Today putative liberal and mustachioed wonker Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/3/15) did what he does best: take something vaguely topical and use it as a hook to promote whatever topic he and his billionaire friends want to propagandize that week.
Whether it’s advocating collective punishment of Ukrainians to push his CEO friend’s “Green Energy” IPO during its quiet period, or unironically floating the idea of arming ISIS to demagogue Iran, it’s a tried and true formula for America’s most tedious Important Person.
This morning, however, Friedman reached a new low, exploiting the Baltimore Uprising to run a rather shameless commercial for his wife’s charter school organization:
On a warm Saturday in late May 2008, my wife, Ann, talked me into going to an auditorium in Baltimore to watch a lottery. It was no ordinary lottery. Numbered balls were cranked out of a bingo machine, and the winners got a ticket to a better life. It was the lottery to choose the first 80 students to attend a new public college-prep boarding school: the SEED School of Maryland based in Baltimore. (My wife chairs the foundation behind the SEED schools.) SEED Maryland — SEED already had a branch in the District of Columbia — was admitting boys and girls from some of the toughest streets and dysfunctional schools in Maryland, and particularly Baltimore, beginning in sixth grade. Five days a week, they would live at the school in a dormitory with counselors — insulated from the turmoil of their neighborhoods — and take buses home on weekends. Last Saturday, I attended the graduation of that first class.
Put another way: Friedman used the most influential media space in the world to run a totally pointless commercial for his wife’s charter school. And it’s OK, because he disclosed the commercial. Sort of—he doesn’t mention that the SEED Foundation lists him and his wife jointly as a million-dollar-plus contributor.
Ann Friedman, previously Ann Bucksbaum, is an heir to a massive multi-billion-dollar real estate empire. She and Thomas occupy a $9.3 million mansion in Maryland. Like virtually all major charter school backers, they are filthy rich do-goody white people who know what’s best for inner-city youth, in this case those of Baltimore. This is swell as far as it goes—but what does this type of pointless self-promotion have to do with anything? Ah, right, we have to shoehorn in the recent uprising in Baltimore to promote this stale brand of boot-strap neoliberalism.
Right away, Friedman paints the image of the type of PR pablum we’ve grown accustomed to with charter schools’ slick PR packaging: “Numbered balls were cranked out of a bingo machine, and the winners got a ticket to a better life.” Anyone who saw Waiting for Superman knows this dramatic image:
There’s only one problem: These public lotteries are—and always have been—little more than cynical PR spectacles not required by law, nor serving any purpose other than promotion. This is why they’re largely no longer used by charter schools. As Cynthia McCabe of the NEA noted in 2011:
The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in documents advising its member schools states that it “and charter support organizations around the country strongly recommend that schools publicize their lotteries to demonstrate the strong popularity of charter schools.” In a section explaining why these public events are a “wonderful opportunity,” the first benefit given is to “draw media attention to the demand for high-quality charters.” The document goes on to specify everything from microphone to snack availability (“Families will be more likely to attend if you can present them with reasons that entice them”). It advises announcers on what to say when a name is pulled in the lottery. “‘Selected’ is preferable to ‘winning.’” For the vast majority of attendees who will go home without their number having been pulled, NAPCS suggests sending them a thank you letter for attending and “wish them the very best.”
In other words, the whole exercise is a gratuitous marketing ploy. Or as Friedman’s New York Times colleague Gail Collins put it in 2010:
Charter schools, please, stop. I had no idea you selected your kids with a piece of performance art that makes the losers go home feeling like they’re on a Train to Failure at age 6. You can do better. Use the postal system.
The point of these lottery spectacles is to paint the image of demand: If something is this “selective,” it must therefore be valuable. Like Friedman’s column, they’re neoliberal agitprop designed to tug at our heartstrings while promoting a radical right-wing privatization agenda. And like Friedman’s column, they’re entirely superfluous. Again, one is compelled to ask: What does any of this have to do with a series of protests and “riots” resulting from a murdered black youth?
The piece reaches peak whitesplaining when pro-charter school Secretary of Education Arne Duncan chimes in and parrots the pernicious trope that the Baltimore Uprising was the result of “absent fathers”:
I asked Education Secretary Arne Duncan what he thought generally about the public boarding school model, which is expensive. He said, “Some kids need six hours a day, some nine, some 12 to 13,” but some clearly would benefit from a more “24/7” school/community environment. “I went to Baltimore and talked to teachers after the riots,” Duncan added. “The number of kids living with no family member is stunning. But who is there 24/7? The gangs. At a certain point, you need love and structure, and either traditional societal institutions provide that or somebody else does. We get outcompeted by the gangs, who are there every day on those corners.” So quality public boarding schools need to be “part of a portfolio of options for kids.”
The not-so-subtle implication here: Absent black parents caused the “riots.” Not legitimate outrage. Not the brutal killing of a black youth. Not the subsequent lack of an investigation. Not the decades of rampant police abuse. But absent fathers and the catch-all of gangs. This is the type of centrist racist dog-whistling one would expect from the man who once said Hurricane Katrina was “good for New Orleans” because it led to more charter schools.
If only more kids could be funneled into the boarding schools of benevolent billionaires—who, incidentally, get massive tax breaks for running these programs—all would be well with the black community. If only they could educate their way out being targeted by racist police. If only we can keep seeding the Friedmans’ pet projects, we would never need to unearth the sprawling, deeply ingrained roots of racism.
CORRECTION: The Friedmans’ mansion was initially described as being in the wrong state.
Adam Johnson is a freelance journalist; formerly he was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. You can follow him on Twitterat @AdamJohnsonNYC.







Arne Duncan was Obama’s first choice for Secretary of Education. Barry chose Arne for his lack of a teaching credential and the consequential failure to have a single day of teaching experience. Instead, he had a history of closing schools and privatizing the rest…at a pace so fast and vast as Chicago would allow.
In time, the vestigial “public” education in this country will be the schooling version of Obamacare: a public need met by a for-profit scheme. What could go wrong?
As someone whose kids go to a public charter school, I am really tired media screeds pretending that all states’ charter school rules, and private funding rolls, are equal.
Minnesota, where I am from, has a much more serious process for forming charters. I have moved and voted to raise school funding for public schools that my children don’t even attend, but then have to sit and listen to these screeds about how terrible public charters are from every left-leaning organization. You know, I am really liberal, but I don’t appreciate this narrow-minded, one-size-fits-all viewpoint. Because of the success of my children’s charter school, there are 5x as many language immersion programs in the Twin Cities metro area. How do I know this to be true? Our school’s teachers & curriculum director shared all of our experiences with them. So, yeah, we led the way, and no, we didn’t copyright the whole experience.
“Baud” at Balloon-Juice.com makes some valid criticisms of this article (see pingback). They mainly have to do with the comments pertaining to Arne Duncan.
One of the best first sentences ever!
“Today putative liberal and mustachioed wonker Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 6/3/15) did what he does best: take something vaguely topical and use it as a hook to promote whatever topic he and his billionaire friends want to propagandize that week.”
You might enjoy this video of this wind bag getting pied at Brown:
The one true W.O.T.D. strikes again.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2012/04/one-true-wanker-of-decade.html
~
Dear Editors:
The article written by Adam Johnson regarding Friedman and charter schools is among the worst pieces of writing that has been put forth by FAIR. It in fact resembles the sort of misinformation which FAIR itself attempts to identify in the media. I appreciate FAIR’s work because it typically employs objective measures of media bias, counting pundits, interviewees, article content, etc. Johnson’s work reeks of a simple anti-charter slant, and the best it comes to making an objective argument is showing that rich white folks fund charter schools. (The hyperlinked article actually only talks about Bill Gates and a handful of others, another piece of misinformation.) This shouldn’t have been sufficient for FAIR’s editorial team.
Let’s talk about the content of the article. Johnson first targets the recruiting technique of certain charter schools, namely the lottery process. I suppose it is relevant to some extent, given that Friedman mentions the lottery, and I would agree that the lottery losers are likely going to feel bad, but so what? A better use of space would have been to show that Friedman’s charter schools are failing; that they are not worthy of being open in some of the poorest, most educationally-deprived/neglected urban (and some rural) areas of the country. A separate issue I have is the inference Johnson makes from Duncan’s statements regarding absent black parents. The connection is simply not there. How did FAIR’s editorial team miss this?
I get the point of the article: Friedman is biased because he is invested in charter schools. I, too, am biased, as my wife has been working in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago at a charter school for the last seven years. There was a spike in gunshot-related injuries and deaths in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, and two of the citywide twelve deaths were relatives of students at her school, so it’s a pretty grim neighborhood. I’d personally like her to transfer to a different place in order to reap the same sort of benefits of unionized teachers: two weeks less teaching per year, two weeks less in-service per year, 2.5 hours less work per day, more holidays, better health insurance, and a better pension. Perhaps she is staying because – and to invoke Duncan’s terminology – she plays an active role in contributing to a badly needed “societal institution” in the neighborhood.
That said, Johnson attempts to make something out of virtually nothing… or at least very little. It is sub-standard work and definitely not worth associating with FAIR. Your team failed to provide anything compelling today.
Matt Shapiro
Matthew A. Shapiro, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Political Science
Illinois Institute of Technology
understandgreen.com
shapiro@iit.edu
First, loved the pie video! Hope the pie was a bullshit cream pie.
Second, I too have a kneejerk reaction to charter schools. If they are serving a niche that is not served by public schools, and that it would be difficult for public schools to do — such as Hinckley in rural Maine, teaching at-risk high school students in a sustainable agriculture program that links them with a public community college — I have far less of a problem with them than if they are taking public monies to run private schools so rich people can make more money, destroy teachers’ unions, and end the very idea of public education.
And you know what? I LOVED this article and the way it was written. I sometimes get very tired of FAIR’s let’s-bore-them-to-death style — I realize this is what is taught in colleges as “objective” — especially when writing about supreme chuckleheads such as Friedman. But then I am not a PhD in political science, just a marginalized nobody who loves a good laugh and an accurate description of an extremely tedious important person.
Ditto, Joshua. I, too am really tired of not towing the liberal line because I support the charter school concept. In fact, I am such a supporter that I believe that ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS should be allowed the same flexibility that our North Carolina charter schools enjoy. If you come from a long line of teachers and believe, like I do, that teachers know more about teaching children than non-teachers, you, too, will support any educational model that gives more decision-making to teachers. Moreover, in the charter schools I know, the parents also have greater input into their children’s education. All around, it is a more positive experience than that offered by the monolithic public education system.
I realize that this article is less about charter schools than a diatribe against rich so-called do-gooders bending the discourse to foster their own agendas. That being said, the article does diverge into a criticism of charter schools. My response is, “Let’s take criticism of charter schools off the liberal agenda!”
Okay, I need to bring this article back into focus a little.
My previous comment, and others here thankfully, of frustration with FAIR’s portrayal of public charter schools is valid. FAIR needs to do its homework better rather than serving exclusively as a PR rep for Federation of Teachers.
However, Friedman is still doing EXACTLY what FAIR accuses him of doing in this article: he IS strongly implying that Baltimore isn’t about endemic racism in policing & administration of justice in general, but is really about absent black parents, and he is suggesting that his wife’s pet project can just replace those missing parents. That is a group of horrid ideas/memes and should be called out. FAIR nailed it on the head there.
I was not aware that liberals are opposed to charter schools, in fact I thought they supported them. The liberal focus on individual experience is shown quite clearly here: “my positive experience with charter schools trumps all that they stand for in the realm of social policy.”
Those praising the privatization of public schools in these comments seem compelled to view the public good as identical to their own. Is union membership anathematic to them in teaching only or would they forbid workers the right to unionize elsewhere? Do they care what happens to the kids that are turned away from charter schools and who languish in the detritus of public schools that will house the unwanted? Are they willing to leave a substantial portion of our youth to this Dickensian fate–incarcerated to a lifetime of structural unemployment and/or incarceration? Do they really believe the alchemy behind taking $1 of taxes, removing 10% as profit, and providing better education on the remaining 90%?
This is the legacy of Thatcherism, Reagan and 35 years of creeping neo-liberalism.
There is an entire generation of young people who need help. Ignoring their needs will not make them go away. Pay now or pay later.
Thank you, Steve!
Well, this discussion has just been lowered to post-YouTube video-discussion status, meaning that the comments have little to do with the content of the blog post. Again, FAIR’s best work is that which counts the talking heads, statements, article topics, etc., as they are solid measures of media bias and accuracy. This FAIR blog, however, makes an impossible (and distracting) leap from claims of bias in Friedman’s article to general flaws in the charter school approach. I can’t back FAIR’s mission with such shoddiness. Even the reference to Duncan’s statement about New Orleans – a point upon which the second part of the blog post hinges – was not a direct quotation of Duncan but rather a direct quotation of a Washington Post journalist. FAIR readers shouldn’t have to fact-check FAIR.
Before signing off for good after more than 10 years of closely following FAIR, I’d like to raise a couple more points. Charter schools may not be across-the-board successes, but the research shows significant improvements, particularly in elementary schools and in low-income areas (see reports by Mathematica, CREDO, and the Center on Reinventing Public Education). Second, the elephant in the room is teacher quality. Rather than engaging in a self-auditing process of weeding out or retraining weak and burnt out teachers, the union’s primary goals are in fact to secure greater-than-inflation-rate pay increases, super-sweet pensions disconnected from the budget, and status quo levels of oversight by their administrators. Charter schools, on the other hand and based on my studies of the issue as well as my personal experience watching my wife work seven years in the LAUSD at a non-charter public school and seven years in the CPS at a public charter school, ultimately get shut down if their teachers – and thus their students – perform badly.
Best of luck to FAIR in its attempt to correct its downward spiral.