They Had It Coming

We understand what she is saying, but she is a consummately annoying woman herself! If she was indeed a dedicated teacher who loved books and kids, then why on earth (except more money and perqs, or maybe unadmitted kid burnout?) would she move to that quite different job.

I ended up liking her far less than those baddies she talked about (the ones she finally admitted were only about 25% of the whole - the rest were nice people).

Her smart-a** style of writing didn’t help a bit. Hard to take her very seriously...

I stopped when I got to "my god was art, literature.."

Bleah. Loser from the beginning, off the rails to start.

I don´t know why Wm H Macy got a free pass here, and Felicity Huffman took the fall. All of Hollywood had to know about this. Secrets like this cannot be kept secrets for long, especially in a community where a lot of intermingling is happening.

If anyone has watched several of the 1st season episodes of his mediocre Netflix offering ´Shameless´, there are some plot lines and characters involved in SAT testing fraud. In depth. Coincidence? Or is it Art imitating life?

If you take time to read the whole thing, to some degree I believe she nails it. However, it was hard to miss the embedded irrelevant but obligatory, explicit slur against MAGA folk and POTUS Trump.

I like writing in plain style without all those literary flourishes meant to impress us peons who don´t inhabit the same rarefied air she breathes. She lost me at "plucked bird."

The writer´s obvious faults notwithstanding, I found this fascinating, in a grim sort of way. Yes, she´s obnoxious, but her article gives us a detailed look at the dark underbelly of the beast whose name is "Our Betters." These are the same ones who want to take our money to pay for their contribution to "social justice," so called, while telling us what ignorant hayseeds we all are.

You need to get past her snarky writing style and focus on what the facts she is alleging.

Its amazing that so many people could read the same article and come back with different views. I myself found the article very entertaining. She was not anti Trump, she skewered the parents as being the sorts that were anti Trump and heroes of progressive politics, "limousine liberals" as she so aptly called them. As for her writing style, barbed, and to the point. Sort of like Tom Wolfe.

Bravo.

Try to not miss this one.

That´s all.

I trudged through the long, long essay, but in the end I thought there´d be something I learned. I am not surprised at all about the payoffs and the benefits of athletics in admissions. Endowments and building contributions have always been around, as has someone paid to take admissions tests. I have read that minorities´ admissions essays sometimes dishonestly emphasize poverty and oppression that the child never experienced. For every student who cheats, there is one whose qualifications are superior but he loses out. Same thing with affirmative action and diversity quotas.

No surprise here. When I worked at a university in the holy SEC group, many football players each had a student assistant to tutor them in those ´macrame and finger painting classes´ they took--when they weren´t running laps or in the special cafeteria of their own.

Silly me, I thought that only happened in dumb-butt southern schools. Apparently not. The example proves what I´ve always thought about the faux blue-blooded snot wads of the east coast and the Ivy League schools.

My goodness that was a loooooooooong article. I didn´t get her style though---it was as if she started on a concept and veered off in another direction--without completing the thought. Or maybe it is just me. I still do NOT understand the reference to ASU. Flashbang? Why? Is ASU now a bad school? A school for only commoners? Too easy to get in? Other examples like that. I just couldn´t really "get" the article.

I thought it was an excellent article, allowing for the fact that no one who writes for the Atlantic is going to share our ideological bent.

Cripe´s a´mighty. I can not stand people who are so GD into themselves they can not see anyone or anything else. She should just go for a very long walk in the woods and get lost!

It is an interesting article, even though it´s too long and wordy,like most articles in New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic. (In other words, "Get to the point, girl!")
Two points other than the main thrust of the article struck me as highly significant but completely ignored by the author.
(1) Allowing people with "learning disabilities" to cheat on tests like the SAT, the ACT, and postgraduate-level tests like the GRE and the LSAT -- taking an untimed test while normal students have a set time limit to finish -- is grotesque! It is obviously cheating. Federal law now considers an intellectual disability, i.e., lower intelligence, to be something that requires giving the lower-performing student a leg up on his/her peers.
(2) Flanagan complains that athletic scholarships for certain sports are "affirmative action" for white kids. Hey, Caitlin, all athletic scholarships are affirmative action for poor-performing students who happen to be young, fit, and skilled in sports. Very few of these "student athletes" at most big schools belong in college. There are some important exceptions, such as the service academies (West Point, Annapolis, Colorado Springs, and New London), where the sports team members have to meet the same academic standards as all the other cadets. There are also the STEM schools, mostly smaller colleges like Caltech, that have strong academic standards and don´t admit illiterates just to play basketball and football. But most people on athletic scholarships have no business attending college.

This article ignores the effect on the student, which can be extremely destructive. A well-motivated student who majors in STEM subjects at ASU and takes the challenging courses offered there can end up with a much better education (and better prospects) than the average Ivy Leaguer who majors in one of the many available fluff subjects.
Only about ? of the ASU students who start out majoring in engineering at ASU as freshmen graduate as engineers, and of those who do so only about 2% make it in the standard eight semesters. Any university that offers a PhD in a subject can provide everything most undergraduates can handle. They should save their money and then go on to an elite school for their graduate work, which is where there is a real difference in the education offered.
When I was an Ivy League grad student, we used to say, "The Ivy League is where wealthy students go to be taught by TAs who were the top of their class at the City College of New York."

In my previous post the ? was meant to be one-third. Somehow the system replaced the number with a question mark.

Remember when John Thompson,BB coach at Georgetown said he would never give a basketball scholarship to a white boy. Not sure if unethical is by definition illegal. I can see the SAT fraud but I would also try to help my child, however even the most naive when reach a point of conscience that something is wrong here.

Ahhhh, ya gotta love the Texas Atlantic Monthly...