What's Campbell Brown Doing Smearing Teachers All Over the Media?

By Sarah Jaffe

Unfortunately, teacher-union-bashing has become one of the few areas in which many Democrats seem to agree with Republicans—and where people with no experience in the classroom declare themselves experts and pontificate to anyone who will listen about how if we could just fire those bad teachers, everything would be fine.

The latest self-proclaimed expert to grace the pages of the national media -- in this case Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal [3] -- is Campbell Brown, former CNN and NBC anchor and reporter. Brown, whose expertise appears to be that she testified in front of Governor Cuomo's Education Reform Commission, doesn't note that she has a personal connection to an organization that spends its time doing just that--demonizing teachers. She painted what appears to be a horrific tale of sexual predators let loose in public schools to prey on our children, and blames the processes that exist to provide teachers with some sort of job security—processes that unions have fought for over the course of decades—for keeping them there. She then hit Morning Joe, MSNBC's morning program, to make the same argument.