Alex Pareene does a demolition job on almost the entire staff of the New York Times’ opinion page.
That page is the most valuable space in American journalism today, yet several of the regulars seem to have grown stale and lazy, recycling opinions based on little more than gossip they heard at the latest high-powered cocktail party or something that Bill Gates–who knows everything–may have said in the last few weeks or months.
Pareene singles out David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, and Thomas Friedman for his special scorn.
I must say I appreciate Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist who pays close attention to the growing inequality in our nation.
And Charles Blow often has original contributions.
But Pareene’s beef is that the columnists he singles out have grown stale and boring.
Opinion columnists are expected to have an opinion on everything, even topics about which they are woefully uninformed.
Since they write so often, they don’t have time to do research and they are too self-confident to check with other knowledgeable sources, so they just echo conventional wisdom.
Not a one of the columnists singled out by Pareene has even the slightest understanding of American education or the issues that are now creating upheaval and chaos in our nation’s schools.
Maybe they just don’t care.
It is not as if education is an unimportant issue. It’s just that to the Times’ opinion writers, it doesn’t matter, even though it will have a huge impact on our future.
No one can know everything about everything. The Times should eliminate tenure for their opinion writers and recycle them, perhaps with Write for America temps.
At least, they would have some fresh ideas and opinions. And in a few months, or a year, they would be gone.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And Nick Kristof is a great, active humanitarian.
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But Kristof is as woefully ignorant about K-12 education as anyone I’ve ever read, anywhere, and he apparently refuses to engage with those of us who have—very politely—asked him to discuss and defend his views.
Seek other employment “perhaps with Write for America temps.”.. a great line.
Couple of good links on education in NY: Most segregated in the US: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/26/report-new-york-schoolsthemostsegregatedinus.html
Product Placement on the common core in NY http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/21/test-product-placement.html
Bought and paid for – think of it as product placement.
Blow, Egan, & Krugman offer insight, Brooks needs to find a new place for his ego to spin reality… and here is a link to the comments on the common core ‘debate’
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/opinion/the-debate-over-the-common-core.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140423&nlid=50637717&tntemail0=y
Maybe I just can’t agree with anyone about anything. For years and years I’ve enjoyed mocking David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert, and Maureen Dowd (actually, not Dowd, because her work horrifies me so much that I look away immediately when I see her byline for fear of blindness). But I’ll be damned if I’m going to give a standing ovation to one hack for trashing a bunch of other hacks. The “hit piece” was a great part of the early days of Internet journalism, but after a decade or so, one gets tired of watching precocious 20-somethings call out their elders for being lame. It’s just another version of the Trump approach to criticism. It’s not enough to say someone is wrong and explain why. They also have to be an untalented loser.
I mean, come on, just look at this guy:
http://www.forbes.com/pictures/eeji45ikli/alex-pareene-senior-writer-salon-25/
Bob Herbert is excellent and Krugman is essential reading- but agree Brooks, Friedman and Dowd are terrible.
I wish they would all read Daisy Christodoulou’s new book Seven Myths about Education. Many teachers should read this too, as it explodes many of the myths we learned in education school.
About time to raise the ante.
Having read the NYT since I was senior in high school – my public school history teacher encouraged the class to subscribe at a rate even I could shell out, the editorial and opinion voice of the Times on education has deteriorated. Ironically I did a research paper in college on the coverage of education in the Times in 1962. The results were spot on. Articles absent political involvement were shoved into the back,pages, succinctly summarized. Add even a soupcon of politics and those pieces were splayed across multiple columns on all-news pages. Toss in some controversy and by golly those accounts hit the front page. The coverage never questioned the primacy of public school education. Corruption and greed, the usual suspects, underlined what was seen as real “news”. Oh those halcyon days.
Fast forwarding to 2008, I noticed what seemed a sea change in both the news and editorial pages. Obama was crowned the Messiah and they were hell-bent on making sure he was crowned. Even though they had grumbled a little about No Child Left Behind, Ted Kennedy himself had helped cobble together the votes to pass it. How could even ardent Democrats argue? But as the increasingly punitive replacement was pushed by the new regime, fronted by Arne Duncan, nary a peep was heard. Dismantle public school education? Sure. Didn’t Bloomberg the data king bless and validate those nebulous studies on which charters were predicated? And Duncan was backed by Obama so the Feds had to be on sturdy ground, right?
Alas, the emperors really are buck naked. Obama’s education policies are destructive. Our first black president is single handily pummeling a core occupation of the African-American middle class – public school teaching and administration, the studies on charter schools pointedly demonstrate that the poorest outcomes are for African-American students, and schools are returning to levels of segregation not seen since before Brown v. Education.
Tom Friedman travels to China with Wendy Koop, a prime actor in de-legitimizing teachers, to visit a country where every 4th ad in the Beijing metro is heralding a school that prepares Chinese kids to get into, gasp, American schools. Where their proliferating for-profit colleges have been unmasked as perpetuating fraud. Turns out they don’t actually educate students. Am I missing something here? Every editorial and many of the news pieces take as gospel the American education for-profit machine churns out disguised as “research”.
Hubris? Blind stupidity? Damn if I know. But it’s gotten so bad that I rapidly skim anything they print because I know that it will make me angry. And lest one suggest that I cancel the rather expensive daily delivery of the Times I still get, remember that newspapers all over the country are disappearing. USA Today?
HUBRIS fueled by greed and power. History repeats itself.
I like that! Write For America! Let’s see — only 5 weeks of training on how to write — would 9th graders fill the bill?
No, not after going through years of high stakes CCSS testing. . .. but then again, they would not be any worse than David Brooks. . . . .
I liked the ” seek other employment” line too but perhaps they should actually JOIN THE RANKS FO TFA for real and let them LEARN ABOUT HOW “WONDERFUL” IT IS TO TEACH WITHOUT PROPER TRAINING. Then let them go back to their column and actually write about the realities of their experience after their two years acquiring “education expertise”! I double dare them!
Michael Powell’s Gotham column has fresh insights. He is critical of Cuomo and no friend to charter schools. He sheds light on all sorts of drk corners where others dare not go.