The Ghost of Campbell Brown
No more shall it haunt working teachers day to day.Washed-up newscaster Campbell Brown's final attack on teacher tenure looks like it's dead in the water in Minnesota, after having failed in California. In fact, it appears she may have given up on reforminess altogether and gone to work for Facebook or something.
I don't know why the reformies don't hang around these days. Maybe, after a while you just get bored of saving the world from those awful people who spend their days teaching America's children. I mean, what kind of person would do that when you could work for CNN, or wherever it was Campbell Brown worked before her services were no longer required?
What do you do after having been a reformy? And even if the news media writes daily articles about how reformy you are, and how all the teachers suck, does it pay? Well, you can start a reformy website or something and get extensive coverage over at Chalkbeat, but where do you go from there? Once the last remnant of your effort to kill teacher tenure goes down in Minnesota, and the papers are no longer coming to you to ask which teachers suck, how much they suck, and why they suck, the novelty is worn out.
Uber-reformy Michelle Rhee is now selling fertilizer, which is pretty much what she was always selling anyway. A bunch of the teachers she fired have gotten their jobs back. It looks like they're getting over 5 million in back pay too. And what's going on with StudentsFirst? You barely even read about them in reformy Chalkbeat anymore.
Now every teacher knows what students first means. It means teachers last. It means go work for a charter school with no union, no job security, no rights, take home a cell phone, answer questions about homework until 11 PM, then get two hours sleep and go back at 5 AM or CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: The Ghost of Campbell Brown
