s professed guiding principles. But Kaplan’s boilerplate
assignment sheets and teaching materials hardly reflect the
particulars of each of its customers. For Kaplan coaches, entering a
New York City public school for the first time is like the first day
on a job. Without data, perspective, or familiarity, you quickly try
to pick up on the culture of the place, to see beyond the oppressive
similarities in the buildings—the uniform concrete corridors, the
unsynchronized clocks, the scuffed linoleum and dented steel doors,
the relentless echo. Indeed, the shows of police force and the
prisonlike design elements, now nearly ubiquitous in underserved
schools, often hide redeeming aesthetic qualities and important pieces
of a school’s past. Once you pass through the security checkpoint that
dominates George Washington High’s entryway, the architectural grace
and history of the school suddenly come into relief. Two staircases
run in torqued parabolas along the edges of the building’s grand
atrium. Overhead, a balcony encircles the perimeter; from the balcony
hangs a full-length oil painting of George Washington. The Battle of
Fort Washington, a major defeat suffered by the American Continental
Army in 1776, played out not far from here. The atrium also houses a
gallery of the school’s famous alumni: Alan Greenspan, Jacob Javits,
Henry Kissinger, Harry Belafonte, the baseball great Rod Carew.
Alongside the photograph of Kissinger is a typewritten letter in which
the former secretary of state recounts the importance the school held
in his early life as a refugee from Nazi Germany. Although he regrets
that he must decline the invitation to attend his induction on the
school’s of fame,” Kissinger does offer, in absentia, words of
encouragement to his G.W. successors: “In America, everything is
possible. It’s up to you.”
A clearer understanding of a school also allows you to make
adjustments to your lessons and teaching style. A school’s stairwells,
for instance, tell you whether you’ll be spending the day in a safe or
a dangerous place, whether the staff has ceded the margins to
students. When students notice a teacher in these annexed spaces,
their faces sometimes slacken to suggest that a tacitly agreed upon
line, an unspoken boundary, has been crossed. At Wadleigh High School
in Harlem, where I worked in March, I stumbled onto a group of
students tagging the stairway walls. Lookouts were positioned on the
top and bottom landings. I passed the sentries unnoticed and saw a
young man in a Yankees cap straining toward the ceiling with a
bright-green marker. “Oh shit,”the boy in the ball cap said, hiding
the cucumber-sized marker behind his back. “Why didn’t you yell
‘teacher’?” he scolded his friends. I passed through a door into the
lobby, where a police officer sat reading a newspaper. I told him what
I had seen. He lifted his eyes heavily from the paper but did not
budge from his seat.
Another place to learn about the day-to-day life of a school is the
teachers’ lounge. Kaplan coaches are often sent here during downtime,
or as they wait to “debrief” teachers on the day’s lessons. These
mandated discussions give faculty members more cause to evade
test-prep interlopers, but this isolation does bestow on coaches a
certain invisibility, and you sometimes find yourself privy to
conversations not meant for your ears. At Health Careers, for example,
I overheard a teacher and an aide discuss a student who had recently
become a “no-show.”
“Enrique has been missing class and sleeping when he’s here.”
“I’ve so noticed that too.”
“The kids tell me he’s joined a gang. I’ve been asking around.”
“A gang? He never seemed like the type.”
“I know. But they say he got kicked out because he missed a chapter
meeting. So that’s why he’s been back in school lately.”
“Gangs have chapter meetings?”
“Well, you know what I mean. I mean he’s too lazy to even be in a
gang.”
Some staff members are welcoming and go out of their way to present to
itinerants like me the largely hidden idiosyncrasies of a school. As I
waited one day to speak with Health Careers’ English faculty about
“weaving” forty hours of Kaplan SAT instruction into their busy,
test-laden, end-of-year schedules, Zev Shanken, an English teacher,
directed my attention to the lounge’s large pane window. The window
offered a spectacular view of the Harlem River, the bare limbs of
Inwood Hill Park, the gray-blue mesa of the Palisades. He pointed to
the school’s athletic fields, tucked into a small elbow of land at the
edge of the cliffs. On this very field, Shanken declaimed, Manny
Ramirez, the Boston Red Sox slugger, perfected his opposite-field
stroke. The baseball diamond sits inside a rectangular, high-fenced
enclosure that runs into a 90-degree corner at dead center. A ball hit
to center would probably have to travel some 500 feet to leave the
field, but to right field the fence appears to be no more than 250
feet from home plate.
“Kids ask me why Manny isn’t up on the wall of fame with Greenspan,
Kissinger, and Javits,” Shanken said. “Some say it’s discrimination. I
tell them no. The reason Manny isn’t up there is because Manny didn’t
graduate. You’ve got to have a diploma to get on the wall.”
Since a day’s coaching brings me a wage that exceeds that of all but
the most senior teachers, schools do not want to pay Kaplan’s hefty
fees if they are not going to get an “honest” day’s teaching out of
it. But occasionally teachers do not feel comfortable turning over
their classes to strangers and say that they’d prefer to teach the
test materials themselves. When this happens, Kaplan coaches watch and
take notes on a teacher’s performance and then, later in the day,
offer feedback on how the teacher utilized the Kaplan materials. The
company calls this “spotting.”
At Truman High School, in April, I find myself spotting a Mr. Pacella.
Mr. Pacella is a veteran of the Truman math department and a man of
imposing stature, with delicate features set on a meaty swath of face.
When I arrive at his classroom, he is using his girth to push two
students out the door, much as a sumo wrestler forces an opponent off
a mat. The two male students, slender as reeds and draped in baggy
clothes, are knocked backward into the hall. They protest loudly that
someone in the room has something that belongs to them. Mr. Pacella
simply holds his palms flat toward them, closes his eyes, and silently
shakes his head and hands. I maneuver between the students and
introduce myself. Mr. Pacella tells me he has just passed out the
Kaplan workbooks. But when I say I can demo a lesson, he declines the
offer. “I’m okay on the teaching,” he says. “Have a seat wherever
you’d like.” Several students huddle around each of the room’s
trapezoidal desks. Any vacant space is covered by backpacks, soft
drinks, piles of ragged textbooks. I take a seat atop the radiator,
beside a window overlooking the New England Thruway.
By today’s standards in New York, Truman is massive. With an
enrollment hovering around 3,000, it is one of the city’s few
remaining “intact” high schools. For most of the teachers I spoke with
there, this is a source of pride. Truman is big and the staff doesn’t
want to see the school shattered into a babel of small academies.
Hassan Laaroussi, a dean there, tells me that the school’s no-nonsense
principal, Sana Nasser, is able to maintain order in such a crowded
school through the use of a new surveillance network. When a student
is caught breaking a rule, Principal Nasser will sit the offender in
front of the video machine. “She’ll cue it up right to the spot,”
Laaroussi says. “She can even zoom in. Then she’ll ask, ‘Is that you?’
There’s no arguing with the tape. If the kid tries to deny it, it’s
over. He’s out.”
From the show of force at the beginning of the period, I expect Mr.
Pacella’s class to be a regimented, disciplined place. But this is not
the case. The room is loud. Students wander about. One student wearing
large headphones stares into a corner, his head moving in little
roosterlike stabs. At another table, a girl extracts bright-pink lip
gloss from a plastic cylinder and dabs it repeatedly on her lips. A
paper plate pasted over the classroom’s clock displays the scrawled
phrase it is now. Mr. Pacella paces around the room, aggressively
urging students to get going on “Page V, page Roman numeral five, page
VEE!” Page V contains a short introductory quiz approximating the
structure of the SAT math section. Despite his entreaties, few
students have opened their books.
A female student who seems eager to get to work asks Mr. Pacella why
they are using this book and not the normal math book. “We’re not
learning about math today,” he says, his voice oozing sarcasm. “We’re
learning about how to take a test.” Another student says she has been
working with the Kaplan SAT book in her English class for the past two
months. Mr. Pacella tells the girl to rephrase her statement in the
form of a question. She pauses to reflect and then tries again. “So
why are we just getting around to it now?” “Because it’s just the way
things have worked out,” her teacher says.
After Mr. Pacella instructs his students to begin the introductory
quiz, the class continues to buzz with conversation and nervous
energy. A girl in tight jeans rises to a half-crouch and pleads with
her classmates to be silent. “Everybody, quiet. Listen up. We’ve got a
visitor!” she says, holding out an upturned palm toward me. No one
appears to have noticed her seemingly heartfelt plea. A boy in the
front row raises his hand and asks if he can use a calculator. The
boy’s name is Ryan, and throughout the period a girl named Antoinette
seated directly behind him has been using the thin handle of a comb to
meticulously separate his hair into dozens of neatly spaced rows. Mr.
Pacella replies dryly to Ryan’s question. He says he doesn’t have any
more calculators because Ryan has “stolen” most of them. “How many of
my calculators do you have at home now, Ryan?” Ryan smiles. “I don’t
know, four or five.”
Mr. Pacella begins to read out the answers and scripted explanations,
verbatim, from the next page of the workbook. “Wow, so did you hear
that, class?” he says. “You get a point for a correct answer, you lose
a quarter point for an incorrect answer, and you don’t lose anything
for skipping.” By this time, Antoinette has nearly finished twisting
Ryan’s hair into tight cornrows. The pair’s relationship appears to be
symbiotic and is quite something to behold (not least for the fact
that it is playing out in the very front of the classroom). As
Antoinette fluffs, picks, and sculpts, Ryan dutifully copies the
answers into his, and Antoinette’s, book.
Twenty minutes into class, and I begin to doubt whether Mr. Pacella
will ever gain control. But then with the authority that experienced
teachers can instantly summon—through a shift in tone, the light touch
of a hand on the shoulder, a readjustment of posture—he signals to the
class that it is time to pay attention. He ambles calmly to a
chalkboard in the corner of the room. He plucks up a piece of chalk in
his hands and pauses a moment, shaking it like dice. The class is
rapt. I’m sure he’s working toward something big. Then I notice what’s
already written on the board behind him: “Reasons Why Ryan Is
Failing.” He begins to form a list beneath the header:
1. Ryan only cares about his hair.
1. Ryan is a constant distraction to Antoinette.
The classroom erupts in laughter.
When I catch up with Mr. Pacella later on in the day, for my required
debriefing, he is seated at a small desk in the hallway, presumably on
hall patrol. He is reading a self-help hardcover. I ask how he thinks
the lesson went. “Okay. I’ve worked with Kaplan’s materials before,”
he says. I can tell he wants to get back to his book.
“Yeah,” I say. “The first lesson is always a little rough.”
Lunch can be an especially solitary time for a Kaplan coach. So when
Zev Shanken asks if I’d like to join him at a place near George
Washington called Isabella, I happily agree. Since arriving at the
school, in fact, I’ve heard teachers speak favorably, almost
fawningly, about this Isabella. “Should we meet over at Isabella?”
“Are we headed to Isabella for lunch?” I guess that it must be some
local Washington Heights treasure, a low-key Dominican café or gem of
a diner. I’m excited.
We pass through the security checkpoint and into the gray March
afternoon. But instead of walking the half block to St. Nicholas
Avenue, where there are a host of Latin eateries, Mr. Shanken makes a
hard left and stops at the building next door to the school. Isabella
is the sixteen-story nursing home that abuts George Washington. We
enter and pick up little green clip-on tags that lie like potpourri in
a small basket at the security desk. We move down the hallway toward
the cafeteria, past a group of wheelchair-bound residents huddled
beneath a television. “This place is a nice change of pace,” says
Shanken, smiling at a wisp of a woman shuffling up the corridor with
the help of a walker. Many of Health Careers’ teachers come here.
Apparently the geriatric balm of Isabella is a remedy for the
adolescent unrest of the school day. “Mr. Samuels, the math teacher
you’ll be working with tomorrow, said he’d be up here too. I’ll
introduce you.” When we get to the cafeteria, Samuels and a group of
colleagues are seated around a table eating sandwiches and
iceberg-lettuce salads from Styrofoam bowls. They look down at my
Kaplan-stenciled bag and offer strained smiles. By the time Shanken
and I make it back from the buffet line, they have gone.
Mr. Shanken is a compelling storyteller and a great lover of words. He
talks excitedly about vocabulary-building exercises that use
etymology, common roots, and associations. He says his
Spanish-speaking students often get tripped up in these exercises by
misleading roots or similar sounding words with a figurative component
that is lost in translation. One example, he says, is the word
“obscure.” “Oscuro in Spanish means ‘dark.’ But ‘obscure’ means ‘hard
to see’ or ‘uncertain,’” says Shanken.
This appreciation of language has also led Shanken to work as a poet,
an editor of a literary magazine, a freelance writer, and a
journalist. His writing has found its way into various New York–based
publications, including community newspapers like The Villager and the
Westsider and erotic magazines like Pillow Talk and Variations. “It
was great money,” he says of the literary porn. “It’s really no
different from any other kind of writing. Apart from the fact that
it’s very hard to write an original story about sex.”
Although I find it a little surreal to be discussing erotica over
lunch at a nursing home, I press ahead and ask him how assignments
come down. Are there traditional pitches, or do you just hack
something out and send it in? He says once you have a good working
relationship with your editors, stories are often solicited by theme.
“An editor you’ve worked with in the past might say, ‘We need 1,200
words in a couple of days. Something really raunchy on a topic like
soft-cock fucking or gerontophilia.’”
“Gerontophilia?” I ask. He looks around the room theatrically.
“Love of the elderly.”
In mid-May, as the school year neared its end, I received an
assignment I had long sought: a month-long Regents prep course for
“non- traditional” students. I was told that I was selected for the
job—leading the prep for the biology Regents exam—because I ranked
among Kaplan K12’s best teachers. Shortly after I accepted, however,
Lauren Phillips, a Kaplan coordinator, expressed her relief in an
email, writing that she was “afraid she was going to have to get on
the phone and start begging folks.” Nevertheless, I saw the work as a
sort of promotion, a hard-earned graduation back to the world of real
teaching. Unlike my previous assignments, with this one Ihave a class
of my own. I knew the students were in desperate need of guidance.
Many of them had full-time jobs, children of their own, or other adult
responsibilities that kept them from attending school during the day.
And I believed I would now have enough time to do some actual good.
Not only would I be able to learn my students’ names for the first
time this year but I’d have the chance to gauge and cater to their
individual academic strengths and weaknesses. Although I would be
teaching Kaplan’s thirty-six- lesson prep course exclusively, I’d have
a measure of control. Since there was no chance of completing the
whole course book in the time allotted, I would decide what should be
included and what excised. 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.
The course was being held after the school day at John F. Kennedy, a
high school located in a northwestern Bronx neighborhood called
Spuyten Duyvil. Twenty minutes before the first class there, we are
told in a brief orientation that our students are between seventeen
and twenty-one years old. Some need only to pass the Regents exam to
graduate; others have accumulated barely enough credits to be
sophomores and juniors. All of the students assigned to my class have
failed—several of them on multiple occasions—the Living Environment
Regents exam, which New York State’s students typically take in ninth
grade. The challenges pile up once class begins. Of the thirteen
students signed up for my biology prep, four show up. In a class
taught by one of my colleagues that evening, a tutorial for the U.S.
History & Government Regents exam, just one of twenty 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.
As troubling as the absence rate, however, is that not one of the
students who is supposed to be in my class is fluent in English. 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.
The attendance for the second class is better: six students turn up.
All arrive seven minutes late, strolling in unhurriedly. I suppose I
understand: When it has taken five years to accumulate the credit
equivalency of a sophomore, what’s the point of rushing? We begin with
an assignment designed to show students that Regents questions often
contain bloated diction, and that very few of the words in the prompt
are necessary to arrive successfully at an answer. But with the
literacy limitations of the group, I find that getting the students
merely to read the questions, let alone read them aloud, is a nearly
impossible task. No one volunteers, and my attempts to nominate
readers are met with firm resistance. So I fill the void with my own
voice. I read the questions to them, knowing that such coddling will
do them no good on test day.
As we move into the lesson, we encounter a question about the
adaptation of species to their ecosystems. I ask students what the
term “ecosystem” means. They have become more comfortable and have
begun to talk to one another in Spanish when things get difficult.
Yinette, a student who dresses like she might be headed to a nightclub
after class, utters the word “ecosistema.” She and the rest of the
group seem to understand. I point out the window at the trees along
the steep hills rising from the narrow strait, linking the Hudson and
the Harlem rivers, that is the neighborhood’s namesake, the “spitting
devil.” I ask what they remember about how these trees looked a few
months ago. A pony-tailed student named Pedro says they didn’t have
leaves. “Now think about tropical plants you have seen in the
Caribbean,” I say. “What do those plants look like in the middle of
winter?”“The ones in the Dominican Republic still got leaves,” Pedro
answers again. “They got flowers, and some even got fruits hanging
down.” This is good, I’m thinking. The lesson has transcended a simple
review of basic ecology. It has become an exercise in the logical
progression of thought.
I say that the Regents will probably ask something like: “How are
these plants adapted to their ecosystems?”
“Adapted?” asks a girl named Cynthia.
“Yes, adapted. You know this,” I say, but I can see that they do not.
“What does ‘adaptation’ mean? Adapcion,” I try in an awful Spanish.
Nothing. I attempt a different tack. “We said that the plants in New
York drop their leaves and the ones in the D.R. do not.” Nods. “We
said that this is because it gets cold here and it does not get so
cold there. Right?” More nods. “So what does this tell us about how
these plants are ‘adapted’?”
Cynthia’s eyes widen. As if channeling a biology textbook, she says,
“The plants in D.R. are adapted to the warm weather and the ones here
are adapted to the cold.” Right. And what are the adaptations? “The
leaves,” she says, trying to project a sense of toughness, as if this
whole tangled, exhausting effort to spit out a single sentence were
beneath her.
A boy named Jaime lifts the brim of his Cardinals ball cap and looks
up from his paper: “Say that again.”
The remainder of the program at Kennedy moves in similar fits and
starts—of tidal wanderings, of ever more apparent gaps in language,
knowledge, and continuity. The average attendance for my class is
three students. In the eighth of nine sessions, the temperature
reaches 97 degrees and the humidity is off the charts. Only one
student comes, Yinette, who travels an hour by subway from
Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yinette is nineteen, and she has told me that
she wants to be a flight attendant. The biology Regents is the last
exam she must pass, she says, to graduate from high school and get
into the community college where she can begin training for the job.
Yinette sits down and immediately pulls out a transparent folder
filled with copies of past Regents exams. “Can you help me on these?”
she asks eagerly. There is no air-conditioning. In the corner of the
room a large fan on a steel pedestal whirs like the prop of a Cessna,
buoying little flecks of dust and paper that float through the room on
slow currents. Some of the exams she has scattered over the desk are
in Spanish and some are in English. Her looping handwriting can be
seen on most of the visible pages. I decide to overlook Kaplan’s
policy of never deviating from the teaching script, which, with the
slow progress till now, dictates that I conduct an “accelerated”
review of two of the course book’s units.
We begin with a problem that references a cryptic flow chart of
complementary and inverse processes of photosynthesis and cell
respiration. The questions below the diagram are designed to test
understanding of the inputs and outputs of these processes. These core
concepts will probably surface in at least two or three different ways
on the exam, so I’m heartened when Yinette shows that she knows this
material. As she taps into her memory and recalls information gained
at some indeterminate time in her past, she seems filled with
optimism. “This is fun!” she says at one point.
We come to a problem about the functioning of insulin in the
bloodstream. We work incrementally, reviewing information so that she
can sufficiently answer the written responses.
“What is insulin?” I prod.
“A hormone.”
“How does it work?”
“Like a key, to unlock the cell.”
“Yes. So why does the cell need to be unlocked?”
“To let sugar in.”
“Why does sugar need to be in the cell?”
“To make energy.”
This feels almost like teaching. In all the other classes, I’ve
pressed ahead in order to cover as much of the Kaplan material as
possible, well aware that students hadn’t grasped the concepts
presented. During this session with Yinette, there is real engagement.
But too quickly the lesson is over. The electronic bell sounds;
Yinette’s cell phone rings and rattles with new messages. “Thank you,
Mr. Miller,” she says. We have one class remaining. “I’ll see you here
on Wednesday, right?” I ask this because she has missed the previous
two classes. Yinette says into the phone, “Lo siento. Lo siento. Lo
siento.” Apparently I have already kept her too long.
At the final class, Yinette again is the only attendee. She has
brought a few more retired Regents exams, and I do not protest when
she asks if we can work on these instead of the Kap-lan manual. We
review the tests together, but the openness and energy of the previous
class have faded. Her recall of information has ceased. Tonight she
seems to be operating in a mental shell, as if the idea is hardening
that she will soon fail the Regents biology exam for the fifth time.
I find myself desperate. I can’t accept that I have not reached a
single student in the program. Kaplan was being paid $1,200 per
student (attending or not) for a job it knew from the outset it
couldn’t complete. The money could have been used for an ESL or
special- education teacher. Instead, I was receiving an entire day’s
wage for each hour I sat in a nearly deserted classroom. “If you see
the word ‘homeostasis’ in the answer choices,” I say to Yinette, “pick
it. It is most likely the right answer.”Her eyes light up. This is the
kind of teaching I loathe: the test fetishizing, the weasely
code-breaking that begins when the hope of learning has evaporated.
But what more, in this final hour, do I have to offer?
“So if I see that word, ‘homeostasis,’ it’s probably right?” asks
Yinette.
“Probably,” I say and do not elaborate. As we move into the final
section of the test, Latisha Hanson, the on-site Kaplan administrator,
enters the room.
“Sorry to bother you,” she says. “But Lauren wanted me to remind you
that we need to give the students the final diagnostic exam.” I look
at her intensely, in hopes that I will pull her eyes magnetically down
to the classroom empty save for one student, that she will acknowledge
the tragic absurdity of her request. “We need to do it for record
keeping,” Latisha says. “I’m sorry.” Then she places a couple of
Scantron worksheets on the table. Yinette quietly tucks her practice
Regents exams away.
The next forty-five minutes pass agonizingly. Several times Yinette
asks me directly for information. What does UV stand for? What are the
building blocks of a protein? What is a nucleotide? A week earlier, I
would have refused to acknowledge such entreaties. But tonight I am a
sieve, leaking weak encouragements and with them answers. At one point
I interject, “I won’t be there on test day to give you this help.”
Yinette says she knows, and then proceeds to ask me what the
difference is between a heterotroph and an autotroph.
The clock reads 7:00, and I tell Yinette that it is time to stop
writing. I say she needs to finish the question she is working on and
hand in her answer sheet. Dog gedly, she continues. I repeat my
request, and she looks up from her exam. She stops writing and hands
me the Scantron. “I failed,” she says.
“You don’t know that.”
“No. I failed,” she says with jarring finality and rises to leave. She
does not bother to retrieve her Kaplan workbook from the desk.
Nearly two months earlier, after I team-taught back-to-back SAT math
prep classes at Harlem’s Wadleigh High, I found myself stuck for lunch
and decided to eat downstairs in the school’s cafeteria. By the
stairwell leading to the basement cafeteria were two stained-glass
images of Goethe and Victor Hugo encased safely behind tough steel
mesh. A tarnished plaque read, from the classes of 1907. The cafeteria
itself was long and oppressively narrow, with small bench seats
attached to foldout tables. The scene there was one of frenetic,
centerless activity, of bodies moving and colliding in an elaborate
and aggressive minuet. Two students were engaged in a sort of joust
atop the bench seats, trying to throw each other off. A medley of
mashed apples and oranges littered the floor. Students yelled to be
heard over the yelling around them—an ever escalating feedback loop
played out in a drab and unlovingly built echo chamber. The thump of
basketballs from an outdoor court and the thrum of traffic added a
sort of bass line to the tinny cacophony inside.
Jonathan Kozol writes of the “squalid feedings” that take place in
these subterranean mess halls. He says that such conditions persist
because of “a convenient defect of vision” and “are almost guaranteed
to coarsen the mentalities of children and to manufacture restlessness
and discontent.” Yet no laws mandate that additional funds go to
improving these critical spaces. It’s perfectly understandable why
rational adults don’t want to eat down here, and that afternoon I saw
only one teacher, seated at the end of a row of foldout tables. When
he saw my bag, he greeted me with a wordless nod. Apart from this
teacher and the kitchen staff, one other adult, a female aide or
assistant, was stationed at a little wooden table near the entrance.
As if she were a small outcropping in a great river, students flowed
around her. She hunched down over folded hands, her back to the
current.
I stepped up to the lunch line and looked for something palatable. It
was the typical school fare of processed chicken fingers and limp
veggies steamed relentlessly into a weird gelatin. Behind the counter,
a machine churned a pale slurry. I asked what was in the machine.
“Smoothies!” the cook announced enthusiastically. In a small basket
behind the counter were the smallest and waxiest apples I’d ever seen.
As I surveyed the grim offerings, a group from the class I had just
taught slid in line next to me. “How’s it going, Mr. Miller?” It was a
young man with a close-cropped stubble of hair, his dress-code tie
neatly tucked behind a maroon cardigan. I was surprised that he
remembered my name; I certainly didn’t know his or his friends’.
During the previous period, their teacher, a Ms. Geraldino, allowed me
to lead the lecture portion of the SAT prep but interjected
occasionally to remind students of a recent lesson on factoring
polynomials and of the importance of showing their work. At one
moment, she stopped me entirely and separated the students into small
groups so that they could illustrate the steps they had taken to
arrive at their answers. Under the constraints of Kaplan’s routines of
repetition and direct application, I tried to add pace to the lesson,
and Ms. Geraldino and I proceeded to teach in different directions,
offering students conflicting messages. Near the end of class, I
announced to the students, “It’s not about the work you show. It’s
about getting the right answer.” Ms. Geraldino, whose room was papered
with complex algebraic equations, winced visibly.
The student said his name was Shawnell. He wondered whether I wanted
to order something. His confident guidance made me feel like I had run
into a Virgil of the Wadleigh High cafeteria. “What do you suggest?” I
asked.
“Honestly? Nothing. It’s all really bad,” Shawnell said, shaking his
head. “But I’d probably get an apple if I was you.” My thoughts
exactly, though judging from the thick paste on the floor, I suspected
that the apples made better projectiles than snacks. There were no
registers, so I asked where I should go to pay.
“Pay? Nah. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t need to pay. It’s
free.” Then my guide leaned over the counter. “Miss! Miss!” The lunch
woman turned and smiled. “My teacher here, Mr. Miller, needs some
apples,” he said.
“Oh yeah? Hello, Mr. Miller,” she said with a vibrancy completely out
of line with her surroundings. Then she looked back at the boys. “So
what’s Mr. Miller want?”
“He wants some apples. Not the ones that are all banged up. Not the
mushy ones. Get him the good ones,” he said. The lunch woman carefully
sifted through the pile, and when she came upon an acceptable fruit
she laid it to the side. Shawnell and his friends peered over the
counter, performing a sort of quality control. “Yeah. Yeah. That one
looks good.”
She handed them to Shawnell, and he carefully placed them in my hand.
Three perfect, tiny apples gleamed in my palm. “So are you going to be
teaching us tomorrow?” he asked. “I like this SAT stuff.”
“No, I’m here only two days.” I replied. He nodded in quiet
acknowledgment. He and his friends seemed to understand the
arrangement. They had come across my type before.
“Good luck on the test in June,” I said. Then I stuffed the apples
into my jacket pocket and ascended the stairs back into the world of
adults.
Veronique
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:41:05 -0400, Boron Elgar
>
>
>
> <boron_el...@hootmail.com> wrote:
> >On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:43:01 +0000 (UTC), Opus the Penguin
>
> >>Dover Beach (moon.blanc...@gmail.com) wrote:
>
> >>> Opus the Penguin <opusthepenguin+use...@gmail.com> wrote in
I'm a subscriber, and I can send it to you. Oh wait, it's just been
posted.
V.
--
Veronique Chez Sheep
ZBicyclist
>
> It always comes down to whether the company really wants to incur
> the
> legal costs of suing a former employee or not. It seems rather
> unlikely, in your case, but I can't say for sure of course.
I think it's hard to win a non-compete lawsuit, but that doesn't
matter. Defending yourself from the suit is the real deterrent for a
job like this one. Most people who would be teaching this sort of
prep course aren't looking to hire lawyers to defend themselves.
Opus the Penguin
Yeah, that's what my boss at The Princeton Review said to me years
ago. He said flat out that in California especially, the lawsuit
wouldn't hold up. "It's more a way of saying, 'I have $3,000 to go
to court and you don't.'"
--
Opus the Penguin
Who doesn't like extruding squishy food into little wormy strings? -
Dover Beach
Opus the Penguin
> In article <Xns9B1E90A7BA1A7op...@127.0.0.1>,
> Opus the Penguin <opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Blinky the Shark (no....@box.invalid) wrote:
>>
>> > Opus the Penguin wrote:
>> >
>> >> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take
>> >> a part time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a
>> >> Princeton Review guy, but they don't have much of a presence
>> >> yet in this area.
>> >
>> > What is "test prep for Kaplan"?
>> >
>>
>> Kaplan is a company that runs test preparation classes for
>> standardized entry tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT,
>> and MCAT.
>
> My memory from when my daughter was getting ready for SAT exams
> was that the Princeton Review book was the worst--questions having
> little to do with the ones that are actually on the exam, and
> often with ambiguous or wrong answers.
>
I would guess your memory is wrong. The Princeton Review goes out of
their way to use actual test questions and to teach only the sort of
questions that are on the test. What you're describing sounds more
like Barron's. Any chance you might have confused them?
--
Opus the Penguin
Opus the Penguin
Thanks. I skimmed through it. I may look at it more thoroughly. It's
confirming my fears about the sort of test prep Kaplan does. There's
even a point where the guy gets challenged by a Princeton Review
teacher who says it's nothing personal; it's just that Kaplan's
techniques are weak compared to Princeton's. So far, looking at
Kaplan's stuff, I very much agree.
So I'm in this situation where I may be compelled to teach sub-
standard material that won't be as effective. Either that or I tell
the guy, after he's given me the job and we've had our first teacher
training session, that I think I'm better than his company. Bleah.
Mike
> Depends on where you live. In California, non-competes are pretty
> much unenforceable. You should be able to find this out about New
> York laws from a local lawyer for very little money. You should have
> the non-competition contract looked over by a lawyer, too.
I live in California, and was subject to a non-compete clause a few
years ago. It turns out they are quite common, and quite enforceable in
California (don't hit 'Reply' yet - read on). It all depends on how
they're written and in what way they're presented.
If it's part of an employment agreement, then it's probably difficult to
enforce.
However, if it's part of a separate contract, like a stock option or a
bonus plan, then it's legal and enforceable, and the terms can indeed be
vicious.
In my case, the company's interpretation of "non-compete" meant "you
can't work for anyone in the semiconductor industry." They were very up
front about this, and the corporate attorney who told us about this
actually believed that this was "exciting and beneficial," and would
make the company look more attractive to potential employees. I am not
making that up.
We hired an attorney to review the contract - a well known Silicon
Valley attorney whose primary business is handling compensation packages
for Silicon Valley executives. Our attorney told us the contract was
entirely legal and enforceable. If we left the company for some reason
other than a layoff, we could be prevented, at the company's discretion,
from working for any other semiconductor company, in any role past
security guard, for three years. To be fair, the corporate attorney told
us we could also drive a dump truck. I asked whether or not I should
consider that "exciting and beneficial," but he didn't answer.
The reason this was all legal is that it was part of a stock option
agreement, and not part of an employment agreement. That's the critical
point - as it was explained to us, an employment agreement is considered
something you're required to sign to work. A stock option, on the other
hand, is entirely optional. Exercising the option and collecting value
isn't necessary to make the non-compete clause enforceable.
We also had a legal search done. The results were mixed - about half the
cases that had gone to court resulted in the non-compete clause being
thrown out. But the other half didn't, and as we discovered, it's very
expensive to start a fight with a big company.
A couple years later, one of our directors was forced out of the
company. He left, and went to work for another company, working on
completely different products than he had ever worked on at our company.
That didn't matter to our company: management went after him with a
vengeance. He found that his stock option checks had been canceled
(another clause in the contract), and his new employer was sued to
prevent him from working. He countered, and after some back and forth,
our company backed down. What they didn't do was reimburse any of his
legal bills, which came to around $5,000.
All this is probably inapplicable to Opus' case.
-- Mike --
Opus the Penguin
> All this is probably inapplicable to Opus' case.
But it was fascinating nonetheless. Thanks.
--
Opus the Penguin
You're a teapot. And you reek of wombat. - N. Jill Marsh
DavidDF...@gmail.com
wrote:
> David Friedman(d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com) wrote:
> > In article <Xns9B1E90A7BA1A7opusthepenguinnet...@127.0.0.1>,
>
> >> > Opus the Penguin wrote:
>
> >> >> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take
> >> >> a part time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a
> >> >> Princeton Review guy, but they don't have much of a presence
> >> >> yet in this area.
>
> >> > What is "test prep for Kaplan"?
>
> >> Kaplan is a company that runs test preparation classes for
> >> standardized entry tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT,
> >> and MCAT.
>
> > My memory from when my daughter was getting ready for SAT exams
> > was that the Princeton Review book was the worst--questions having
> > little to do with the ones that are actually on the exam, and
> > often with ambiguous or wrong answers.
>
> I would guess your memory is wrong. The Princeton Review goes out of
> their way to use actual test questions and to teach only the sort of
> questions that are on the test. What you're describing sounds more
> like Barron's. Any chance you might have confused them?
Certainly possible--it was a year or so back. But my wife's memory
agrees with mine.
Opus the Penguin
On second look, I think my memory's out of date. Reviews on Amazon of
their most recent sample tests complain of incorrect answers. Sounds
like they may have been rushing some things to print without any
quality control.
--
Opus the Penguin
That is the thing that made it memorable, well to the extent it was
memorable, as I can't remember much more than that. - Xho
Jim Prescott
Les Albert <lalb...@aol.com> wrote:
>On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 18:59:56 +0000 (UTC), Opus the Penguin
>><opusthepen...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> How enforceable are non-compete agreements? I'm about to take a part
>>> time job doing test prep for Kaplan. I'm more of a Princeton Review
>>> guy, but they don't have much of a presence yet in this area.
>>> To sign up with Kaplan, I have to sign a thing saying I won't go work
>>> for the competition (or set myself up as the competition) for a period
>>> of one year following termination. I also agree to be bound by the laws
>>> of the state of New York in this matter.
>
Curious that Kaplan requires that you be bound by the laws of a state
where, according to Les' article, "enforceability is quite limited".
Unless something has changed in NY since that article was written, it
seems likely that Kaplan wants NY just for its own convenience, not as
a form of venue shopping.
--
Jim Prescott - Computing and Networking Group j...@seas.rochester.edu
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of Rochester, NY
Lee Ayrton
>
> Curious that Kaplan requires that you be bound by the laws of a state
> where, according to Les' article, "enforceability is quite limited".
>
> Unless something has changed in NY since that article was written, it
> seems likely that Kaplan wants NY just for its own convenience, not as
> a form of venue shopping.
According to Wiki-o-the-moment, Kaplan, Inc. is a for-profit corporation
headquartered in New York City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan,_Inc.
I'm guessing that that is the state that they are incorporated in.
--
"Thank heavens I'm atheist, otherwise I'd be in fear of going
to hell." Veronique explains comparative religion.
groo
>> It may be an interesting article but they won't let anyone read it
>> unless they're a subscriber :( Only seventeen dollars a year! (shakes
>> head...)
>
> I'm a subscriber, and I can send it to you. Oh wait, it's just been
> posted.
>
Harper's prints the word "fuck"? I've never read the magazine, but I
thought it was too mainstream for that.
--
"Did he do the "we dee-dee dee"s or the "a-weem a-wep"s?" - darkon on
afca
paulydak
It was one of the first mainstream publications in which I ever saw
the word used, back in the 80's.
--
Pauly-soon to come: Readers' Fucking Digest (condensed porno)