Frank Bruni-The Plutocrats' Pundit

[Smarmie Doofus]

Why in the Ed Forum? Because Bruni's thundered ( one might say "blundered) into the Common Core debate via his twice weekly NY Times OP-ED.

So. Who is this guy, really?

I spent some time trying to find what fancy private prep school Frank attended . You *know* he could not possibly have had personal experience with public education and still produced a column as utterly clueless as "Are Kids too Coddled?" http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/opinion/sunday/bruni-are-kids-too-coddled.html?_r=1& .

Well... it wasn't EZ. His bio is stripped down on Wiki. It starts w. college. Other internet bios are similarly mute on the question: "Where did he go to secondary school." For a minute.... since Frank Bruni grew up in White Plains, NY .....I thought that he just MIGHT have walked the very same HS halls as Smarmie Doofus.

But no. When google failed me, I had to sit thru an excruciating Frank Bruni-Charlie Rose interview about .... ugh.... restaurants. Mother of jesus. ( Our hero... in case you don't know.... was NYT food critic before he became an authority on CCSS, public education and child rearing). Still nothing. Finally I found a youtube video of an FB interview with his college alma mater ( Duke? UNC? I'm not sure.) No .... Frank did not name the school but did confirm that he attended " a private school outside of Hartford." ( That's a prep school folks. White Plains is two hours by car from Hartford. No one commutes four hours everyday for HS.)

So... the surprise here is .... there IS NO surprise: Bruni joins the overeducated ranks of the reform prep school glitteratti: they know about public schools because they've never set foot in one. He joins the company of Obama, Duncan, Gates, Rhee, Cathy Black, David Brooks, Jonathan Alter...... and the list , alas, goes on and on and on.

Anyway... I didn't realize that Eric Alterman had already done the rest of the work on Bruni, so I'll let him take you the rest of the way.


From Eric Alterman in The Nation


http://www.thenation.com/article/176236/frank-bruni-plutocrats-pundit#

>>>>Bruni’s gift for plutocratic empathy emerged again in his next column—this one a heartfelt defense of the feelings of billionaire Michael Bloomberg. That poor fellow has been the victim of “a clutch of would-be successors appraising you with the kind of warmth accorded the Wicked Witch of the West. Ding-dong.” (You read that right: “Ding-dong.”) Now nasty “Bill de Blasio is here to wipe clean the civic memory of you.”


True, Bloomberg accused de Blasio of running a “class-warfare and racist” campaign. But what do you expect? De Blasio let the people of New York see his biracial family. And, yes, while ”income inequality in New York City has worsened during the Bloomberg years, to an extent that’s morally unacceptable and perhaps socially untenable,” and while the mayor did happen to worship “at the altar of Wall Street” during this period, so what? So did Charles Schumer and Cory Booker, and you don’t see de Blasio being such a meanie about them. This may have something to do with the fact that de Blasio happened to be running to replace Bloomberg, but that’s apparently no excuse. So maybe “more passion about the gap between rich and poor is a virtuous thing,” Bruni allows, but damn it, “making Bloomberg the heavy isn’t.” Has de Blasio no sense of decency after all?

Of course, it is perhaps a mistake to blame Bruni for doing what he was presumably hired to do. The real question is, what is the Times telling its readers by allowing him to do so?

Nicholas Kristof, also of The New York Times, is still pressing for US military intervention in Syria, as Greg Mitchell reported earlier this week.>>>>>>>>

http://www.thenation.com/article/176236/frank-bruni-plutocrats-pundit