Brown v. ...
How did an ex–news anchor become the most controversial woman in school reform?
“Don’t you love the energy here?” asks Campbell Brown, bouncing down the hall at the offices of “co-working” office-share WeWork. Forty-five and wearing a gray turtleneck sweater and mom jeans, Brown has small, curious brown eyes, a volleyball player’s carriage, and a deep voice that’s pleasant no matter what she’s saying. “You know, an Israeli guy [co-founder Adam Neumann] started WeWork with one office,” she says, swishing by row after row of glassed-in spaces for companies like Parking Panda, which helps find a spot for your car, and Unroll.Me, which has something to do with cleaning up a messy in-box. “And now it’s international and it’s huge!”
To be massive, shiny, and new—these are the libidinal values of tech. Here at WeWork, Brown is busy reinventing herself, too. Over the past few years, she’s transformed herself from a TV journalist to a hero reformer for the teacher-tenure-busting crowd, a spinoff of the charter-school-and-make-education-a-business crowd. We’re a couple of years past peak charter, when Waiting for “Superman” enraptured well-heeled do-gooders, Obama’s Education secretary dissed teachers unions, and school reformer and D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee surpassed even Harlem Children’s Zone guru Geoffrey Canada as a neoliberal education legend. This past summer, Rhee stepped down from a nonprofit backed by the Bloomberg Foundation that had hoped to raise $1 billion, and a number of recent studies have shown mixed results for charters, which do not, generally speaking, outperform traditional public schools (though, as reformers point out, some especially good ones could be important laboratories). These days, the energy in reform is with those who are taking the fight to the courts. Mayors, chancellors, and the rest of the Albany Establishment are too entangled in political interests to make change, the activists claim, and education reform’s best chance is to bring lawsuits to challenge teacher tenure as unconstitutional.
Brown is their unlikely public face. Tenure, she says, violates students’ rights to an equal education, protecting bad teachers and preventing productive turnover. Enshrining that legal principle, of true equal opportunity for every student, would presumably require a much fuller and more radical transformation of the school system than the one reformers envision—or even really support. But anti-tenure litigants won their first suit in California this summer, and Brown plans to help file suitsin two more states this year and ten in total over the next five years. Her first big day in New York court comes on January 14, when lawyers for her Partnership for Educational Justice will address the state’s motion to dismiss its suit. It’s unlikely her group will win, but the New York State chancellor has already announced plans to rethink tenure.
Even in school reform’s new lawsuit era, hand-to-hand combat is still the preferred mode of resolving—or not resolving—conflict. Brown has The Most Controversial Woman in School Reform -- NYMag:
