Jersey Jazzman writes that we know what Campbell Brown is against: bad teachers. She says teachers should have due process protections. So does Arne Duncan. Unions would agree with them that termination hearings should not be expensive and endless.
So what does she want?
Jersey Jazzman writes:
“Campbell, I’d be a lot less inclined to question your motivations if you would just do us all a favor and tell us what it is you want.
“I went to your website and tried to find a proposal for a system of teacher workplace protections — it wasn’t there. There were, of course, plenty of reformy talking points gussied up with research that show illustrations of the importance of teacher quality. But there wasn’t anything that resembled evidence that shows tenure suppresses overall teacher quality, and there wasn’t anything even remotely resembling a concrete proposal to “fix” a tenure and seniority system that still hasn’t been shown to be a drag in student achievement.
“If you want to have a serious debate about tenure and seniority, Campbell, the very least you should do is present some sort of alternative system of teacher, student, and taxpayer protections. If you think you can come up with something that will work better than tenure and seniority, by all means let’s hear it.
“But unless and until you do, your complaints are little better than whining. And no teacher worth his or her chalk puts up with that. – See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/07/what-exactly-does-campbell-brown-want.html#sthash.uqNKOiP2.dpuf”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Neoliberal solution for everything: accept conservative framing, give away hard-won rights, gain public approbation = utopia!
You see it everywhere: chained CPI for SS, ACA minus public option, now in education: come on, you don’t need due process, it just makes you look bad! And once you give that up, you’ll be golden for generations! They’ll surely not continue to chip away at your rights after THAT concession!
Can we please refrain from asking Campbell Brown what she wants or asking if she wants a “serious” debate on tenure and seniority? She wants a paycheck. She wants to revive her career. Education issues are the best cheap shot gig she can come up with. Sure, hit The Colbert Report with plenty of great anti-CB Tweets but don’t give her power she does not have. She is an amoral airhead who will do whatever she can in order to get ahead in the land of the latest, hot button scam. Call her out for what she is, a flim-flam artist.
This.
Perfect description of this ninny.
And please give us a precise definition of teacher “quality.”
fame. fortune. to be on tv. a new wardrobe. makeup professionally done. nice shoes.
that’s what she wants.
Seriously, I believe she (and Rhee) have followed Marilyn Monroe’s mindset. . .which was: “I don’t mind being in a man’s world, so long as I can be a woman in it.”
I don’t she cares what the platform is, so long as she can talk about it and be a star. It’s the next best thing to Hollywood (if those are your goals).
What does Campbell Brown want? To be on TV. Period.
“Campbell Brownnose”
Campbell Brownnose tells her master
What she wants to hear
Helping Rhee-verse the tenure faster
Reforming her career
Make that “Rhee-forming”
Answer: Money and attention.
If she is a fool, then you have to ask, why she is being given this platform? Qui bono?
As if the readers of this blog need someone to give them that answer…
1. Attention
2. Money
3. A book deal
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/10/campbell-brown-new-york-schools-rhee
Their goal is the endgame. Likely Ms. Brown has investments in charter schools. Or microsoft. Or Pearson. Or like the above, to get a paycheck and fame. Isn’t the fame what drew the Rheeject in the first place? Then, the paycheck from the republicans to give to republicans while she claims she is a democrat.
This entire crapfest of cc, reform, teacher bashing, union busting, changing laws to accommodate charters, anointing/appointing school boards and supers, Broad Academy, etc……all an endgame to put public money into private pockets.
Perhaps it is to keep the have nots further away from the haves.
Perhaps it is to make scores of children dumb(er) enough that all the jobs they’ll be able to work at are McDonalds/Walmart, etc.
All the money the billionaires blow on fixing elections and “awarding” excellence to charter schools, and TFA scabs, and charter school seed money, and backing lawsuits to eliminate tenure and lifo, which basically will mean the unions are useless, so to bust unions, and to no longer be opposed by a voting mass……….. could so be better spent actually giving to school district that are in dire need.
Look to Pennsylvania. Is there going to be no money to fund the public schools? Betcha there will be money to fund the charter schools. Eventually, in the entire USA, are there going to be no more public schools? Is the future online, without teachers? Is that what our country is coming to?
Seriously as I’m typing this, I’m sitting here shaking my head. I just don’t understand it. The future is going to suck, based on the present.
On Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice website, she claims two things about how the educational system should be fixed:
1) the promotion of charter schools
2) firing “ineffective” teachers
The studies out there suggest that these are at best ineffective. However, what is more irritating is how she claims these efforts are meant to empower low-income parents. Her agenda has nothing to do with low income parents. Do parents want their kids over tested? Do parents want nationwide standards and a de-emphasis on arts education? Campbell Brown doesn’t care to know because her plans for other people’s kids demand these.
Maybe if she cared about the low-income parents and their kids, she’d advocate for more local control and more equitable funding. Instead, she is an advocate of schools redesigned from the top-down to create robot like students who can’t think for themselves on the cheap.
I think that the discussion around tenure should be concise and argued around the specific reasons why tenure is essential for educators. I also think that push back around efforts to undermine tenure should be about tenure and NOT about Campbell Brown. Every time her name is mentioned in conjunction with tenure we give her publicity which supports her efforts to position herself for her own career advancement. Discuss the issues, point to the arguments and leave Campbell Brown out of it no matter whose talk show she ends up on. It isn’t ever in our interests to reinforce Brown’s investment in using this issue to promote herself.
I have responded to this issue on my own blog in three parts using a Bill Gates quote that is currently making the rounds on LifeHacker. Part 2 deals with why tenure is important for teachers. It’s here at http://www.stonepooch.com/ablog/bill-gates-says-your-boss-doesnt-have-tenure-part-2/
It would be interesting to see how much income Ms. Brown gets from her “corporate reform” activism, and how it compares to her predecessor Michelle Rhee, who makes more in an hour of bashing public school teachers & their unions as the average starting teacher makes in a year—while we have to read the outrageous stuff that her supporters claim about how self-less and noble she is..
Below, we can read as one of her backers blathers about how Rhee is now “shunning high salaries” to “improve the lot of our nation’s students,” and how she was targeted and victimized in D.C. because she “put students first.”
Check out what WAITING FOR SUPERMAN director Davis Guggenheim wrote in his blurb accompanying her page in TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Important People list:
(CAPS are mine… Jack… it’s in the last paragraph)
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2066367_2066369_2066128,00.html
—————————————
DAVIS GUGGENHEIM:
“She (Michelle Rhee) SET A GOAL TO IMPROVE THE LOT OF THE NATION’S STUDENTS, and she has stuck to that. And she PAID DEARLY FOR IT, stepping down from her D.C. post in 2010 after Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his bid for re-election, a public rejection that some saw as A REPUDIATION OF THE TOUGH STEPS to raise the standards of the city’s public schools.
“Subsequently, SHE SHUNNED ANY HIGH-SALARY OFFERS that resulted from her high-profile tenure and INSTEAD FOUNDED HER OWN ORGANIZATION.
” ‘PUTTING KIDS FIRST’ could be a pithy slogan. For many it is.FOR RHEE, IT’S A LIFELONG COMMITMENT.”
—————————————
Hey Davis, you know who else has to “pay dearly”? The folks who have to pay to have this woman speak for an hour or two!
Ms. Rhee may have “shunned any high salary offers” after the voters of D.C. ran her out of town, but she sure isn’t shy about lapping up her $50K / hour speaking fees!
(NOTE: her 2013 STUDENTS FIRST tax forms indicate she currently makes $350,000 annually… isn’t that “a high salary?)
It’s nice that her “lifelong commitment” to “putting kids first” pays so well.
Here’s Hollywood agency CAA’s promo blurb for her:
http://caaspeakers.com/michelle-rhee/
——————————————————————-
“In the ever-evolving landscape of education in America, Michelle Rhee has been working tirelessly for the past two decades to give children the skills and knowledge they will need to compete in a changing world.
“From adding instructional time after school and visiting students’ homes as a third grade teacher in Baltimore, to hosting hundreds of community meetings and creating a Youth Cabinet to bring students’ voices into reforming the DC Public Schools, Michelle has always been guided by one core principle: put students first.”
——————————————————————
Wow, Rhee has “been guided by one core principle: put students first.”
How touching and noble of her? Given that moving statement, I’m sure that—like Dr. Ravitch—Ms. Rhee probably donates her time to give speeches and make appearances… at most only asking to have her expenses covered.
Wait a sec. I just found something on-line. It says that… Ms. Rhee… NO, I DON’T BELIEVE IT… SOMEBODY’S LYING OR MAKING THIS UP TO HARM HER REPUTATION…
No… it says that… she actually CHARGES MONEY (???!!!) for her speeches?
Say it ain’t so!
And that, when giving speeches, she is represented by the top Hollywood agency C.A.A., Creative Artists Agency?
Well, I’m sure her pay is just a small honorarium… as, like you, Dr. Ravitch, her true motives are to improve the educational lives of children, and to make sure every child has a great teacher at the front of his or her classroom, and, as Davis Guggenheim puts it, her mission to “put students first,” while “shunning high salaries.”
What’s that? It’s NOT just a token honorarium. Let me guess…
$1,000?
$2,000?
Higher? You gotta be kidding!
$5,000?
$10,000?
Get outta town!
$15,000?
$20,000?
What? She gets more than that just for an hour or two of speaking and answering questions?
Really? It’s actually higher?
$25,000?
$30,000?
Okay, someone’s just winding me up here. There’s NO WAY she charges more than THAT!!!
$50,000!
BINGO!!!!!
$50,000???!!! I don’t believe it.
Somebody’s gotta be making that up to discredit Ms. Rhee. It’s probably some evil, corrupt defenders-of-a-failed-status-quo teachers union thugs who put adult teachers’ interests ahead of children/students’ interest that hacked into C.A.A.’s website and created… yeah, it’s probably them who are making up and spreading these lies in an effort to harm Ms. Rhee’s reputation, and protect those teachers’ own selfish interest and cushy jobs-for-life.
Apparently not.
Some enterprising writer named Molly Bloom at the on-line publication STATE IMPACT actually got a copy of the contract that Rhee uses for her personal appearances and posted it on-line.
Oh, will you just shut up and gimme that link!
http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/10/10/michelle-rhee-to-speak-at-kent-statestark-prompts-faculty-to-organize-counter-event/
What’s that? Just scroll down and you can see
a scanned copy of Rhee’s boilerplate contract? Hmmm….
Yep! There it is… In the contract posted, $35,000 is indeed what she’s getting paid to speak at Kent State, plus a bunch o’ FIRST CLASS expenses. .. (She claims here that she was discounting her usual $50,000 / hour fee because the venue, Kent State, was “a school.)
The contract posted is the actual one used for Ms. Rhee’s appearance at at Kent State University,
Why, that’s SECOND worst atrocity ever associated with that school’s history. (“Tin soldiers and Nixon’s coming… Four dead in O – hi – o… “)
(Watch this whole video… it’s pretty well done!)
I like how the “Purchaser”—the entity or person who hires her— sends the payment to:
“Rhee Enterprises, LLC” (PAGE 2)
Helping improve the education of children and “putting students first” is a lucrative Big Business, apparently.
There’s more on PAGE 3:
——————————————————————
“a. Purchaser shall provide the Artist with one (1) First Class round-trip, unrestricted, fully-refundable airplane tickets, or cash equivalent, at Artist’s election;
“b. Purchaser shall one (1) VIP hotel suite; Purchaser to make and confirm reservations in consultation with the Artist; Artist reserves the right to choose hotel;
“c. Purchaser to provide the Artist with meals and all reasonable incidentals;
“d. Purchase shall provide Artist with a towncar and Professional Driver for round-trip transportation from the Artist’s home to the airport, airport to hotel, hotel to engagement, or any combination thereof;”
——————————————————————
Yes, that’s right… Rhee demands not just a hotel room, but a “VIP hotel suite” at a hotel approved by her, as well as a towncar with a chauffer to drive her around???!!!
Come one. Be fair. Don’t beat up on Rhee because of this. You need all that if you’re going to be “putting students first.”
Item 6 is telling. Michelle or her agent crosses out the following:
——————————————————————
(CROSSED OUT WITH A PEN)
“6. RESPONSIBILITY for EVENT-RELATED TAXES. Purchase agrees to pay any and all local, State, and/or Federal rental, amusement, sales or other taxes as required by law.”
——————————————————————
Next to the crossing out, Michelle or her agent scrawls,
“TAX EXEMPT”…
… as Students First is a non-profit organization.
Awww, that’s too bad. That money would have gone to the state’s general fund for education, as Ohio schools are hurting for cash right now.
Item 9 is interesting:
——————————————————————
“9. ARTIST’S MERCHANDISING RIGHTS. Artist shall have the right, but not the obligation, to sell souvenir programs and other merchandising items on the premises on the place of the presentation without participation by the Purchaser, subject to local venue’s contract requirements, if any, of which the Artist is notified in writing.”
——————————————————————
(INSERT JOKE HERE… it’s too easy… i.e. Michelle Rhee T-shirts, action figures, etc.)
There’s also a pay-or-play clause, which means that if the event is cancelled for any reason, you have to pay Michelle her $35K anyway.
Reading this I feel like I’m watching a final scene of “THE WOLF OF WALL STREET”, where the slimebucket and convicted Wall Street felon Jordan Belfort now makes a cushy living as a “motivational speaker.”
God save us all!
This kind of rhetoric from Ms. Campbell, makes us think what is the real motive behind her statements.