Campbell Brown To Hammer De Blasio For Not Being Reformy Enough

Keshia Clukey at Politico NY:

ALBANY — Campbell Brown, the former news anchor turned anti-teacher tenure advocate, is hoping her keynote address Wednesday night to the Business Council of New York State's annual conference will spur its members to focus attention on education reform.

...

Brown said she will focus her speech on student achievement and income inequality and that the keynote, which she will deliver at The Sagamore Resort in Bolton Landing, will also take issue with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse.”

“We can’t afford to have incremental changes. We don’t need any more speeches. We need real change,” Brown said.

We can't afford incremental changes - we need drastic, sudden, dramatic change.

Interestingly enough, Brown gets lumped in politically with "conservatives".

In fact, her husband Dan Senor was one of the "conservatives" who helped bring drastic, sudden, dramatic change to Iraq. 

That went well, didn't it?

So you know the drastic, sudden, dramatic change Brown wants to bring to the education system will go just as swimmingly.

When Brown says de Blasio's policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse," she can look to husband Dan and the policies he helped engineer in Iraq as a model.

WSJ: Campbell Brown Is Aiding Parent Group For Tenure/Seniority Lawsuit

Not a surprise:

A new advocacy group is helping parents prepare a challenge to New York's teacher tenure and seniority laws, contending that they violate children's constitutional right to a sound basic education by keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who has been a critic of job protections for teachers, launched the group, Partnership for Educational Justice, in December. She said six students have agreed to serve as plaintiffs, arguing they suffered from laws making it too expensive, time-consuming and burdensome to fire bad teachers.

The preparations to challenge the state's tenure laws this summer follow a landmark ruling in California earlier this month. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu struck down the state's laws on tenure, dismissal and seniority, saying they disproportionately saddled poor and minority students with incompetent teachers. Evidence that ineffective teachers hurt learning, he wrote, "shocks the conscience."

California unions that intervened in the case, Vergara v. California, said they would appeal, and legal analysts predicted the ruling would inspire similar suits around the country.

Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, said his union believes the Vergara decision will be overturned, and the facts are different in New York than in California. While he said that New York's new evaluation system has flaws, it aims to bolster teacher quality. 

"The system is designed to help all teachers improve, and for those who struggle or don't belong in the system, to remove them in an expedited hearing," he said. 

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, said by email: "It is a shame so many so-called 'reformers' can't find a way to do something that would actually help students, teachers and schools."

Ms. Brown wants a verdict in her group's case to spur legislators to come up with better education policies. "My hope is this would be a wake-up call to politicians who failed to solve these problems for years," she said. 

Her team has been meeting with parents to find plaintiffs. One is Jada Williams in Rochester, who wrote a seventh-grade essay complaining about teachers who she said gave no real instruction and failed to manage unruly students. Her mother, Carla, said in an interview: "When a child in class is educationally neglected, that's a criminal act."

David Welch, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who financed Students Matter, the advocacy group that filed the Vergara suit, has given Ms. Brown guidance, and came to a meeting of about 30 people at her apartment in April to discuss it, she said. A mother of two children in private school, Ms. Campbell said she gave seed money to the Partnership for Educational Justice. She declined to disclose other donors. She has applied for nonprofit status.

Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, is leading the New York case pro bono. Mr. Lefkowitz, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, fought for Wisconsin's school vouchers and prevailed through the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. Lefkowitz said "it boggles the mind" that in the New York education system the vast majority of teachers were rated effective or better last year even though 69% of students in grades three through eight didn't pass state proficiency tests.

"The system lacks integrity and students are being forced to pay the price," he said. Unions often note that many factors affect learning, such as poverty and parent involvement.

Mr. Lefkowitz said he plans to challenge statutes mandating that during budget cuts, districts must dismiss the newest teachers first, with no consideration of their performance. Unions have long argued that without seniority rules, districts would lay off more highly paid veterans to save money.

He said he will also challenge what he said are overly complicated disciplinary procedures that dissuade administrators from trying to revoke tenure; some of these cases have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

Union officials emphasize that tenure doesn't guarantee a job for life, but enforces due process to shield teachers from arbitrary firings, nepotism and vindictive bosses. A district may seek to revoke tenure if a teacher gets two bad annual ratings in a row. 

Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue teachers are granted tenure before it is clear they deserve it. In New York, teachers generally get tenure at the end of three years of acceptable service, but principals can add another probationary year. 

In the California case, the plaintiffs brought an equal-protection claim, arguing that a disproportionate share of bad teachers end up in schools serving disadvantaged students. 

The New York constitution says children have a right to a "sound basic education." Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue that laws leading to the retention of ineffective teachers hurt students no matter what their background. He said he plans to file the suit in New York Supreme Court in Albany.

I've dealt with some of this before in a post which you can see here.

I think the plaintiffs in this case will have a more difficult time getting the verdict they want because 

a) tenure takes longer to get in NY - many teachers are taking 4 or 5 years before they are getting it in NYC - and many teachers never get tenure at all and just leave the system and

b) APPR effectively ended tenure protections - teachers can be fired two years running if they're rated "ineffective"

The plaintiffs can argue that it costs millions to fire so-called "bad teachers" all they want.

Under APPR, it takes two years of "ineffective" ratings to fire teachers - something that is easily engineered the way the system was devised by the state.

Reformers can also claim that 69% of students were less than proficient on the state exams, so 69% of teachers must be less than effective all they want as well.

That argument is easily countered by the moves the governor and the Legislature made to acknowledge how awful the CCSS implementation was, something that directly affected the state test scores, as well as all the publicity surrounding the SED artificially setting the new CCSS test bar a lot higher than the one for the old tests.

I don't think Campbell Brown and her merry men and women in reform are going to have as easy a time in this kind of suit as the reformers had in the initial Vergara case hearing.

But that doesn't mean they're not going to try.

The Hypocrisy Of Campbell Brown

Eduwonk interviewed Campbell Brown post-WSJ op-ed.

Brown continues to say over and over that teachers unions are "protecting sexually predatory teachers" in the interview.

She agrees that she should have disclosed that her husband, Dan Senor, former Iraq war spokesman for the Bush administration and current Romney adviser, is a board member of the New York chapter of Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst, but says that is immaterial to her argument - teachers unions protect sexual predators:

Critics have seized on your husband’s [Dan Senor] affiliation with the New York chapter of Students First to discredit you. In retrospect, should you have disclosed his role as a board member in the op-ed?

Yes. Absolutely. But tell me why this matters? This is just an attempt to distract people from the problem. The teachers union is protecting these teachers and they have to stop.

Neither Brown nor Eduwonk bring up the supreme irony in all of this - Brown's husband Dan sits on the board of a group run by Michelle Rhee who was accused by a federal inspector general of helping to "fix" sexual misconduct allegations made against her then boyfriend and now husband, former NBA star and current Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson, when he was running a Sacramento charter school, including using Americorps funds to cover up Johnson's alleged sexual misconduct.

Here is the Congressional committee report detailing those allegations and the NY Times coverage of that report.

Is the allegation in the Congressional report that Rhee helped cover up her husband's sexual misconduct when he headed a charter school "relevant" to the discussion we're having over whether teachers unions, by insisting upon due process for teachers accused of sexual misconduct, are "protecting" sexual predators?

Absolutely.

If Brown is going to accuse a group of protecting sexual predators and her husband sits on the board of a group run by a woman who has been accused by a Congressional committee of protecting a sexual predator, then that surely is relevant to not only the issue being discussed but the credibility of Brown to discuss it.

But apparently neither Brown nor Eduwonk think this is the case.

The hypocrisy these people in the education reform movement exhibit knows no bounds.

That Campbell Brown was given one of the top slots at Andy Cuomo's education reform committee forum to attack teachers unions for protecting sexual predators when she herself has a connection to a group run by a woman who has been accused of protecting a sexual predator says all you need to know about Andy Cuomo's education reform committee and says all you need to know about Campbell Brown.

Neither Campbell nor the Cuomo education reform committee are looking to protect children or put students first.

They're looking to attack unions and use any method or argument at their disposal to destroy them.

That the argument they've chosen this time happens to apply to one of their own (the infamous Michelle Rhee) doesn't seem to bother them in the least.

Why Does Michelle Rhee Protect Sexual Predators (AKA, Her Husband, Kevin Johnson)?

Seriously.

I assume Campbell Brown will get right on this and write an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal calling for the firing of Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson.