The Campbell Brown Show

Some people simply see earth as our home, but for legal expert Campbell Brown, it's a forum to shock us with spectacular and lurid accusations. There are 128 teachers who were accused of some sort of sexual offense. Only 33 were fired. Why can't Walcott fire the rest? The short answer is arbitrators, chosen jointly by UFT and DOE, found them not guilty.

But for legal expert Campbell Brown (who's married to some Students First bigshot, which surely has absolutely nothing to do with her crusade), that answer is just not good enough. She made it a point to confront UFT President Michael Mulgrew about it. You can see the video here.

Gotham Schools had originally written it was about "teachers who have sexually harassed students," but to their credit, they changed it after I complained. The fact is, not all these cases were about that, and I know of only one. In this case no such thing happened. However, Campbell Brown did not like it when I objected to Gotham's description.

@TeacherArthurG @gothamschools @CityAndStateNY um..... U don't think a teacher asking a kid for a strip tease is harassment?
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

You see how this goes, don't you? You can only answer two ways. Yes, I think it's harrassment, and I'm therefore completely wrong. Or no I don't, and I therefore condone such behavior.

Brown was not finished with me.

@TeacherArthurG @gothamschools @CityAndStateNY u don't think teacher simulating sex acts with kids is harassment?
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

Goodness gracious, what an awful person I must be for thinking such a thing. Or not thinking it. I told Ms. Legal Expert Brown that I knew precisely one of the notorious 128, that this person did nothing that merited dismissal, let alone suspension, and that Gotham's original description was misleading and inaccurate. I told her she was also misleading and inaccurate.

When you watch the video, note that legal expert Brown refers to these same two cases, as always. So out of 128 cases, 33 teachers were removed, but the teachers alleged to have done these things were not among them. Legal expert Brown refers to this as a "loophole." But there is, in fact, a process, described very clearly by Mulgrew. Maintaining otherwise is tantamount to stating that accused Americans who are found not guilty are getting by because of that darn jury system, the loophole that keeps police from tossing us into prison indiscriminately.

Mulgrew states, exactly, that the teachers in question were "not found guilty of sexual impropriety." Guess what legal expert Campbell Brown decided to tweet in response?

Michael Mulgrew says @UFT does not believe a teacher asking a little girl for a strip tease constitutes "sexual impropriety". @rweingarten
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

And this:

Michael Mulgrew says @UFT does not think a teacher simulating sex acts with kids is "sexual impropriety". @rweingarten
— Campbell Brown (@campbell_brown) August 22, 2013

First, Brown is lying. Mulgrew said no such thing. The UFT said no such thing. And the video proves it. Neither Mulgrew nor the UFT were the arbitrators who made the decisions. In fact, I have no idea whether or not Mulgrew is even familiar with these cases.

Apparently, though, legal expert Brown is familiar with no others. She spouts these endlessly to the Daily News, to Gotham Schools, to me, to Mulgrew, to anyone who will listen. She has her "gotcha" argument and needs no more than that. You're either with legal expert Brown or you support sexual harrassment, you think mistreating children is a great thing, and she's got no problem telling you all about it.

But there are things legal expert Brown leaves out. Like what about the teachers who are not alleged to have done these things, what about teachers who didn't do these things, and since she has no problem misleading us with clearly false statements about Mulgrew, how do we know she isn't simply lying about everything else?

The fact is Dennis Walcott wants to fire all these teachers. He denies 100% of U-rating appeals. Leaving accused teachers to his tender mercies, as legal expert Brown would like, is simply idiotic. It's not surprising when groups like Students First NY jump on the bandwagon, and I remember them tweeting me a few months ago, trying to bully me into publicly endorsing their nonsense.

Teachers who abuse children sexually belong in prison, where they can meet like-minded individuals. I can't really assess how well the arbitrators do their jobs. Are they perfect? Perhaps. Perhaps not. In the one case with which I am familiar, they judged fairly well.

But legal expert Campbell Brown, endlessly repeating the same old strawman fallacy, is pretty easy to figure out.  Her argument may be good enough for the Daily News, and it may be good enough for Gotham Schools. But it's not good enough for those of us still exercising critical thought, thank you very much.

Charles M. Blow Joins NY Times Common Core Lovefest

It looks like, in the space of a week, three NY Times columnists have come out swinging in favor of the Common Core. The latest is Charles M. Blow, who I'd previously found thoughtful and worthwhile. His opening salvo informs us we are not keeping up with other countries, yet our lower test scores align precisely with our disgraceful higher poverty levels. As if that were not enough, Broad's source for this proclamation is the Broad Foundation. One wonders why he doesn't just go to the Walmart family, with his particular standard for objective sources.

It's ironic that Common Core is supposed to teach our children to think critically, and its prominent proponents appear incapable of doing so. Blow's second source, right out of the gate, is Amanda Ripley, who he describes as a journalist. One of Ripley's journalistic specialties is ad hominem attacks against real-live education expert Diane Ravitch, accused by Ripley of living in an "alternate universe."

Blow then explains it is endorsed by the Obama administration, and he's apparently unaware or uninterested that this administration has endorsed demonstrably nonsensical things like merit pay, which has worked nowhere, ever, value-added evaluations, which have worked nowhere ever, higher class sizes, which have worked nowhere, ever, and Hurricane Katrina, which Arne Duncan declared the best thing to happen to education in New Orleans, despite the abysmal results after it was privatized. One might say this administration was more or less in the bag for billionaires like Broad, Gates, and the Walmart family.

Then comes the unkindest cut of all, though this one is by no means Blow's fault. Common Core is also supported by the American Federation of Teachers. This certainly gives street cred to this reformy screed. One would thing that a group that ostensibly represents teachers would demand evidence that a group of standards were effective, but one would be mistaken. We've allowed this corporate scheme to be foisted upon our children for reasons that elude me utterly, and shame on us for doing so.

We're also led to believe it's a good thing because 45 states have accepted it. And yet, with all that apparent acceptance, an Edweek article suggests two out of three Americans know nothing about Common Core. While that's certainly a poor showing for an alleged democracy, it appears nationally prominent columnists who write about it don't know all that much about it either, so perhaps the majority of Americans, getting their information from sources like the NY Times, are doing the best they can with the information they have.

Blow finally says something that makes sense in this column:

We have drifted away from the fundamentals of what makes a great teacher: the ability to light a fire in a child, to develop in him or her a level of intellectual curiosity, the grit to persevere and the capacity to expand. Great teachers help to activate a small thing that breeds great minds: thirst.

And yet, Blow's very next statement suggests Common Core will do that. A fundamental misconception here is that testing our kids to death will somehow make them love to read. And yet, reformy folks like Obama, Bloomberg, Rahm, and even Reformy John King send their kids to private schools with reasonable class sizes. They don't send their kids to places that will treat their kids the way they want ours treated. They don't set their kids up for failure the way ours were, via Common Core.

In fact, kids who love to read can plod through the nonsense set forth in Common Core. They can read anything, no matter how dry or tedious, if there is some worthwhile task attached to it. But the notion we can get kids to love reading via forcing arbitrary percentages of non-fiction on them is ridiculous. In fact, the notion that there is value in writing that is difficult to comprehend is in itself questionable. I've read enough poorly-written textbooks to personally attest to that.

One of my favorite quotes is from Pete Seeger:

Any damn fool can get complicated. It takes a genius to attain simplicity.

Seeger was referring to the songwriting skills of Woody Guthrie, most famous for the classic This Land is Your Land. Even as NY Times columnists rewrite Woody's ballad:

This land is Broad's land,
This land is Gates' land,
Walmart education,
For the kids of the nation...

It just doesn't have the same ring to it. This is especially true when Gates deems such nonsense unsuitable for his own kids. And any way you slice it, Common Core, established nowhere to prove anything whatsoever, is something less than classic, something distinctly less than genius.

Ignoring the massive poverty that afflicts this country, poverty that is exacerbated by the very businesses of the reformy foundations that presume to know how to educate our children, is not particularly genius either.

What a disgrace that people promoted by the NY Times are too incurious to examine the other side of this issue.

Arne Duncan Approved NY Times Column

I continue to be amazed at how low the bar seems to be for professional writers. Maybe they, rather than we, should be compelled to prove added value with some ridiculous mathematical formula. Even as teachers are under assault nationwide for the egregious offense of devoting their lives to helping children, NY Times writers continue to make many times our salaries without even the most cursory research.

Exhibit A is this column from Bill Keller. While it's ostensibly directed against far right critics of Common Core, and while I agree with his criticisms of their tactics, it's remarkably weak on the actual issues.

...the Common Core was created with a broad, nonpartisan consensus of educators, convinced that after decades of embarrassing decline in K-12 education, the country had to come together on a way to hold our public schools accountable.

I'm not precisely persuaded by that. Take a gander at this and you too may wonder who these "educators" are. I'd also question the "embarrassing decline" of education. In fact, if this supposed decline is correlated with test scores, it's fairly easy to see that the lower scores are precisely aligned with high concentrations of impoverished and special needs students. Poverty, of course, is something Bill Gates has determined he can't change, so we're therefore supposed to ignore it.

Keller continues with the Duncan-approved talking points that Common Core is not a federal program, and that there is no national curriculum. In fact, the Common Core standards were highly encouraged by Duncan's Race to the Top. Cash-starved states adopted it, along with junk science evaluation of teachers, so as not to be shut out of the federal support for which their residents paid taxes. It's a bad deal, and will likely result in said states losing money which they'll be forced to devote to even further high-stakes testing.

Most deplorable is the fact that this writer appears totally unaware of the lack of research or field-testing that went into this initiative. As if that were not enough, the writer has no sense of what it means to set up millions of children as failures, particularly with tests with inappropriate and ridiculous standards.

The fact is it isn't simply right-wingers who oppose Common Core, and Keller makes a brief nod to that. But Keller appears unable to differentiate between the issues of health care and reformy education, and shows no evidence he's even familiar with their history. Destroying public education used to be the exclusive province of the extreme right, but groups like DFER have bought enormous influence over faux-Democrats, who now push ridiculous union-busting anti-middle class nonsense.

I'm frankly amazed that people with so little evident curiosity can make a living writing.

If It Doesn't Get Them Sued for Libel, Daily News Can Run With It

Personally, I'm bone weary of ridiculous headlines like this one, announcing to the world what's happening with "perv" teachers. While I'm certain it's important to Bloomberg's BFF/ Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman to trash mayoral hopefuls for not being Bloomberg, I question the whole name-calling thing.

First of all, it's there for no reason other than to mobilize public sentiment against working teachers. Anyone who didn't know better might believe this nonsense.

Second, it's pretty clear the Daily News has allowed itself to become the ever-willing tool of legal expert Campbell Brown. It's getting to the point that the Daily News might wish to take note that legal expert Campbell Brown is married to some Students First bigshot. After all, if you're going to press a story like this one over a period of years, you might as well do a little rudimentary research.

Finally, and here's the major issue, the charges are simply untrue. Legal expert Brown contends that most teachers charged are still working. That's a fact because they were not convicted. I realize that legal expert Brown and the Daily News cannot distinguish between charges and actual guilt, but it's kind of irresponsible they mislead their readers like this. For example, not a single person relying on the Daily News for information will realize that legal expert Campbell Brown wants Walcott to fire teachers who were not convicted.

Isn't it libel to write lies about people? I don't know what the legal burden is to establish it, but I suppose the News has lawyers on staff to advice them of what lines to cross. I'm sure they manage to draw lines that keep them out of court.

Because that's important.

The truth, on the other hand, appears to be of no consequence whatsoever.

Another Day, Another Trashing of Teachers

The Daily News, no longer content to have its editorial section lecture us on the perfidy of teachers, has now taken to the pages of its "reporting" to do so. In fact, to save time, they appear to be simply writing the same story every day. Teachers are a bunch of perverts, legal expert Campbell Brown says they are right, and that's pretty much it.

And, of course, paragon of fairness Dennis Walcott says anyone charged with sexual misconduct ought to be terminated. If the puppet of the city's richest man says you're guilty, that ought to be good enough for anyone. Right, Daily News?

To bolster their case, they gave one example of a teacher they say attended some NAMBLA meetings. Momentarily disregarding whether that's any truer than the rest of the unsubstantiated nonsense they offer, did this guy actually do anything? There are laws about having sex with children, and it's my belief that people found guilty of such things go to prison. In fact, it's my belief they belong there. Of course, I'm not a legal expert like Campbell Brown, so it's hard to say.

And I'm sorry, but there is still a presumption of innocence in this country, and it still applies to all Americans, even school teachers.

It's reprehensible that the Daily News is so appallingly ignorant of our legal system that it would vilify people for asking their guilt be proven before they face conviction and termination.

Probably the Daily News is also unaware that Chancellor Walcott, whose judgment they dare not question, upholds almost 100% of U-ratings for teachers, whether justified or not. Is it because they didn't do their homework? Or is it because, in their zeal to stereotype working teachers with unsubstantiated nonsense, they just don't give a damn?