I am assuming Thomas Friedman knows a lot about foreign affairs, which is what he mostly writes about. He certainly knows very little about America’s public schools. I wonder when was the last time he stepped into a school or talked to a real teacher. My guess: it has been many years. Maybe he went to a public school.
His article in Sunday’s New York Times demonstrates that he is not only out of touch, but woefully misinformed. Everything he knows about Race to the Top he learned not by any research or school visits or investigative reporting, but by talking to Arne Duncan.
Guess what? Arne Duncan thinks Race to the Top is a huge success. He says so. It must be so. It will make the entire population college-ready. Everyone will go to college, get a good job, poverty will end, and we will outcompete every other nation in the world.
If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. It’s not too far from where I live, and it is regularly sold to the gullible.
Of course, Friedman also really admires No Child Left Behind too, even though it wasn’t perfect. and he sees the close connection between NCLB and RTTT. Where do you begin with a man who opines but knows so little?
Please, someone, bombard Mr. Thomas Friedman with the nearly 400 letters from parents, teachers, administrators, and students about the massive disaster called Race to the Top.
Ask him where we are racing. Ask him who will get to the top. Ask him why we ditched equality of educational opportunity.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Done. I also asked him to correct the record after reading the letters.
Thank you, Diane, for your work.
-Julie Gorlewski
Done…made the same request. I don’t get the feeling he is able to learn and process new information.
Saw him on Meet the Press this morning, and rolled my eyes as he listed RTTT as something Obama should be proud of – but his NYT article leaves me speechless. What’s really scary is Friedman’s influence among many liberal, supposedly well-informed liberal types. Many consider his pronouncements – on pretty much anything – to be the final word, no need to look further. Ugh.
Read Matt Taibi’s takedown…not all buy into the Friedman schtick. He keeps recycling the same ideas and metaphors. He is a legend in his own mind.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/thomas-friedmans-new-state-of-grace-20120627
Done.
Friedman is terrible on foreign affairs, too. For those interested, here is Matt Taibbi’s classic take down of Friedman from 2005 (google “Taibbi Friedman” for more recent eviscerations):
http://www.alternet.org/story/21856/flathead/?page=entire
Reblogged this on Transparent Christina.
Friedman’s piece is currently the most emailed article in the NY Times There are 348 comments, many of which raise concerns about RTTT. Mine is online and is a subset of my letter to Obama….
As a parent of a child in a highly regarded school district, I beg to differ with your praise for Race to the Top. While accountability and increased academic standards are both important, thrusting an unproven curriculum on an entire nation’s students is not smart.
Common Core (CC) is a drastic change. For students entering “in the middle of the movie,” there are components that are missing. CC has turned my child’s 7th grade math class upside down as it is now based on 6th grade math and concepts in statistics (and other areas) that were never previously taught. Also, usual topics like exponents and scientific notation have disappeared completely to be replaced with concepts like drawing to scale.
There’s a lot of explaining in math now. CC has my child talking a lot about math but not actually doing much math. The emphasis is not on skills but spewing phrases like Constant of Proportionality or justifying procedures in algebraic expressions that have already been solved with properties of numbers rather than actually working on the math steps himself.
Perhaps the biggest danger of CC math is that it eliminates the ability for students to be on an advanced track for Algebra. This means kids will not have an opportunity to take college level math in high school.
I’m not convinced that CC math is a step forward for education. Our district’s math program was doing quite well before these changes. I now fear for the future of math education in our schools.
Ten years of NCLB/RTTT with no significant gains in student achievement and according to Friedman “it is too early to draw any firm conclusions.” Seriously? How many more boatloads of time and treasure would he have us waste on this charade?
10pm………………..comments no longer accepted. That was fast.
Fake it, until you make it!
I submitted mine at 1 pm on Sunday when comments were still being accepted. It was never posted. I am very suspicious of the NY Times controlling the commenting section. I did not include any offensive language (and yes I did have to hold myself back) but it was never posted. Most newspapers immediately post comments without having to make it past the comment police. Many Times articles do not even allow commenting. Apparently the Times is terrified of free speech and the public calling out the ignorant hubris of their pundits.
I had the same experience. I wrote a comment in the early morning and it never got posted. It was not inappropriate, yet they must have believed that it was too critical of Friedman and his neo-liberal positions. No wonder why the Times banished Michael Winerip from the education beat.
You ask when the last time that Thomas Friedman talked to a teacher. The answer is, everyday. His wife. Though to be fair, she “retired” years ago. http://www.aspeninstitute.org/people/ann-friedman I always thought it interesting that she taught school because she is an heiress. Her parents, the Bucksbaums, own General Growth Properties, which owns many, many shopping malls. They are worth millions and millions. Did you ever see a photo of Thomas & Ann’s house? http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Thomas+Friedman%22+house&hl=en&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox&prmd=imvnso&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=Z7aEUMfmFKSJ0QGjsoCgDw&ved=0CB8QsAQ&biw=800&bih=403 That’s enough gossip for now, I think!
Ironically she worked for Montgomery County in Maryland which is the one district in the state to turn down Race to the Top funds because they didn’t want to be forced to use test score in their teacher evaluations. They are noted for developing their own teacher evaluation reforms using peer review.
Thomas Friedman doesn’t know a lot about anything. His area of ignorance is world economics, though, not foreign policy.
A few years ago, for our professional development in school-wide twenty first century literacy curriculum, we were broken into “jig-saw” groups and ordered to create summaries of our assigned chapter of his manifesto on the glories of neoliberal globalization, “The World is Flat”. I was written up for deviating from instructions, by criticizing our chapter instead of just paraphrasing.
That caused me to watch his output since, so I noticed when he cranked out a piece blaming American teachers for the 2008 financial collapse.
Here’s a short critique of another of Friedman’s columns last week, from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “The How Many Wrong Statements Can You Find In Thomas Friedman’s Column Game.”
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-how-many-wrong-statements-can-you-find-in-thomas-friedmans-column-game
Here’s one sample, a familiar Friedman claim:
“This merger [of globalization and technology] makes old jobs obsolete faster and spins off new jobs faster, but all the good new jobs require higher skills.”
CEPR points out the facts don’t support Friedman’s assertion:
“There are no major sectors of the economy with rapidly rising wages, with longer workweeks and with large numbers of job openings relative to the number of unemployed. These are all characteristics of markets with labor shortages — the jobs requiring higher skills story that Friedman is telling. ”
On a deeper level, we have to confront the global financiers’ drive to disinvest in the education of the vast majority of the flat worlds’ children, including those in (former) first-world nations. Grinding poverty is engulfing the world’s next generation, to Friedman’s ideological delight. To stop it, we need to say “working class” out loud. Here’s is CEPR again, almost saying it:
“Instead our trade agreements focused on putting manufacturing workers in direct competition with their low-paid counterparts in the developing world. This has eliminated millions of manufacturing jobs and put downward pressure on the wages in the jobs that remained. The decision to direct globalization on a path that hurt manufacturing workers was a policy choice, not an inevitable historical process.”
The attacks we’re experiencing in our work (and in Friedman’s columns) are part of that downward pressure. Is our common interest in protecting universal public education enough to unite us? Teachers of the world, meet the workers of the world.
Gee, a member of the 1% of the 1% espousing policies that force more of the middle- and working classes’ money upwards into their own pockets. Who wudda thunk it?
For anyone who still thinks Friedman has anything wise to say about foreign policy, here is the infamous clip from his interview with Charlie Rose, in which he explains that the reason (which he wholeheartedly endorses) for the Iraq War was to say to the region which produces those who terrorize us (and I am not making this up!): “S*ck on this.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwFaSpca_3Q
How many things can you find wrong in those three minutes of bloviating?
Diane –
Thanks for calling him out. I read this this morning and thought …what is he talking about? Does he know anything? Obviously not. He should know better AND he should stick to foreign policy.
Jeannie
I, too, commented on the article:
The “reforms” Duncan and Obama advocate are not substantially different from the ones Romney and, say, Michelle Rhee would advocate…. and neither policy will “…elevate teaching into an attractive profession” because both are based on the premise that student, school, and teacher performance are linked to test scores. Teachers are expected to robotically teach to these tests, especially in low performing districts. Teaching to a test is changing teaching into a low-skill low-wage job that requires trained workers at a time when advances in cognitive sciences and technology make it possible for teaching to become a high-skilled high-pay job. Privatized charter schools are deemed “successful” when they elevate test scores but the elevation of test scores will not yield high school graduates who are ready to compete in the international workplace of the future.
The biggest problem with the RTTT model is that it reinforces the old factory model of education by increasing the emphasis on testing students in age-based cohorts. We have the tools available today to tailor schooling to meet the unique needs of each student and we are developing a greater understanding of neuroscience and cognitive development. Why are we calling the measurement of students using crude multiple choice tests “reform”?
Friedman’s obliviousness to the true meaning of Education Reform is not a new phenomenon. I’ve written about his love of bogus ideas in education on at least four occasions since January in my blog:
http://waynegersen.com/?s=Friedman
Here is how to contact Friedman ..https://myaccount.nytimes.com/membercenter/emailus.html
I suggest that if a reporter would look closely s/he would find a close connection between Friedman and DFER’s Tilson.
Here’s an article by Jay Matthews of the WaPo who calls out Tom’s understanding of education.
Bad Rap on Schools
staff.washington.edu/…/BAd%20Rap%20on%20the%20Schools.pdf
JAY MATHEWS –
Also this one:
Teaching for America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: November 20, 2010
Thanks to this blog and Taibbi – I’ll save my book money.
Bad Rap on Schools – a better link
http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=1176
In fairness to Tom Friedman, he’s probably just as informed and astute about education as he was, 10 years ago at this time, about the wonderful benefits we would inevitably gain from the Bush-Cheney war on Iraq.
A better enabler for death, destruction, deceit and disaster we’ve never seen. Why does the NY Times still employ this man and why does anyone still take him seriously?
Unfortunately, you can no longer leave comments on this blog, in response to Friedman’s ludicrous and truly awful column.
However you CAN still give a “recommendation” to the comments that you like, which will send their ratings higher and increase the odds of them being seen. It would be good for the most popular comment rankings were filled with ones like this, which I just recommended:
So take a few minutes to go through the list of comments and give a recommendation at the bottom of the comment if you agree with it. It took me only a few minutes to scan these comments and give a “thumbs up” to the good ones.
Let’s make sure the INTELLIGENT comments win this blog posting “Race To The Top” in response to an absolutely clueless, repulsive column by Friedman.
Apparently, a ‘highly qualified’ journalist has no need to verify his ‘facts’ or sources. They can be broadcast willy-nilly without regard for truth or accuracy.
This column follows Friedman’s usual m.o.: “Some thoughts occurred to me the other day after I talked to some guy.”