Law Humor

Dear Thomas Friedman: One Out Of Three Ain’t Good

By Pseudoanonymous

I’ve had a grudge against Thomas Friedman ever since he slandered the countryside between the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport and Bentonville as “Dogpatch”. The man doesn’t recognize working farmland and unfarmable hill country, which is bad enough, and doesn’t recognize his own failure to understand what he sees, which is much worse.

So it’s never a surprise when Friedman misses the implication of his own writing. Here he argues for his own exclusivist form of educational reform (via an exclusivist immigration policy, but let that pass for now), and comes up with these two remarkable bits:

My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely ?supportive parents? and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest.

We’ll get back to that in a moment. Now, what lesson does Friedman draw from his night out?

Gotta say, it was the most inspiring evening I?ve had in D.C. in 20 years. It left me thinking, ?If we can just get a few things right ? immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy ? maybe we?ll be O.K.?

Now, did you hear that teacher say anything about education standards? No. She talked about “supportive parents” (which, for Friedman, ties into his exclusivist immigration stance), resources, and funding. Where in Friedman’s article is increasing the resources for the schools? Where does he suggest increasing their funding? Nowhere.

But that is exactly the part of schooling that can be controlled. The government can’t provide a kid with supportive parents. It can fund that kid’s schools.

Perhaps if Friedman could understand the vast sea of underserved students in underfunded schools throughout the nation as internal immigrants he’d consider giving them what they need.

Or not. After all, they’re poor.

Full post as published by Arkansawyer on May 01, 2010 (boomark / email).