(Campbell Brown) Ex-CNN Anchor Joins Debate vs. Unions Over Teacher Misconduct
In late July, a Twitter user began to post a flurry of messages on what happens to be one of the Bloomberg administration’s newest education campaigns.
“Teachers union must stop protecting those who commit sexual misconduct with children,” read one post on July 29.
“Unions have to be there to support great hardworking teachers. Not ones who sexually harass and endanger our kids,” said another from Aug. 3.
The posts began to draw the attention of Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, who wrote on Twitter, “Union protects against false allegations,” which elicited this comeback:
“Then how do u explain teacher asking child for striptease and not fired?”
The author of these missives was not a mayoral operative or a city education wonk. It was Campbell Brown, the 44-year-old former CNN anchor and mother of two young sons, who from her home in Lower Manhattan had begun to insert herself into an uncomfortable political fight in a conspicuous way.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/education/campbell-brown-joins-debate-over-teachers-unions.html?pagewanted=all
"Teachers' union" is a dirty phrase in current politics given the billion-dollar union-busting industry, the anti-union messages and anti-government resentment being pushed by Fox News and 1000s of talk radio stations nationwide, and even Obama's education secretary backing anti-union measures and an all-too-complaint media including Brown (Brown isn't even a conservative). So in the wake of incidents like what Brown described or the scandal of the pedophile teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles, how can we stop the demonization of teachers' unions? I recently had a facebook argument with a libertarian friend about the role of teachers' unions in covering up allegations of child abuse at Miramonte (in reality it was because the administrators sat on their hands).
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