{"id":2373,"date":"2004-08-19T12:35:16","date_gmt":"2004-08-19T17:35:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/2373.html"},"modified":"2004-08-19T12:35:16","modified_gmt":"2004-08-19T17:35:16","slug":"floyd-flake-left-out-one-key-detail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/floyd-flake-left-out-one-key-detail\/","title":{"rendered":"Floyd Flake left out one key detail"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The charter school controversy got its third day of play in the New York Times today, this time by way of an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/08\/19\/opinion\/19flak.html\">op-ed<\/a> from the Rev. Floyd Flake. Unfortunately, he left out a significant detail about which readers should have been told.<\/p>\n<p>Flake presented a spirited defense and defended the charter school system against recent revelations of poor student performance. His argument considered charter schools from a detached, third-person perspective &#8212; &#8220;they&#8221; have to negotiate contracts and &#8220;they&#8221; are often a valuable option for families. Flake, however, should have been saying &#8220;we.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Times identified Flake as &#8220;a former Democratic member of Congress&#8221; and &#8220;the pastor of the Allen A.M.E. Church in Queens.&#8221; That&#8217;s true, but the Times forgot a third part of his title &#8212; employee of the nation&#8217;s largest chain of charter schools.<\/p>\n<p>Edison Charter Schools operates for-profit charter schools in 21 states plus the District of Columbia. Though Flake&#8217;s op-ed didn&#8217;t mention it, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.edisonschools.com\/news\/news.cfm?ID=60\">Edison hired Flake four years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Edison Schools announced that Floyd H. Flake would be joining the company as President of Edison Charter Schools and as a member of the company&#8217;s Management Committee. In his new position, Flake will play a leading role in the expansion of Edison schools throughout the country.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words, Flake&#8217;s op-ed in the NYT presented charter schools as a magical elixir for what ails American education, but failed to alert readers to the fact that he has a personal, vested interest in seeing charter schools proliferate and receive millions of tax dollars.<\/p>\n<p>Flake&#8217;s defense is presented as that of a dispassionate observer. That&#8217;s clearly not the case. Either the Times screwed up or Flake is intentionally trying to mislead. Or maybe both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The charter school controversy got its third day of play in the New York Times today, this time by way of an op-ed from the Rev. Floyd Flake. Unfortunately, he left out a significant detail about which readers should have been told. Flake presented a spirited defense and defended the charter school system against recent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}