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 elementary lesson: an accusation is not a conviction. Everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
One curious aspect to this copycat case is that no one has been able to establish the basic claim that every child would have a “great” teacher if no teacher had due process rights or any job protections whatever. What seems more likely is that teachers will flee to affluent districts, if they can, to avoid the low value-added scores that are attached to teaching the most challenging students. Inner-city schools attended by the poorest children will find it more difficult to maintain a stable staff. Some victory that would be.
If people like Campbell Brown really cared about poor kids, they would fight for small class sizes, arts teachers, school nurses, libraries, and improved conditions for teaching and learning. They don’t.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Campbell Brown is campaigning for a job on Fox … and sees her current advocacy as the best route.
If it’s the same story I recall the teacher was eventually exonerated because he was out ill during the time period the girls alleged the sexual misconduct.
The rumor mill in a middle school/jr. high can be deadly. On several occasions, I had the opportunity to quash some very damaging fantasies. We had class discussions about how information morphed as it passed from person to person until, other than the poor victim’s name, there was nothing resembling fact left. All of the students had experienced this warping of words, and they were more than willing to withhold judgement and not participate in the verbal free for all once they stopped to consider what was happening.
Yes, all along teachers have known that students with higher learning deficits and greater needs require more attention from capable teachers. But, if and until the students in these situations are given an opportunity to deal with learning at a pace that recognizes their needs, they will not magically “catch up” to a predetermined level of “proficiency”.
I don’t know what silver spoon of superiority from which Arne Duncan was fed, but he and his cohorts do not ” get it”. There will never be vast improvements in education achieved by this approach of “rigor” insertion.
You can plant some big industry corn in dry, unfertilized, unwatered soil and expect it to produce a great crop. You can plant some “rigorous curriculum” into a mind that is unprepared and expect it to miraculous educational results.
Once a real foundation for learning is established, the child can learn as rapidly and as deeply as he or she desires. Without the real foundation that is formed to deal with the specific child’s needs, little can be accomplished, let alone sustained.
Like with Gates and Murdoch, who saw ahead to a product lines/sales/contracts and a market for survival-4-sale to the prisoners of reform, it’s likely that Brown is looking ahead to opportunities she hopes will come.
I actually have more respect, or more accurately less disrespect, for Murdoch then Gates and the other “reformers”. At least Murdoch was up front about his goal to tap into the 600 billion spent on public education.
Their intentions are not necessarily nefarious, but it constantly amazes me how individuals like Brown focus almost exclusively on punishing “bad” teachers. I’d figure that many of the problems besetting America’s criminal justice system also result from this punitive mindset.
It’s also interesting how those in power (e.g. Bush) often escape meaningful accountability for their actions.
Check out the Board of Directors, as well as the Staff of Campbell Brown’s “Partnership for Educational Justice.” You will find a group with little or no experience or insight into the world of teaching and learning. I have no respect for this bunch.
What you and some of the other posters have drawn attention to certainly doesn’t add to her credibility
She didn’t have any credibility. She is married to a Mitt Romney campaign manager, or some such title, who sits on the student first board of directors and she was canned from CNN so her journalism career is flailing and she needs to get her name attached to something and this is it. That’s Campbell Brown.
Linda, Brown is married to Dan Señor a right wing former member of Bush II administration involved with the whole Iraq fiasco.
Thank you….another one deemed the “best and the brightest”.
Linda: translation…worst and dumbest!
as to credibility…. just hearing the words Campbell Brown makes me think of a can of soup…. sorry, just the way it is, just the way my brain works…. just as seeing Vergara made my brain go Viagra… unfortunate, I know… but kinda apt, in a painfully ironic way…
I dunno, but I’d say Occam’s Razor indicates that their intentions *are* nefarious. It’s just too much to assume that they simply don’t understand what they are doing when the evidence is in front of their faces on a daily basis.
I imagine many of them view the world in a different manner than we do. Some are likely just greedy/selfish, but I highly doubt all or even most corporate ed reformers are acting out of genuine malice. In my opinion, American culture promotes an understanding of personal responsibility that is philosophically shallow. Unfortunately, it is also intuitively appealing, so those of us looking for the structural factors behind the student achievement gap or poverty can really find ourselves up against it.
I may be a bit of an outlier given my skepticism of traditional notions of free will, but I do think there is a general philosophical divide between corporate ed reformers and those of us defending public education that can make effective dialogue near impossible.
Campbell Brown, and her husband, Dan Señor, are supporters and/or Board members or staff affiliated with a number of charter school entities, including those of Michelle Rhee, Joe Williams, and various agitators against public school educators. Her new venture claims to represent a number of students who assert that their education was sabotaged by “bad” teachers. Same old, same old evidence-free propaganda.
As expected, it seems Campbell has an interesting background, including being expelled from school. Granted this is a Wikipedia reference, but fun to read.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_Brown
Oh, well, now I understand why she gets such valuable real estate in every media outlet:
“After graduation, she spent a year teaching English in Czechoslovakia.”
She’s an expert! 🙂
And, I noticed that her dad’s trouble with telling the truth doesn’t hold a prominent place in her wiki bio. Jim Brown was our former insurance commissioner who served time for lying during an FBI investigation:
“Jim Brown was convicted and served six months in Federal Corrections Institution in Oakdale in Allen Parish.”
Remember folks, It’s “just limited to tenure!”
“Monday’s ruling in Harris v. Quinn was limited to home health aides and did not apply to longstanding practices that allow public sector unions to collect millions in dues annually from nonmembers covered by union contracts. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that home health aides are not the same as other state employees because they work for individuals in private homes.
Activists behind a lawsuit pending in federal court in California say the Harris ruling has set the stage for their complaint, which challenges the constitutionality of a California requirement that public school teachers must pay union dues regardless of whether they choose to join the union.”
Now we can all watch ed reformers become increasingly incoherent as they rely on the home-health care workers anti-union decision to destroy teachers unions yet claim they are pro-labor*
* only beginning in June of election years and expiring at close of polls on election day.
Wealthy and well-connected Democrats could conceivably be responsible for the final nail in the coffin of labor unions in this country. Wow.
Here’s the link on how they plan to expand the home health care union decision to teachers in California:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/supreme-court-ruling-on-unions-reverberates/2014/06/30/f6045362-006e-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html
False accusations have probably been around since the earliest days of schools, and as Diane says, the unions protect teachers against false reports. Effectively, I might add. The most notorious sexual predator ever to walk the halls of Chicago’s public schools was a guy named James Moffat, who was eventually found guilty of sexually abusing five students while he was serving as principal of Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago. Because he was an administrator, and had clout all the way to the mayor’s office, Moffat thought he was insulated from prosecution as long as he selected his victims carefully, using the powers he had to know so much about kids as a principal. The coverup of Moffat’s crimes was enormous, and began at the top.
But thanks to a courageous social worker, who called me at Substance after being warned not to “play with fire” by blowing the whistle on a guy with such enormous clout, Moffat’s crimes went before a Cook County Grand Jury. Then he was indicted (ironically, the day after Chicago Public Schools officials failed to win an administrative case against him…).
I began reporting the case in 1984 and wrote more than 60 stories about it all the way through the criminal trial three years later. At every step, CPS officials tried to derail justice and help Moffat.
Many strange things took place. Between the prosecution and defense phases of the ten-day trial, the transcript of the prosecution phase was “lost.” (A Chicago tradition when clout is involved by the way). Moffat’s lawyers tried to get me on the witness stand to testify about my sources, but the judge upheld the shield so I sat there and wasn’t forced to answer any questions about how I had been reporting Moffat’s crimes from the onset of the investigations.
Moffat’s defense “team” included a clout-heavy lawyer named Anne Burke, who at the time was known as the wife of one of the most powerful men in City Council, Alderman Eddie Burke. (One of the leaders of the “Council Wars” factions of white racist politicians who harassed Harold Washington). Anne Burke later went on to do the interim coverup investigation of the predatory priests for the Catholic Church and then became a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court (she was the lone voice against upholding the constitutional protection to public worker pensions this week).
As Kurt Vonnegut (who began a writing career as a Chicago reporter at City New Bureau) used to say… “and so it goes…”
Moffat and his supporters, many of whom had an inkling of his crimes, could not believe anyone with that much power in Clout City would ever go on trial, let alone go to jail.
Nevertheless, after a stormy trial that was only reported in full in the pages of Substance (we were only in print then; there was no Internet), Moffat was found guilty of more than 30 counts of those crimes against more than five victims.
He got several years in prison. His clout saved him from having to go into the general population, and after he got out of prison that same clout got his named removed from the Illinois sex criminals postings. But he never had access to kids in schools again, thanks to all of our work, the good prosecutorial work of an able team, and a courageous judge.
Every time Education Week does a round up about teacher sexual predators (usually with the mug shots of the predators, who are usually young women), I want to scream because of the hypocrisy of the official narrative. The most powerful sexual predator in the history of American public education was James Moffat of Chicago. And he is to this day left out of the histories.
During the years I’ve been reporting on the news from Chicago’s public schools, I’ve been very careful in reporting on these kinds of crimes because of the problems Diane speaks about. Of the cases I’ve known about, roughly half have proved true, and those resulted in convictions. The union never defended those guys.
But in the case of a high ranking administrators whose crimes were far worse, the defense came straight from City Hall and the most powerful precincts in Clout City.
When you do the right thing, there are other rewards. When we wrote about the testimony of the five victims in court, we used pseudonyms, since all of them were victimized while they were minors. One of them, a girl who was a victim when she was 14, we called “Midgy Jonworth” in our coverage.
About a year ago I received a phone call. A woman left a message asking me to call a dog walking service in the suburbs. When I called back she said she just wanted to thank me for having covered that story when she was so young. Eventually, she won a major civil damages lawsuit against the Chicago Board of Education, but of course the Board gagged the record of that settlement. But during the criminal trial, we had to watch her testify in court — and watch Moffat’s defense “team” — including that sanctimonious lady who is now on the Illinois Supreme Court — try every trick to discredit the witness.
Many victims are strong and can stand up for a long time, as the Catholic priest scandals have shown. And there can be justice.
But not when fools like Campbell Brown spout off through the megaphone provided to them by the likes of CNN. Sex crime prosecutions require a lot of work, just as reporting on them does. But if you’re only into a bit of cheap shot punditry, it’s no work at all to libel the AFT, NEA, and all of the local unions of both.
Campbell Brown is an out and out fraud, a con artist of the basest strip who makes a living out of preying on parental nightmares while collecting a substantial sinecure from her billionaire employers. She is a perfect example of what has gone so wrong, wrong, wrong with America. Here is a post from last summer. http://raginghorse.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/the-conspicuous-silence-of-campbell-brown/
Lets’ face it pedophiles are everywhere kids are. Scouting, summer camps, schools, pre schools, playgrounds etc. But to punish everyone who works with kids for a few perverts is so perverted it is hard to wrap your head around it. Deasy , the superintendent in Los Angeles did it. One pervert in a school and he tried to fire the whole staff. Union stopped him but he still housed them for a year in a Highschool under construction, and then tried to make them reapply for their jobs. Hideous. No other word for it. What is the percent of teachers that sexually abuse kids. Probably under 1 percent and yet she wants to punish all teachers, strip them of their rights and stick it to them. You can’t even hug your kids anymore in some districts. Like hugging a crying kid is some kind of perversion. Makes me so angry, taking all the joy and love out of teaching one Campbell Brown at a time.
And she hangs out with the Rhee’s, and the latest Kevin (after Huffman onto Johnson) who himself has been unable to keep his hands off teenage girls.
Click to access Phoenix_Police.source.prod_affiliate.4.pdf
Beautifully written and reasoned. Thank you Diane for being in our corner!
My point is that Ms. Campbell Brown seems to be outraged by sexual abuse only when there is political gain to be had. I.e. Only when it can be used to slander teacher unions poison public perception concerning them.
Yes, I am waiting for her to express outrage about the recent CHARTER scandals in CT: convicted, felons, fake dr.’s, sexual offenders, etc. Not to mention her friend, Michelle’s husband, KJ.
I know that our local teachers’ union just help oust a principal who has bullied everyone – students, parents, and teachers – for 10 years. We had to get rid of her legally. She resigned/retired.
We would never protect a child abuser or sexual predator. There would have been a swarm of attack on these types instantly. It is much more difficult to get rid if an administrator.
People who are on power trips are difficult to oust. Just think how much more difficult getting rid of a privately hired bully!?!?!?!
Campbell Brown’s War on Teachers: She’s the latest version of a media strategy initiated with the Reagan campaign of 1980 led by Michael Deaver–focus media on an “issue of the day”–a single visually and verbally provocative item, thematically simplistic to facilitate headline-writing, crawler-copy , chanting, and signs, to capture the attention of the audience. Dems were an election cycle behind GOP in media managing until Wall St money shifted to ObamaDems in 08.
Around 1980, right-wing media outlets were testing the first white male TV talk show hosts but the first hosts were unappealing, inarticulate angry white men like Sean Morton Downey and a Prof. Martin Abend on Fox TV. Took a decade until assets like Rush Limbaugh and then O’Reilly/Hannity/Scarborough emerged. Then came a Campbell Brown or a Megyn Kelley, attractive young white females who followed on the first failure of the Sen.’s daughter Liz McCain and the quirky Palin herself to fill that slot.
Campbell Brown’s follows same playbook: big lies, exaggerated alarms, molded facts, non-verbal facial cues, hectoring target-guests, etc. So, why did she turn from mass media pundit to litigation leader? First, of course, is that public relations only work to the extent they capture audience attention; for that Brown is an asset with brand-name recognition giving her automatic attention b/c of her celebrity status; she gained brand-name recognition via being a young attractive white female at play in the fields of angry white men.
Second, the Vergara case is an opening to the right which big money is rushing to exploit after seeing its earlier campaign of “Parent Trigger” close quickly on their fingers. Vergara is “Parent Trigger” writ large, reincarnated without the need to mobilize genuine mass parent support(something the right-wing billionaires and rheeformers cannot accomplish–only Eva Moskowitz knows how to fake this effectively). Identifying, managing, and financing a small group of “plaintiffs” is a far easier task through which to kill tenure and unions, far easier than parent trigger was.
What to do? Vergara reads like a very weak case which the CA tchrs union should have fought like hell and won; perhaps union insiders didn’t want to fight or didn’t know how or are just degenerate from years in safe positions. So, I’d say we can’t count on the teachers’ unions to fight this one out. Activists in and outside the unions will have to consolidate to get ahead of the game. We have social media tools to do this. We have the bodies to show up en masse where lots of protest will make a difference. We have a lot of people in our networks who can each contribute small amounts to bundle the cash needed to put out kicking TV ads. Fight or become a doormat for Gates and company.
Diane, funny opening. 🙂
Here’s what I think: Whoever wants to stand up and say one teacher denied them a quality education is pathetic. Seriously. There is no other way to describe that. Unless they molested you or blackmailed you, shame on you for LETTING one person deny you a quality education and if they are guilty of either awful other sin listed, there are laws and ramifications against that and it’s a separate issue.
This is ridiculous.
Find you a good robot and let the rest of us actually live life: pain, strain, sickness, health, good fortune, bad fortune. . . if you can’t feel the rain and you can’t feel the sunshine, there is no place for you. And if you are so hard up that you would take a payout or stand up as a pathetic example, then bless your hide. But you’re still pathetic (whoever “you” happens to be).
I hope a good judge gets to listen. There are better ways to deal with real problems.
Not all teachers support tenure – http://teaching-abc.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-tenure-good-thing.html
There really are bad teachers!, but an open and transparent way of teacher development, where they can be exposed, or educated, is forbidden with the current system of commercial staff development. Good administrators need to come from good teachers.
What the heck are you talking about?
I think we need to start a movement to reform the news. If it weren’t for bad reporters like Campbell brown my life would be much better. After all, EVERYBODY knows that reporters are just people who couldn’t make it as actors. And studies prove that being subjected to 2 years in a row of bad reporting lowers my chance of knowing what is really going on in the world.
TAGO!
Diane,
Here’s the story you are recalling from the DC area:
http://articles.latimes.com/2000/mar/26/news/mn-12749
False Accusations Make Teacher’s Life a Nightmare
Behavior: Seven students accused him of sexual touching, then admitted they lied. Regrets fail to explain conduct.
March 26, 2000|BRIGID SCHULTE | WASHINGTON POST
Just after 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 16, gym teacher Ronald Heller was called to his principal’s office. He was shown written statements from several sixth-grade students saying they’d seen him in the girls’ locker room, hugging one girl in her bra and panties, slapping another on her behind and calling yet another “hot sexy mama.”
The wind went out of him.
“I did not do this,” Heller, 54, said. “This is a lie.”
He looked at the names–six girls and a boy. Only two were in his class. The rest he didn’t even know.
The principal of Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, Md., handed Heller a letter informing him that he was suspended with pay, effective immediately. He was given 15 minutes to leave the school.
“I was flabbergasted,” said Heller, a teacher and coach for 32 years. “I thought it was all a big mistake and that I’d be back at work by Friday.”
For nearly a month, he stayed home, doing yardwork and watching “SportsCenter,” waiting for Montgomery County, Md., police to investigate. No one from the school could talk to him. And he had to get permission from the central office every time he left home. “I felt like I was on house arrest,” he said. He couldn’t sleep. He lost weight.
The lowest point came when detectives said they had two days to decide whether to arrest him. Heller called his wife, Ronnie, a special education teacher of 23 years. “I got real emotional,” he said. “I started crying.”
For nearly a month, the girls stuck to their story–even embellished it. One told police that she remembered he’d brushed her breast when he was taking a ball from her. Another said he’d given them a group hug outside the locker room.
But with each flourish, investigators were becoming more suspicious. Holes in the once-airtight story started appearing. Finally, one student–the boy–confessed. They’d made it all up. Then, one by one, the girls recanted.
On March 13, the six girls, whose names are being withheld by police because they are juveniles, were arrested for making false statements to the police and were suspended from school for 10 days. The boy was suspended but not arrested.
Montgomery County State’s Atty. Douglas F. Gansler said he wants to teach them a lesson by having them do community service with real victims of sexual abuse. School officials are expected to decide soon whether to let them return to Roberto Clemente or transfer them to another school–or expel them.
“We’re in a difficult position,” said community Supt. Donald H. Kress, who oversees county schools in the Germantown area. “How do we treat Mr. Heller fairly, and how do we provide appropriate punishment without throwing these kids away?”
Heller was exonerated and returned to school March 14 to an avalanche of flowers, letters, e-mails, cards and hugs from colleagues.
The case has become a national phenomenon and Heller, who appeared on NBC’s “Today” show, a lightning rod for teachers who hesitate to hug a weeping student for fear that any touch might be misconstrued and end a career.
The outpouring of sympathy for Heller is matched only by the vitriol heaped on the students. Gansler, in televised interviews, said the youngsters “maliciously conspired” to get Heller fired. And on talk radio, he fielded a rash of angry callers who wanted their hides.
The school system’s internal e-mail system is flooded with comments. “Ron Heller is a wonderful and moral person and he has been through enough,” said one. “He does not need to see these lying, conniving students walking the halls.” Another called the girls “evil.”
This much is true: The students lied. Heller’s life and reputation were nearly ruined. But what might never be known is this: Why did a group of 11- and 12-year-olds make up such a vicious story about a teacher they didn’t know?
Clique Chooses Chat Over Sports
One of the six girls wears a Tigger watch. She has long, professionally manicured nails, painted white. She sleeps on purple flowered sheets with a cat named George. Posters of stuffed teddy bears and glossy magazine pages of the pop group ‘N Sync adorn her walls.
On the small TV in her room she keeps her peach lip gloss, blue Shimmer in Glimmer body lotion and sweet-smelling Splish Splash body splash.
Until now, the worst thing she had lied about was when she lent her younger sister her Barbies but then told her father the sister took them. She is in honors classes and was a straight-A student until the Big Lie. Now she’s barely making C’s.
This girl, whose family agreed to let her speak to the Washington Post only if she remains anonymous, acknowledges she doesn’t really know Heller. Sometimes he helps out in her physical education class, when she and her clique of friends like to sit around and talk and he tries to get them involved in sports. And she doesn’t like that.
“He always comes up and says, ‘Hellooo girls,’ if we’re sitting in a circle. ‘You girls think you’re better than the boys with your nails,’ ” she said in a high mimic. “He’s just annoying.”
‘We Thought It Would Be Fun’
The week of Feb. 14, Heller disciplined two of her friends–a boy and a girl–for bad sportsmanship, the boy for taunting kids and the girl for giving up and pouting when her team began to lose. He set up a meeting with them two days later to talk to the school counselor about their behavior.
Her friends were angry. One said she was going to tell the counselor that Mr. Heller entered the girls’ locker room and that she’d heard that he touched girls’ behinds.
The morning of Feb. 16 was cold. The girl’s mother drives a school bus, and the girl and her friends gather on it before school. That morning, the talk was all about Mr. Heller in the girls’ locker room. The girl’s mother overheard them. “Why didn’t you ever tell me this was happening?” she asked her daughter, then marched the girls into the counselor’s office to make a report.
As the girls got off the bus, they started to giggle nervously. One said, “Oh my God.” But instead of telling the counselor that they were just repeating rumors, they decided to say it had happened.
One by one, the girls were called into the office to make a statement. As one left, she told the next one what she’d said, so their stories would match. Teachers at the school said the girls showed “attitude” sometimes, but were good kids. There was no reason not to believe them.
“We thought it would be fun,” the girl said, sitting in the living room of her parents’ townhome. “The whole idea of being the center of attention, going to the office and everyone in school knowing. Everyone thought it would be cool.”
And, she said, they thought that would be the end of it.
But when she got home from school that day, Det. Errol Birch, with the Montgomery County Police Department’s pedophile unit, was waiting for her. She decided to lie.
“We didn’t think it would get so big, like the police involved,” she said. “It all happened so quick. We wanted to keep going because we didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Over the next few days, she started to feel sick. “My neck and back hurt. I couldn’t sleep anymore. I’d just sit there and cry. It was like there was this big weight on my shoulders,” she said. “I felt really bad for Mr. Heller. I don’t think I ever thought he would get in trouble. Besides him being annoying, he’d never done anything serious to me.”
Still, when Birch interviewed her and the other girls again, on Feb. 23, she lied again–and added more details. “Everyone made more stuff up,” she said. “They started just throwing things in.”
By that time, police had doubts. The girls said they had complained to two female gym teachers. One short interview with them proved that wasn’t true. Even confronted with that, “they stuck to their guns,” Birch said. “They seemed credible.”
By this time, some of the girls weren’t speaking to each other. Some wanted to tell the truth. Others were afraid. This girl was torn. “I didn’t want to get my friends in trouble,” the girl said. “I didn’t want them to be mad at me.”
Kevin P. Dwyer, president of the National Assn. of School Psychologists, said early adolescence is an age where the not-quite-child, not-quite-woman is given to lying, saying hurtful things about other girls to secure her own place in an increasingly important social pecking order.
“They editorialize and massage the truth. And some are clearly vicious lies,” he said. “At this age, they’re self-absorbed, they’re clumsy, they don’t think things through or see long-term effects. And they’re desperately in need of having a peer group they can identify with. They’d do anything to keep from being rejected from their circle.”
On March 1, police spoke to the boy for the first time. He said it had gone too far and it was time to stop. Nothing was true. The boy was then suspended.
On March 8, Miles Alban, a retired Montgomery County police officer who is an investigator for the school system, met with four of the girls.
He had his doubts too. ” ‘Hot sexy mama’ is just not language used by people in our generation,” Alban said. “That’s kid stuff.”
Alban told the one girl: “This is serious business, and it’s going to have some serious consequences. If it didn’t happen, tell me now. Let’s end it.”
Without hesitation, she said, “It never happened,” and began to cry. In subsequent interviews, each girl recanted within minutes.
In the car with her father, the still-sobbing girl blurted out, “I thought I was going to hell.”
*
When Ron Heller interviewed at Roberto Clemente five years ago, he knew times had changed. High-profile sex-abuse cases and a flood of false accusations of sexual misconduct had made teachers more careful–paranoid even, that a hug, a pat, any touching of a student could be misinterpreted.
He had three rules: no gymnastics, no coed wrestling and no class discussions during sex education.
Heller is a typical old-school coach–short and square, direct and tough. He’s affectionate in the old-school way too. He gives kids nicknames like “Haircut” and “Jason of the Golden Fleece.” He makes up rhymes, like “Laura, Laura makes the grass grow green, makes the boys all scream, when she grows up she’ll marry a man named Johnny and live in a submarine.”
Sitting in an overstuffed yellow armchair in his airy home, Heller freely admits he’s from another era–he started teaching in 1967–and doesn’t quite “get” “Dawson’s Creek,” MTV and the “whatever” attitude of today’s preteens.
“I’m a dinosaur. I tease kids sometimes because I really enjoy working with kids,” he said. “I came from an era where if you had a fat kid in your class, you called him Fatty. If you had a skinny kid, you called him Skinny. If he had red hair, you called him Red. It wasn’t malicious, it’s just the way it was.”
Most of the nicknames and rhymes, he said, are for his special-needs kids. “Do I rub their backs? Of course I rub their backs. They’re the only ones I touch,” he said. “Because they’re the ones who need a little more help.”
He’s strictly hands-off with regular kids, with the teams he coaches and games he referees on weekends. “There may be a player writhing in pain on the side of the field, and I may know that if I pull on her leg it will make her cramp go away, I’m not touching her. No way,” he said. “I’ll yell, ‘Coach, come take care of your player.’ ”
For 32 years, he’d been careful. Like other teachers, he makes sure he’s never alone with a student and always leaves a door open when meeting with one. He’s been to the trainings. He knows the rules. And still, he suffered every teacher’s worst nightmare.
The worst part is that kids who didn’t even know him had the power to turn his life upside down.
Heller’s attorney had him take a lie detector test March 8. Heller and his attorney, Paul F. Kemp, said it showed he had never called anyone a “hot sexy mama,” much less fondled anyone.
By Friday, March 10, it was over. All seven students had owned up to the lie. And the school system was beginning the paperwork so he could return to school.
He wants to make sure the girls don’t.
“They come,” he said, “I leave.”
The girl wants the world to know she’s not a bad person: “What I did was wrong. I can’t change what happened. I just want to get back to normal, get back to my life and everybody to forget about it.”
As punishment while she’s suspended, the girl has to do the dishes and clean up around the house more. She found out through a neighbor that she’s lost her part in the school play.
She doesn’t quite understand that she’s been arrested–she wasn’t taken away in handcuffs, like on TV. On the way to the police station, she asked her father, “Am I supposed to smile for this picture?’ ”
Like the other girls’ families, her brother and sisters are taunted at school. One younger sister went to the health room with a stomachache for five straight days. On her mother’s school bus, elementary school kids shouted, “I hope she gets 10 years!”
Her parents want to see that she’s learned a lesson. “It wouldn’t have bothered me a bit if they decided to keep them after school every day to scrub toilets, sweep up trash and do custodial work,” her father said.
But then it’s time to heal. “Hopefully we can get past this, and hopefully without having to move out of the neighborhood. But I can see it getting to the point where no one wants to play with my kids.”
The girl has written letters of apology to Heller and everyone involved. But her parents are afraid to send Heller’s, scared that it could be used against them if Heller sues. “We’re living hand to mouth as it is,” her father said.
In round, girlish script, she asks for forgiveness: “Dear Mr. Heller, I don’t even know where to begin. The truth is you never did anything to me except being friendly. . . . I know [you’re] probably wondering why a group of good kids would ever make something up about you like this.
“And the reason,” she wrote in pencil, “is still a question to us.”
As even more vile:
His reputation sullied, teacher commits suicide
False accusation leads to tragedy in Virginia city
By Timothy Dwyer, Washington Post | February 15, 2004
ROANOKE, Va. — The two-lane bridge that Ron Mayfield Jr. came to on the morning of his death stands almost 200 feet above the flowing waters where his father took him fishing as a boy and where, years later, he spent hours with his own son, casting for catfish and perch.
He made two final calls on his cellphone, gasping out a farewell to his wife and dialing 911 without saying a word. Then he lay the phone beside the road and straddled the knee-high metal bridge railing.
At an hour when the school day was just getting started 6 miles away at Woodrow Wilson Middle School, Mayfield leaned sideways and let go, falling into the river.
The note he left tucked in the Bible, on the front seat of the car he left properly parked in the rest area by the bridge, began this way:
“I am so sorry for what I have done, but there is no way I could carry on, absolutely no way.”
The apology was for taking his own life. He had no need to apologize for what drove him to his death, because Mayfield knew it was untrue.
A student at Woodrow Wilson told authorities that he had been assaulted by Mayfield, 55, who taught English to nonnative speakers. Mayfield denied it, but his word, his reputation, and his spotless record were not enough. He had been suspended, and police were called in to investigate.
What Mayfield did not know as he mounted the bridge that morning was that police had cleared him of wrongdoing.
No national statistics are kept on the number of false accusations students make against their teachers, but specialists have said the evolving culture of the classroom has caused the number of reports of abusive teachers to increase in the past 15 years. A study in Britain found that 1,782 allegations of abuse by teachers resulted in 96 prosecutions.
“There is a culture now where students know how to get rid of a teacher, they know how to get a teacher removed from a classroom,” said Greg Lawler, general counsel for the Colorado Education Association. When he took the education association job 17 years ago, Lawler said, he spent 30 percent of his time defending teachers accused of criminal acts. Accusations have increased so dramatically that he and another lawyer now work full time defending teachers, he said.Mayfield’s friends and family said they are struggling to understand how a man who never had as much as a traffic ticket and no history of depression or mental illness could be driven to such despair. Teaching had been his profession of choice, but when he graduated from college, there were few teaching jobs to be had. Instead, he followed his father and grandfather into railroad work. After 20 years with the Norfolk and Western Railroad — a career that outlasted his first marriage — Mayfield took early retirement and returned to college, determined to make teaching his second career. Mayfield received a master’s degree from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 1992, the same year his son, Robert, graduated from college. Mayfield taught English in Japan and Saudi Arabia.
Myrna, a Philippines native, was working in Saudi Arabia as a midwife. Her first impression was that he was very friendly, kind, and talkative. Slight of build, he shopped in the boys’ department.
They married in Virginia, and he took a job teaching English to foreign students in the Roanoke public schools.
He was clearly distraught that October afternoon. He told Myrna that the accusation was the vengeance of an angry teenager. In fact, he said, a week earlier he had touched the chronically disruptive 13-year-old on the chest, emphasizing that the boy needed to behave and pay attention.
When the boy misbehaved again that morning, Mayfield said, he ordered him from the classroom. The boy responded by complaining to the principal that Mayfield had assaulted him the week before. The boy, the son of immigrants from India, had polio as a toddler and uses a wheelchair.
Mayfield was warned about the troubled boy, Abdul Nahibkhil, at the start of the school year by a colleague who said the boy disrupted her class the year before. Abdul’s parents, Abdul and Shina Nahibkhil, had come to the United States from India about 27 months earlier. The parents, who speak no English, were interviewed with their daughter Jasmine, 20, serving as interpreter.
“When the investigators came, my parents told them that in India, teachers hit students all the time and they didn’t care if Mr. Mayfield hit Abdul or not,” the daughter said. “They said if he hit him, he deserved it. But it didn’t matter. They didn’t care if he hit him or not. They wanted the matter dropped, and they said that they would make Abdul go to school and apologize to Mr. Mayfield.”
Abdul denied being disruptive in class. Another sister, Mina, a high school senior, said she had Mayfield as a teacher last year and really liked him.
The parents said they were upset that no one from the school had immediately notified them about their son’s accusation. Had the principal called them, they said, they would have told him to drop the whole thing and get Mayfield back in the classroom.
Superintendent E. Wayne Harris and Vicki Price, then-acting director of the city’s social service agency, declined to comment. They said the investigation was a personnel matter and was private.
Mayfield did not know Abdul’s parents wanted to drop the case, his wife said. He contacted an attorney from the Virginia Education Association. As each day went by, he grew more depressed.
On Saturday, Oct. 11, he picked up his wife from work and gave her some startling news.
“I’m not supposed to be here today,” he told her. “I thought about committing suicide today.”
Then he handed her a three-page suicide letter.
“Hi, Honey,” it began, “I am writing this to come clean with everybody. . . . I cannot have my face on television and in the newspaper over this incident, an incident where I was attempting to teach Abdul a lesson and wake him up. . . . I am so tired and so nervous, almost paranoid that the police are going to be knocking on our door at any moment to arrest me.”
His wife wept.
“I have to see your mother and talk about this,” she recalls telling him. “I cannot carry this myself anymore. I can’t handle it anymore.”
So they drove to his parents’ house in Vinton.
He had not told his parents about his suspension. They were stunned.
His father, Ronald, a soft-spoken man, told him, “Ronnie, if you really think that this is going to hurt us, if you commit suicide, that is going to hurt us a lot worse.” They kept talking, and eventually Mayfield said he would not kill himself. They asked for his promise, and he gave it.
On the way home, he told his wife that if anyone found out that he had considered killing himself, it would make him look guilty. He never spoke of it again.
On Oct. 15, police informed the school that they had found no evidence to support Abdul’s allegation. School officials did not pass the information on to Mayfield, his family said.
The next morning, Mayfield was out of bed before 6:30 a.m. He told his wife he had to visit a friend.
“I won’t be long,” he said, kissing his wife. “I love you.”
The soaring bridge that carries the Blue Ridge Parkway over the Roanoke River held such a special place in his life that he used a photo of it as his computer screen saver.
When she got his final phone call at 8:01 a.m., he did not tell her that was where he had gone. In the minutes after he dropped into the river, his cellphone, abandoned on the sidewalk, rang again and again without answer.
Campbell Brown would want those two teachers to have been fired on the spot.
An Open Letter to Campbell Brown
http://educationclusterfrack.blogspot.com/2014/06/an-open-letter-to-campbell-brown.html
Brown cries foul when we question her motives. We questioned her connection to the Romney campaign, and we questioned her connection to Rhee’s Students First campaign to destroy unions. When she fails to justify her motives she calls our concerns idiocy.
She claims the high ground and we all should follow. She provides no evidence to support her accusations and she demonstrates complete ignorance on the work unions have done on this issue.
She hides behind a non- profit shield, hiding her financial backers.
Wonder how she supports herself? Wonder how much her non- profit teacher union hater organization must pay her?
I hope, that once the teachers, who will be thrown into her evil spotlight, have to defend themselves against her Vergara like case begins, they get that information during discovery. I hope they sue her for defamation.
The timing and complete lack of a personal history or connection to public education leads me to believe Campbell Brown’s entrée into education reform was nothing more than a bald-faced attempt to link Democrats with aiding and abetting child abuse. She is a private school parent, and she certainly can’t be unaware of the historical failure of some private schools to keep their kids safe from predators. But all of her focus is on public schools with unionized teachers. Odd.
Oh gosh, you’re right. I hope they are not at Horace Mann.
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.
—
Wait I thought kids loved high standards ? We are told that time and again. And students will magically cope up to whatever standards you give them !
Campbell Brown probably sees her role as part of the “disruptive innovation” business fad (that unfortunately does not seem to go away as all fads are supposed to). Privatization over public … crash and burn… unfortunately our nation’s youth will suffer greatly under Brown’s misinformed and implemented plans. Teachers will be in an out of schools like travelers at airport turnstiles. Good for learning? I say no!
Truthdig has a good piece on Jill LePore (a Harvard counter-balance to Christensen)..
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_jill_lepore_20140706
Good article from Mother Jones (an excellent investigative journalism magazine)
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/campbell-brown-new-york-schools-rhee
Except stuff like this happens, and maybe I think Campbell’s on to something: http://nypost.com/2014/07/06/teacher-that-wooed-teen-with-gifts-texts-suspended-but-not-fired/
What is the percentage of U.S. teachers involved in criminal behavior? Low. Very low. Yet some people use this to devalue all teachers and to act as if a few bad apples is indicative of all public teachers. We are certified, vetted, educated, trained, and finger printed. And we are insulted that our integrity is denigrated by some highly financed publicly known figure. And, we know what we are doing and willingly go the extra mile for kids in all kinds of circumstances. We are angry that know it all mouthpieces lying and manipulating “data” for their own purposes. It is ridiculous. Totally ridiculous. There are bad people in all professions. To act as if teachers need to be “cleansed” and replaced by untrained, undedicated graduates who are just as likely to do something wrong. (Not likely!!)
I would say more but I won’t go there.
And this was covered up for years. Please pass to Campbell. She needs to get a suit going stat to help the kids in Riverdale. Thanks Tim.
Linda: You miss the point about Campbell’s attack on teachers. It’s public school teachers who belong to unions she attacks. It’s actually the unions/tenure she’s after using teacher misbehavior as a proxy. She doesn’t attack teachers in charter/private schools who work without union representation for misdeeds from what I’ve seen on this blog
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I do get it. I was pointing our her hypocrisy. She’s not too too far from Horace Mann, so she should take care of this.
Got it.
Campell Brown is a tattered last resort from the reformers. They are losing and losing BIG. Everyone from Gates to Cuomo have begun their back-pedal in the past month. She is going to get no support from their camp. Yet, they have allowed her step forward knowing in the next six months she will be the most vilified talking air- head that gets some air time. In other words, the rest of the deformers will use her as their whipping boy and claim bad journalism. I am not even worried about what she says. Her accusations are ridiculous and she can only read from a script. She cannot debate any statement she makes with anyone that is educated. In other words, Dr. Ravitch you are not going to be on her show in the near future…
Diane, agreed, as you wrote, that sometimes students don’t tell the truth. Also agreed that there should be due process investigations of allegations.
Wouldn’t you also agree that sometimes adults in private and public schools do abuse children in various ways – and that people who have been convinced as in this case should have major consequences? In this case, the local district did terminate the (substitute) teacher
http://www.startribune.com/local/west/266353091.html
I don’t see a statement from you affirming the need for major consequences if a teacher is found guilty.
Joe Nathan: Ridiculous comment. Teachers are isolated in “rubber rooms” at any charge of improper behavior and in NYC aren’t even informed what the charge is or what student made the complaint. If found guilty, dismissed or penalty determined by an independent arbitrator. All the attacks on public education/teachers are orchestrated for personal enrichment having little to do with education.
Joe doesn’t post here to listen to others. Your response doesn’t fit his schema so he will merely by-step. Even when he asks a question he is not interested in your
response unless you agree or worship HIS dedication. Please don’t post your background again, Joe.
Linda: Agreed. I have trouble ignoring the “ignorable”.
Michael, some years ago I worked with the West Clermont Public Schools, a Cincy district. There had been a climate of silence for several years about sexual abuse going on by some teachers who were indicted and as noted in this story, found guilty:
http://enquirer.com/editions/2003/01/31/loc_amelia31.html
Diane has asked me questions, which is fair. I’d like to know what she thinks about teachers found guilty of abusing children. Her opening statement above includes the need for due process and the comment that sometimes children don’t tell the truth.
Joe Nathan: your question is self serving. Diane shouldn’t, and hopefully wouldn’t, answer such a shallow, obvious, and pointless question.
BINGO! Self-serving, condescending, patronizing, baiting, self aggrandizing, pompous….that’s him.
Silence was one of the problems in West Clermont.
No one is promoting silence..once again divert……got anything else?
Really, Joe…you think Diane would speak highly of teachers found guilty. That’s not what you’re doing and you know it. Stop patronizing
all of us here. Get off your high horse. There are plenty of incidents in private boarding schools as well. You nitpick here.
Your comment is VILE, Joe Nathan. Your desperation to keep your Charter “School” Scam going is becoming more obvious every day.
And now you come up with THIS! How sickening. How sick you must truly be.
Hey Joe,
Wouldn’t you also agree that sometimes adults in private and public life do murder other people in various ways – and that people who have been CONVICTED—as opposed to “convinced”—should have major consequences?
I don’t see a statement from you, Joe, affirming the need for major consequences if a person is found guilty of murder. Why not?
Why are you so silent about murder? I’ve never ONCE seen you condemn murder in any of your comments? How come? Aren’t you against murder? Well, if so, why are you seemingly in favor of it, judging by your complete failure to condemn it?
The discussion as to whether some few teachers are predators is misguided. In any profession or situation where adults and children are in settings where it is possible, there can be child child abuse. Priests, ministers, youth workers, scout leaders, parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, neighbors, camps, and teachers have all been accused and/or found guilty or innocent of this heinous behavior.
To act as if anyone denies that it happens is insulting.
To act as if Diane or anyone here just turns away from acknowledging this is preposterous. The point is that possible predators are everywhere, and thank God they aren’t in the majority.
If Campbell Brown thinks that teachers are more likely to abuse kids than those in other kid-related professions or life situations, she is misrepresenting for a reason.
Does she honestly think hiring “teachers” with no child development training will produce higher quality individuals?
Due process is often too long, too painful, too harmful. But kids do lie. Some kids want to teach a teacher a lesson. No one can assume that a teacher is guilty until proven innocent.
I once had a 4th grade student who wore those exercise pants that snap up the side to school. He transferred in from a city school. He was trying to make an impression. He was a street smart big mouth child. One day he deliberately ripped the snaps open on one leg while we were on line for lunch. He said…”Look what Mrs. # did to me!!!”. The kids pounced on him like a duck on a June bug saying, “You lie!!!!”. He backed down and apologized. But the fact was I did not and would not have done ANYthing to him. It happens.