In Valerie Strauss’s blog “The Answer Sheet” in the “Washington Post,” Professor Alyssa Hadley Dunn subjected Campbell Brown’s statements on the Stephen Colbert show to a fact check. Dunn, who taught high school English, is now an assistant professor of Teacher Education at Michigan State University.

Dunn compares what Brown says to what research shows.

She concludes: “Quite simply: there is no research demonstrating causation between teacher tenure laws and lower rates of student achievement, which is the entire argument behind the lawsuit.”

Mercedes Schneider decided to do something unusual for her birthday. She transcribed Stephen Colbert’s interview of Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor who is leading the battle to take the right to due process (aka a fair hearing) away from teachers. She thinks that doing so will produce a great teacher in every classroom. How will this happen? No one knows.

Here is the transcript.

You know who Campbell Brown is: she is the former CNN anchor who wants to get rid of teacher tenure. She apparently thinks that teachers should be fired if someone in charge wants to fire them

You may not know Mike Mignone. He is a veteran middle-school math teacher in Belleville, New Jersey, and also president of his union.

When the school board awarded a contract for $2 million to install a surveillance system (not a security system) to a relative of a school board member, Mike Mignone blew the whistle on the deal.

JJ wrote:

“As Mignone’s lawyer puts it: in October, he found out; in November, he spoke out; in December, tenure charges were filed against him. Mignone, who had always had excellent reviews, suddenly found out he would be up on charges that included (get ready for this one) answering students’ questions about the surveillance system. According to Mignone, his students asked him questions about whether they were being monitored; he took a few minutes out of class and gave them some honest answers. That, in this board’s and this superintendent’s minds, counts as a fireable offense.”

JJ wrote: “Mignone was suspended without pay. The only reason he wasn’t fired on the spot was that he was entitled to a tenure hearing. Last night, the results of that hearing were announced at the New Jersey Education Association’s annual summer meeting: Mignone was cleared of most changes, reinstated, and has been awarded back pay. I can think of no better example of why teachers need tenure than Mike Mignone. This courageous teacher and labor leader stood up for the rights of students and teachers, all while saving the taxpayers millions of dollars. But the only reason he has a job today is because he had earned the right to a fair hearing — the very definition of tenure.”

JJ hopes that Mike Mignone is invited to debate Campbell Brown on national television.

Jersey jazzman has another great piece about tenure. He writes: “I can only hope that Campbell Brown’s appearance last night on The Colbert Report is typical of what she is going to bring to the debate over school workplace protections. Because if this is the best the anti-tenure side can muster, we teachers will easily win the debate — provided we ever get a chance to participate.” –

Watch the priceless video of Stephen Colbert interviewing Campbell Brown, who is leading a campaign to eliminate teacher tenure in New York. Colbert asks her to reveal her donors. She replies that she won’t do that because the few dozen protestors outside with hand-lettered signs might harass them. She says the protesters are trying to silence her, but of course she is on national television and they are not. She doesn’t look silenced.

JJ writes:

“It’s all about the kids.” As I’ve said before, that is a ridiculous argument against tenure on two levels:

1) Tenure isn’t just good for teachers; it’s good for parents, taxpayers, and students. Tenure allows teachers to be whistleblowers and advocates for children when doing the right thing may be unpopular with school boards and parents. As Colbert pointed out, it allows teachers academic freedom in a time when powerful interests want to teach our children junk science, revisionist history, and prejudiced attitudes.

2) Just because something is good for teachers doesn’t mean it is automatically bad for students. Yes, tenure makes it harder to fire teachers; that’s the point. But no one has ever shown granting tenure impedes a teacher’s effectiveness or makes the teaching corps as a whole less effective.

As I’ve pointed out time and again, tenure has a real economic value for teachers, yet costs taxpayers very little. If you can’t show tenure harms children — and no, the Vergara decision did not show this, which is why it will almost certainly be overturned on appeal — why wouldn’t taxpayers grant it to both protect their interests and minimize the budgetary impact of teacher compensation? Getting rid of tenure is a terrible economic decision for taxpayers.

The idea that anything good for teachers must be bad for students is one of the most pernicious arguments to come from the reformy camp. It’s nothing more than an illogical appeal to emotion, and it tacitly casts teachers as villains when they dare to stand up for themselves. It needs to stop.

– Colbert very wisely makes the connection to school funding (he doesn’t understand how school funding weighting works, but give the man some slack), arguing that a civil rights stance on tenure must logically also support making sure all students have adequate resources. As Bruce Baker has pointed out many times, New York is one of the worst states in the nation when it comes to school funding fairness; states like New Jersey which (until lately) have equity as a goal do much better overall in student achievement.

And here are the questions by JJ that show what utter nonsense Campbell Brown’s campaign is:

“Campbell, a few miles away from New York City are some of the wealthiest and highest-performing school districts in the United States, if not the world. All of these districts have unionized teachers, step-guide contracts, tenure protections, and seniority. If tenure is the cause of bad teaching in poor districts, why do wealthy districts with tenure do so well?

“And if you really believe that the teachers in poor areas are not as good as those in wealthy areas, how will getting rid of job protections help bring in better teacher candidates? Why would anyone want to teach in a city district, subject to far more political interference, when they can decamp for the leafy ‘burbs and avoid that nonsense?”

– See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2014/08/campbell-brown-lame.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+JerseyJazzman+(Jersey+Jazzman)#sthash.spnqBOB2.dpuf

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”