Latest News and Comment from Education

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Who Is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure? | Diane Ravitch's blog

Who Is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure? | Diane Ravitch's blog:



Who Is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure?




Mother Jones published this article in 2013 when Campbell Brown started her campaign against “sexual predators” in the New York City public schools (there are none, apparently, in charter schools, thank goodness!).
 Campbell Brown is now leading the lawsuit attacking tenure, seniority, and due process for teachers in New York state. Her organization has found half a dozen student plaintiffs who claim that their teachers were “bad” teachers, which denied them a quality education.
 The big difference between then and now in Campbell Brown’s group is that in 2013 her public relations firm was connected to Republicans.
Her current PR spokesman is Robert Gibbs, who was President Obama’s White House press secretary.
What Ms. Brown seems not to know is that there are sometimes false accusations made by students. I recall that when I lived in D.C. in the early 1990s, a junior high school teacher was accused of sexual misconduct by several girls in his class. The evidence seemed overwhelming given the number of complaints. The teacher was pilloried in the press. But when the police interviewed each girl individually, they did not corroborate the other stories, and in a matter of days, they all admitted they had trumped up the charges to punish a teacher who had given them too much work and had too high standards. That was an Who Is Campbell Brown and Why Does She Want to Eliminate Tenure? | Diane Ravitch's blog: