http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/opinion/01brooks.html?src=recg

One of the Stars of the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mr. David Brooks, here takes aim at his latest victim Ms. Diane Ravitch, a highly respected scholar, theoretician and advocate in education and schools. He opens by giving Ms. Ravitch a good dressing down for her, to our thinkers own thought, ideologically inspired critiques of the American Educational System and its’ obvious deficits. Mr. Brooks excels in the art of nearly free-floating high minded critiques that reflect his penchant for overarching metaphors, that most times caricature the subjects actual thought. He resembles that great American pop artist Walt Disney in the realm of the pseudo-intellectual, which makes him the perfect embodiment of the Aspen Ideal of never ending self-congratulatory rhetoric. We can observe that Ms. Ravitch is on the ‘left’ and Mr. Brooks is on the ‘right’ in the most reductivist of terms of this presentation, of the good and the bad in Mr. Ravitchs’ career as advocate and partisan in the Education Debate: the political crux of the matter, here, being her once supporting No Child Left Behind then changing her mind. Here are quotes from the Wikipedia entry for Ms. Ravitch that will clarify:

“While she originally supported No Child Left Behind and charter schools, Ravitch later became "disillusioned," and wrote, "I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for." In the major national evaluation, 17% of charters got higher scores, 46% were no different, and 37% were significantly worse than public schools, she said. High-stakes testing, "utopian" goals, "draconian" penalties, school closings, privatization, and charter schools didn't work, she concluded. "The best predictor of low academic performance is poverty—not bad teachers."^[8]”

“Ravitch said that the charter school and testing reform movement was started by "right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation," for the purpose of destroying public education and teachers' unions.^[9] She reviewed the documentary Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, as "propagandistic" (pro-charter schools and anti-public schools), studded with "myths" and at least one "flatly wrong" claim.^[10]”

 Mr. Brooks never tires of giving those ‘left-wingers’ what for, as part of his duty as watchman of the republic, a duty he takes mighty seriously. As one of his regular readers I can attest that Mr. B. is always on point, when it comes to ideological enforcement, embroidered with mitigating intellectual rationalizations, while hewing to a simulacrum of argumentative rationalism: one might even say that that is his singular talent.

Political Observer