Career Memoir – education and deconstruction.com

Test Pilot

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “Test Pilot, How I Broke Testing Barriers…” by Stanley H. Kaplan with Anne Farris, published in 2001.

Kaplan was born in 1919 in Brooklyn, NY. In the last several decades he parlayed his passion for teaching into a big-name corporate entity in America. Kaplan began a tutoring business in his hometown and added the service of preparing students for the New York State Regents exams. In 1946, he added the “Scholastic Aptitude Test” (SAT).

At that time, the SAT’s original purpose was to provide a criterion based on merit (rather than white male privilege) by which colleges would accept students. The test was supposed to be predictive of a student’s first six months of higher education. Supposedly, the SAT was not the kind of test one could study for. It tested aptitude– “developed abilities” acquired from life-experience.

In 1947, the College Board (a trade group that monitored higher education in the United States) created the Educational Testing Service (ETS) to administer the SAT and other tests. ETS is a nonprofit organization. More and more WWII veterans were taking the SAT in order to get accepted to the college of their choice, and have the GI Bill pay their tuition. More and more colleges were considering the SAT in their admissions process.

The hegemony of the College Board was such that it wouldn’t tell students (and their parents) their SAT scores. The scores were sent directly to the colleges to which students applied.

The author wrote that in the 1960’s, “I still supported the use of admissions tests along with grades as the best predictors of success because grade inflation was rampant.” That decade, Kaplan expanded his company’s service lines to include test-prep for the PSAT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, DAT and MCAT. It also did test-prep for medical-school board exams, the passing of which was required prior to graduation.

In the early 1980’s, Kaplan’s business was allowed to take on a duty of the Immigration and Naturalization Service– a federal agency. At that time, there was a shortage of medical doctors in America, so Kaplan issued visas to foreign students to study medicine in this country. There were students from Vietnam, Syria, and Russia, among others. Fortunately, Kaplan also offered test-prep for the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

There were controversies through the decades. Kaplan wrote, “I realized that the SAT wasn’t biased; inferior education in America was biased… I saw firsthand at my own centers what a difference small classes, higher expectations, and individual attention made in students’ academic achievement.”

It appeared Kaplan did have bragging rights in that he built a billion-dollar business, and truly loved teaching. It is possible the test-prep trend he started, DID actually help reduce education inequality across the country by imparting basic skills to underprivileged students (with scholarships) whose under-resourced school districts failed them. In other words, his test-prep business was a stand-in for providing basic education for students who wanted to learn but couldn’t, at their poor-quality local schools.

However, it is impossible to prove whether or by how much, students can raise their standardized test scores by taking-prep classes, as the statistics on the students are trade secrets, and there has been propaganda from all the different stakeholders from the get-go, on all the standardized tests.

The reader might notice that the original name of Kaplan’s business was “Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Center Ltd.” That “Ltd.” means it was incorporated NOT in the United States, but in the UK or some other offshore tax shelter, and a place that would minimize the company’s having to defend against lawsuits!

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the author’s business history, and his philosophy.

The World I See

The Book of the Week is “The World I See, Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI” by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, published in 2025. In this wordy volume, the author described her professional and personal lives from the 1980’s through the decades of greatly accelerated computing power to date.

Born in Beijing, China, Li grew up in Chengdu. She and her mother moved to Parsippany, NJ to join her father in 1992. Because she and her parents were immigrants, they were grateful for opportunities to get educated and work in a free society. Thus, they weren’t self-absorbed attention-whores with a sense of entitlement. They worked extremely hard, and still suffered financial hardships. Of course, they got a few lucky breaks that allowed Li to participate in a tech startup.

Meanwhile, AI software can replace the inefficient way the census of the United States is taken. Nowadays, data on people’s cars, indicate all kinds of detailed demographics, including the political leanings of their drivers. On the other hand, there are American citizens who do not own or lease or drive a car. So other data sources would need to count those individuals.

There exist other potential dangers in the new Orwellian economy; fatal ones! A hacker could change just a few pixels of what a self-driving car sees so that it misreads a street sign and causes an accident.

The author became interested in a neural network in which software categorizes and describes graphics, in words. Unfortunately, in the single-digit 2000’s, Li and her colleagues couldn’t compete with other researchers who had monster-sized resources, such as those at Google.

Read the book to learn what became of Li.

On My Watch

The Book of the Week is “On My Watch, Leading NATO in a Time of War” by Jens Stoltenberg, with Per Anders Madsen, published in 2025. This hodgepodge of a volume alternated in describing snippets of world history from all different centuries, and the major military conflicts of the world from the 2010’s onward.

The Norwegian author served as secretary general of NATO for ten years, beginning in October 2014. There is always controversy over which group– the EU or NATO– should militarily aid a NATO member that is attacked. And since its inception, NATO has had its intrigue and James Bond wannabes. “At the end of September [2021] we expelled eight Russians who were accredited as diplomats to NATO, but who in reality were active intelligence agents.” Periodically, NATO nations hold summits. Attendees of the 2021 London summit discussed a ten-year plan in connection with climate change, infrastructure, cyber-threats and China.

In early 2020, the Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban behind closed doors, without other NATO members present. All American soldiers (after 40 years of CIA-shenanigans), and NATO troops (after twenty years of ups and downs) were to leave Afghanistan by the end of April 2021, subject to the following conditions to which the Taliban agreed (nod-nod, wink-wink):

draft a new Constitution for Afghanistan;
have the Taliban’s soldiers join the regular Afghan military;
stop launching terrorist attacks;
sever its alliance with al-Qaeda.

By summer 2020, Trump had changed his mind, and wanted all American troops out of Afghanistan as soon as possible. He thought that promising to “bring our boys home” would help him get reelected president in 2020.

For a different reason, the author’s colleague agreed that withdrawing all troops was a wise move. From an economic standpoint, throwing bad money after bad money was stupid, and the participating nations should have cut their losses long before then.

Over the course of four decades, alpha males with hubris syndrome couldn’t face the reality that Afghanistan’s people consist of numerous tribes who have been fighting one another for hundreds of years and their vendettas are not going to stop anytime soon. Afghans are insular, and so would reject outsiders’ (the EU, UN or NATO) coming in to supervise the leadership of their territory.

On a larger scale, countries of the world have their shifting alliances and hostilities. The Ukraine war which began in 2022 had China, North Korea and Iran supplying military resources to Russia, while NATO supplied weapons and ammunition to Ukraine.

Read the book to learn much more about the author’s take on, and how he dealt with delicate diplomatic situations.

Dead Center

The Book of the Week is “Dead Center, In Defense of Common Sense” by Joe Manchin, published in 2025.

Born in 1947, Manchin grew up in West Virginia. He was elected governor of West Virginia in 2004. In January 2005, he privatized the state’s workers compensation system, because the system was an extreme financial burden to the state budget.

At that, the unions feared they would lose their benefits. The plaintiffs’ lawyers got mad as hell because the system had been a gravy train for them. Some workers did have legitimate claims because West Virginia’s economy is based on drilling for and mining of natural resources and the major resource– coal– is an extremely dangerous business.

Manchin levied a tax on coal to pay down West Virginia’s crushing debt load. He was a straight shooter. He wrote that he tried to add other kinds of revenue-generators such as tourism, infrastructure and small businesses, to the state’s economy.

Manchin came around to agreeing that term-limits for elected officials, including Congress members, would be good for the country. A limit of two terms would force a public servant to take quick actions in their first term to get reelected, and then, if they want a legacy, they’ll have to continue to try to help their constituents.

If, however, as seems to be the case with career politicians– their motives for getting elected to office are simply power-hunger and greed. If they’re limited to two terms, they’ll accelerate their patronage piggishness and profiteering in their first term, and get complacent in their second term (if they get one) because they know they’ll be long gone when it hits the fan.

Moreover, “It is an iron law of politics: Stopping stuff is always more popular than compromising to get things done.” Read the book to learn what Manchin actually got done; as someone who truly cared about his constituents and voted pursuant to his conscience, he was willing to compromise.

Timebends, A Life

The Book of the Week is “Timebends, A Life” by Arthur Miller, published in 1987.

Born in 1915 in New York City, Arthur Miller was an internationally famous playwright best known for Death of A Salesman and The Crucible.

Miller commented that in 1932, ordinary Americans were out of money and hope, and the Republicans were out of ideas. In 1952, the Republicans were extremely furious that the Democrats had had a stranglehold on the American government for twenty years. Miller was a participant in an informal think tank of intellectuals– academics, writers and artists, and as was common for the time– who were also heavy drinkers and smokers. They were at wits’ end trying to counter the overwhelming, vicious anti-Communist propaganda of the political Right.

In 1948, Miller and his friend, an Italian attorney, met the mafioso Lucky Luciano in Sicily. In exchange for having three cartons of American cigarettes taken from them, Miller and his guide got a free road-tour of the island. Curiously, at every gas station, their driver wasn’t charged for fuel, either.

In the early 1950’s, Miller tried psychoanalysis, which was the latest thing among deep thinkers like himself. However, he gave it up, as he feared that digging too deeply into his subconscious might curb his creativity, which would mean the loss of his livelihood.

The [U.S. government’s] House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) maximized its power to terrorize all Americans by convincing them that Communists were conspiring to take over the country. BUT the Communist Party had been legal in the 1930’s and 1940’s– the period when the accused had allegedly been associated with it, or knew those associated with it. In many cases, by the end of the 1940’s, the accused had shed their ties to it, so at the time allegations surfaced in the 1950’s– there was no illegality. Even the accused who were actually guilty, were denied due process.

Besides, in the United States, the Communist Party and its front had had mostly Socialist, not Communist goals. There was, and still remains so much ignorance about the two ideologies. In this blog, do a keyword search for “Communist” and “Socialist” to become informed.

Miller forgave Hollywood-director Elia Kazan for naming names of alleged Communists he’d interacted with when HUAC pressured him into doing so. Miller argued that if Kazan had not caved, his career would have been ruined, so he wouldn’t have made any more emotionally moving movies with socially valuable messages; the same way some politicians who make ethically difficult choices by voting on legislation that will harm their constituents, are doing it to get reelected so that they may continue to do more good for their constituents in the long run.

On the other hand, in recent decades, laws have been changed to make excessively unethical behavior legal. So most of the disgusting behavior of America’s leaders is lawful, regardless of the leaders’ unconscionable greed and hubris. One ray of hope indicating that the United States still has democracy, is that it still has two political parties– one to rein in the other.

Read the book to learn a lot more about Arthur Miller’s life and times, generally a rerun of earlier times.

The Conscience of A Liberal

The Book of the Week is “The Conscience of A Liberal, Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda” by Paul Wellstone, published in 2001. This career memoir humbly recounted the author’s triumphs and setbacks in community organizing and changing the world.

Wellstone, an idealist, and Democrat from Minnesota, got elected the first time he ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990. He explained that his proposal for a single-payer national healthcare system, would eliminate health insurance companies altogether– so of course the insurance industry lobbied against it.

Wellstone described how crucial the early weeks of pregnancy are for the lifelong health of the child. After about three weeks of gestation, the child’s “neural tube” begins to form. Epilepsy, mental retardation, autism or schizophrenia can result if these cells are damaged in any way by what the mother ingests, inhales, or any illness or injury she suffers. So coverage earmarked for maternal care in a healthcare bill might be a good idea.

On another topic, Wellstone voted against president Clinton’s welfare-to-work bill in June 1996. The senator spoke with multitudes of his constituents who were on welfare. If they were required to work, especially if they headed a single-parent household, they would actually become poorer, because, given the kind of low-level job they could get– the total food, housing and healthcare benefits they would lose– would likely exceed their wages. And they would have to pay for childcare. Or additional education.

Such is the situation for culturally-disadvantaged people stuck in the poverty cycle in America. Factor in social ills such as addiction, domestic violence, poor health, etc., that people in higher economic strata are better able to afford to deal with– and the problems of those “working poor” actually multiply, because one thing leads to another.

For the above reasons, many Democrats felt Clinton was siding with the cold, heartless Republicans. Moreover, unsurprisingly, at the book’s writing, the United States was dead last in the rankings of 26 top industrialized nations in “protecting children against gun violence.”

Wellstone wrote that during the 1993-1994 election year, one of his fellow senators cast several votes against his conscience with the goal of getting reelected. He lost the election anyway. Wellstone himself claimed he usually resisted peer pressure.

Wellstone made suggestions of how the government could reverse its greedy ways. One he hoped more state governments would implement, was to allow an option of state candidates to run “clean money” campaigns. At the book’s writing, Massachusetts, Arizona, Maine and Vermont let candidates opt to spend campaign dollars they received from only a publicly financed fund; rather than from private donors who expected a quid pro quo, and nowadays, almost always get it, thanks to campaign finance laws that resemble Swiss cheese, what with loopholes.

As is well known, representative democracy in the United States has become a combination greedfest / power trip. Ordinary Americans (ones who have no powerful political connections), in order to change laws, can’t afford to:

pay for trips for senators and congresspeople;
donate millions of dollars to candidates to get quid pro quos;
have lawyers at the ready if they’re called out on any illegal behavior;
hire lobbyists.

Wellstone did say BOTH PARTIES were to blame for this mess.

Read the book to learn much more about the occasions in which Wellstone formed coalitions with his opposition in order to try to pass legislation, how they horse-traded to get their pork, or block laws they didn’t want passed.

Nothing Random / In the Ring – BONUS POST

WARNING: VERY, VERY LONG POST

The first Bonus Book of the Week is “Nothing Random, Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built” by Gayle Feldman, published in 2026. Ironically, the writing in this tome was awkward and contained bad grammar in certain spots. Anyway, the author recounted the U.S. book industry of a bygone era– a decades-long saga typical for a business run by alpha males with clashing egos.

The reader might recall that prior to the internet, publishing a physical book required months and months of advance preparation, involving what would now be considered a bloated staff. The publishing personnel took pride in their work, and truly cared about doing quality work. It wasn’t all about the big dollar sign as it is nowadays.

In summer 1963, author Ayn Rand, on contract with publisher Random House, was writing a book of essays, one of which was super-controversial. Rand contended that JFK was fascistic, supporting her arguments by quoting the president, showing how he sounded like Hitler and Goering. She truly believed that the most prosperous nation would have purely capitalistic economics, and completely libertarian politics. She felt capitalism is a meritocratic system.

But to start with, capitalism requires a government that provides and maintains the systems of a healthy, well-educated workforce. When private entities provide essential services such as healthcare and education, there occurs corruption– because profit-seeking entities favor money over people. Therefore, the government needs to have some socialistic systems in the forms of: financial assistance for certain of its citizens, locally run public schools, public libraries and public transportation, to name a few.

Capitalism is a meritocracy only insofar as there’s no cronyism between the government and business leaders. Pure meritocracy is a fantasy. There is always a certain level of corruption in government, that waxes and wanes with the tenor of the times. This is inevitable due to the greed of human nature. Public-private partnerships are a necessary evil in a democratic society.

So arguably, Rand’s political and economic systems are a recipe for the eventual formation of an oligopolistic oligarchy, run by fighting warlords. Sounds familiar.

One bright spot in today’s sorry state of affairs in America, can be seen in today’s communications environment: This is the Golden Age of Free Speech. The internet has allowed anyone and everyone to have their say if they want to– on social media, or if they get their own website– with no censorship. And no one needs to have great wealth or power anymore, in order to do so.

Read the book to learn much, much, much more about Bennett Cerf’s life and times.

The second Bonus Book of the Week is “In the Ring, The Trials of A Washington Lawyer” by Robert S. Bennett, published in 2008. This wordy volume contained awkward phrasing and bad grammar in certain spots. But it showed how tolerance for criminality in the United States government has skyrocketed.

The huge surge in the demand for white-collar criminal-defense attorneys in recent decades, is one indication. Bennett thought the attorney’s job is to do everything possible short of illegal or unethical behavior, to help save his client’s reputation and freedom. He recounted several legal cases he handled.

One, in 1981, involved U.S. Senator Harrison A. Williams, Jr., who– after indisputable evidence of corruption surfaced– was convicted in the ABSCAM scandal. The investigating committee was truly nonpartisan. After the trial, Williams’ fellow senators felt his continued presence compromised the dignity of their government body, and therefore, they were obligated to expel him. Williams eventually resigned. HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

Unethical behavior and criminality have reached such a screaming crescendo that this country’s TOP leader (not simply a senator!) and his cronies are staying in power. And Congress is letting them.

The Democrats are letting the GOP have their way, thinking voters will blame the GOP– as the GOP has a majority in Congress; Democrats think they will win back a lot of seats in the midterm elections. But some voters are angry at the Democrats for looking weak, and not fighting back.

The concentration of power among the billionaires has gotten so extreme, that in the near future, the United States must return to the 1950’s era mentality of: (like the healthcare company ChenMed’s culture) Americans’ expecting to be treated by medical doctors who are trusted family friends; and taxing the rich as the standard, acceptable way of life.

Or else, the United States will continue to devolve into the kleptocracy of a Third World country.

Bennett showed how, when an international incident occurs, there are complicated, incestuous global relationships that require delicate negotiations. In the case of a 1997 Soviet-Georgian diplomat’s drunken-driving accident in Washington, D.C. in which someone died, controversy ensued as to whether the diplomat should have immunity from jail-time or fining. The U.S. could have instead cut off financial aid to Soviet Georgia as punishment. However, retaliatory action could be taken against American diplomats at embassies around the world.

The author wrote, “I have always felt that there was more business for criminal lawyers representing companies when the Republicans were in power rather than the Democrats.”

Anyway, read the book to learn of several additional situations which Bennett felt he handled skillfully, despite his having to deal with alpha males with hubris syndrome, James Bond wannabes, black ops and CIA operatives.

Regarding the aforementioned issues, here’s a song that answers the question: Why are the billionaires keeping Trump in office? It’s what Trump is singing to the few people still working for him.

U.S. of A.

sung to the tune of “Y.M.C.A.” [the album version] with apologies to The Village People and to whomever else the rights may concern.

My men, there’s no need to feel shame. I say, my men, immortalize my name. I say my men, ’cause I rule this great game. There’s no need to ask, am I stopping?

My men, I love making dough. I say my men, here is where you can go. You can stay here. I’ll rule the world for all time, all on the American taxpayers’ dime.