Who’s Afraid of Campbell Brown?

But don’t let this modest arrangement fool you: Brown’s new endeavor is all about kickstarting her ambitious plans to reshape the education debate in America. In June, she launched the Seventy Four, an online news agency with a staff of 14 dedicated to covering education reform. The name refers to the 74 million Americans under age 18 who stand to benefit from better schools. So far, the amount and breadth of content produced by the site is impressive. In addition to reporting on federal policy, the site has done lots of in-depth coverage of controversies and developments in local school districts, interviews with prominent education figures across the political spectrum, and investigations of corporate interests involved in education. And should the abundance of educational failures get you down, there are plenty of heartwarming and inspiring success stories about students’ achievements and public schools that succeed in spite of the odds. 

By covering education all day every day, Brown hopes to foster a sense of urgency about improving American schools. Brown has promised that the site won’t shy away from advocacy and opinion—which it labels “opinion”—but at the same time she insists that her mission is not political. “My whole point about school reform is it’s not partisan. It’s not,” she says. “It’s a moral issue.”

The trouble is, the last thing America’s teachers’ unions want is real reform, and they certainly don’t want Campbell Brown leading the charge. Far from making education a moral issue, they’re counting on it remaining a partisan one. 

In August, Brown organized an education reform forum in New Hampshire with six contenders for the GOP presidential nomination. It was a wide-ranging and informative discussion in a primary season where substantive policy discussions have been largely, uh, trumped. Brown was all set to hold a similar event with Democrats in Iowa on October 22 that was to have been cosponsored by the Des Moines Register. But the order came down from on high that Democrats were not to participate, and the forum was called off. 

“What happened here is very clear: The teachers’ unions have gotten to these candidates,” Brown told Politico. “All we asked was that these candidates explain their vision for public education and how we address the inequality that leaves so many poor children behind. .  .  . President Obama certainly never cowered to the unions.” 

In assessing just how much control teachers’ unions exert over Democrats, Brown was overgenerous to Obama. One of his first major acts as president was to appease unions by killing off the District of Columbia’s successful school choice program, which benefited poor black kids almost exclusively. (The Republican Congress later reinstated the program.) On the other hand, Obama hasn’t been completely hostile to education reform. He has backed charter schools and merit pay for teachers—that is, paying teachers based on their performance as opposed to union metrics unrelated to performance such as seniority. But even hugely popular reforms like these still face resistance from unions. 

Flawed as it is, Obama’s record still contrasts favorably with those of previous Democratic standard-bearers. Campaigning for president in 2004, John Kerry came out for merit pay. Soon after, a leaked memo from National Education Association (NEA) president Reg Weaver explained he had met with Kerry to discuss supporting merit pay and confidently assured union members that the Democratic nominee “would not do so in the future.” 

Since then, teachers’ unions have remained among the Democratic party’s most influential and energetic activists. In 2012, 16 percent of the delegates to the Democratic convention were teachers’ union members, and it’s hard to imagine things being different in 2016. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton this summer, betraying a promise to hold off until a public meeting and angering the rank and file’s many Bernie Sanders supporters. But it’s safe to say that whoever the Democratic nominee is, teachers’ unions will largely be able to dictate the education agenda. 

Since all meaningful education reforms hinge on greater accountability and erosion of the ironclad union protections that keep bad, even criminal, teachers in classrooms, the union agenda is preserving the status quo. As Campbell Brown recently found out, education reform remains an issue that the teachers’ unions are genuinely afraid to discuss in front of voters. 

And that gets Brown worked up. “I don’t understand how it’s not a part of the conversation!” she says. “I just heard a debate the other night between a prominent lawmaker and a politician about how Democrats were teaming up with the Koch brothers to work on criminal justice reform. So apparently it’s safer, if you’re a Democrat, to team up with the Koch brothers to reform criminal justice than it is to take on the teachers’ unions.” Her exasperation is more than justified when you consider that study after study has linked criminal activity to a lack of educational attainment. “Criminal justice reform is the end of the problem, not the beginning,” she says. “Why wouldn’t you work on education reform? I mean, they are deciding how many prison cells to build based on whether schools are succeeding.”

Given that teachers’ unions are used to making some of the most powerful politicians in the country dance on a string, they’re not happy about the emergence of Campbell Brown as a politically influential voice in education reform. She’s well-connected, independent, and has deep pockets. Perhaps most important, she’s a former A-list broadcast journalist, and her communication skills are superb. Consequently, union leaders don’t just disagree with Brown—they feel intense personal hatred. 

“She is a good media figure because of her looks, but she doesn’t seem to know or understand anything about teaching and why tenure matters,” Diane Ravitch, a prominent education academic and reliable supporter of the unions, told the Washington Post last year. “I know it sounds sexist to say that she is pretty, but that makes her telegenic, even if what she has to say is total nonsense.” 

If this sounds sexist, that’s because it is. But such patronizing dismissals have not been entirely ineffective—the more liberal elements of the media have gotten the union memo about attacking Brown personally and disingenuously implying she has a hidden agenda because, like nearly every other politically sensitive nonprofit, hers does not disclose all the donors funding her efforts. Salon’s headline was “Campbell Brown’s insidious new lie: Charter schools, dark money and the war on teachers’ unions—and your kids.” Mother Jones, slightly more measured, went with “Who’s Really Behind Campbell Brown’s Sneaky Education Outfit?” Esquire graciously inquired, “Who The Fck Is Campbell Brown?” Another ground for ad hominem attack—AFT president Randi Weingarten is particularly fond of bringing this up—is Brown’s marriage to Dan Senor, a bestselling author, Wall Street figure, and former chief spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in the Bush administration. Unlike her husband, Brown has always steadfastly maintained her political independence, but “Republican” is about the worst slur imaginable in the minds of teachers’ union officials.

What’s going on here is obvious. They attack Brown because actually responding to the substance of her complaints would be far too awkward for unions and their media allies. Since Ravitch brought it up, teacher tenure laws are a good example. In 2013, Brown founded the Partnership for Educational Justice, which has led both legal and PR campaigns to reform New York’s dismissal-protection laws for teachers. Far from spouting “total nonsense,” Brown laid out the problems with New York’s tenure laws in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. In New York, any allegation against a teacher must be first evaluated by an independent investigator. It is then brought before an employment arbitrator, and the teachers’ union has a say in approving the arbitrator. Since the arbitrators are paid $1,400 a day, they have a strong incentive to keep the unions happy. The result is that even sexual misconduct and physical abuse by teachers often result in little more than a slap on the wrist. 

And as bad as this is, firing teachers in New York may be easier than in other parts of the country. In 2010, LA Weekly concluded a five-month investigation into the corrupting influence of absurd teacher tenure laws in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country. The results were astounding. “In the past decade, [L.A. school] officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just 7 of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance—and only 4 were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the 3 others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.” Another 32 teachers were given settlements of $40,000 to $195,000 for the district to be rid of them, and it’s estimated that as many as 1,000 of the district’s teachers are considered “performance cases” by the district. 

Brown not only understands the issues surrounding teacher tenure, she’s got pretty good reasons to be indignant. “If the unions had come to the table and said, ‘This is crazy, there should not be an abusive teacher in the classroom. Period. Let’s figure out how to rework this, how to rewrite this law, how to deal with them, how to deal with dismissal protections in a new, better, smarter way,’ then they would have remained relevant,” she says. “You can’t defend teachers who physically harm or sexually harm children. You can’t. And yet they are. So it destroys their credibility. And they have no sort of standing to have any conversation about what the future of public education looks like, when all they’re trying to do is hold the line.” 

Unions aren’t just good at holding the line, they’re also good at cowing their critics. Last year, Time magazine ran a cover story headlined “Rotten Apples: It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires may have found a way to change that.” Teachers’ unions organized a petition against Time that garnered over 100,000 signatures, and the magazine subsequently published pages and pages of responses to the article from Randi Weingarten and numerous other union sympathizers. It’s hard to imagine any other interest group in America getting a major publication to bend over backwards like this. 

Brown, on the other hand, isn’t much bothered by personal attacks and gives as good as she gets. “These people are from another era. I wish there was someone on the other side who was thoughtful, who I could engage with, who seems to be genuinely committed to progress. That would be fantastic to have a real debate,” she says. “But when this is the opposition, I am amazed we have not won already. Good God. It tells you everything you want to know about the unions and where they are headed.”

Ultimately, the problem for union spokesmen such as Weingarten and Ravitch is not that they have to contend with refuting some telegenic idiot every time the Washington Post calls them for the union point of view. Brown is eager to publicly debate education reform, but they’re afraid of engaging her. Given the opportunity, she’s going to clean their clocks. And, yes, she’s going to look good doing it. 

Despite a vigorous campaign to tar Brown with her husband’s politics, she is no right-wing firebrand. Only seen in the funhouse mirror of union politics is she a radical, or even a person who comes at education from a political rather than a pragmatic standpoint. On Common Core standards—the plan for states to voluntarily adopt uniform education curricula and accountability measures across the country—for instance, she’s unlikely to satisfy the Republican base. Opposition to Common Core among the conservative grassroots is so fierce there’s even been talk about coordinating a campaign to get state referenda on Common Core on the 2016 ballot in the hope it would drive Republican turnout in the presidential race.  

Brown’s thoughts on Common Core are uncharacteristically tepid. She freely admits there are problems with the initiative and that she’s still thinking through the issue. But she’s also bothered by the hypocrisy of some prominent conservative politicians—particularly governors Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie—who helped launch Common Core and sold it as an important new accountability tool, only to turn their backs on it once they realized it was going to be a liability in GOP presidential primaries. 

The result of politicians’ demagoguing Common Core is that voters are confused. “Whenever anyone says, ‘Are you for or against Common Core?’ the first thing I ask them is, ‘What do you think Common Core is?’ ” Brown says. “Because I get a different answer from everyone I ask. For some people it actually is a set of standards that all states are supposed to abide by. But for some people it really is about testing.” 

A lot of parents are worried that Common Core will exacerbate overtesting. Congress is currently overhauling the Bush administration’s landmark No Child Left Behind law. There’s bipartisan agreement that the way the law attaches education funding to student test scores has created some perverse incentives, and there’s concern that Common Core’s accountability measures could do more of the same. Earlier this year, teachers and administrators in Atlanta got prison time for their role in a massive cheating scandal to dodge No Child Left Behind’s accountability provisions. And parents and teachers alike have complained that schools spend far too much time preparing kids for federally mandated tests, as opposed to traditional pedagogy. 

Brown acknowledges the tests are written poorly. “And on top of that, as teacher evaluations became linked to test scores in different states, there was a big push by the unions to add additional tests,” Brown notes, because unions want to ensure one bad test result doesn’t impact a teacher disproportionately. The result? “In some school districts, literally, they are taking six or seven tests a year. That’s insane,” she says. 

At the same time, testing is key to most reform efforts. Brown is understandably worried that testing will become so despised as to undermine future attempts to strengthen accountability in the system. Among the stellar reporting the Seventy Four has done is its coverage of the pitched battle in the Montclair, New Jersey, school district over the state’s new standardized test. Some parents and education officials favored requiring the test, while other parents wanted their children to be allowed to opt-out. The opt-out campaign succeeded in getting nearly 50 percent of the parents of Montclair’s 6,700 students to refuse testing. But the Seventy Four’s reporting showed persuasively that the opposition to accountability measures in Montclair was in no small part being manipulated by “secretive operatives, education insiders,” and, yes, the teachers’ union.

“If there was one test that was well designed—that wasn’t just some dumb multiple-choice thing, that actually challenged your kid’s critical thinking, that you could then measure how they’re doing .  .  . I would find that useful,” says Brown. “I think it’s especially useful in low-income communities where the schools aren’t as good, where social promotion happens a lot, and where, if I’m a mother in that community—and I have a lot of friends who are mothers in those communities—I need that test, because that school is telling me everything’s fine. And I’m worried to death about my kid, because he has basically two paths to choose from, actually getting an education and graduating or the street. So for my kid, that test is essential.” 

The dilemma with testing, then, is that designing a test that actually challenges kids’ critical thinking isn’t easy and, worse, it opens a political can of worms. Increasingly, imposing one-size-fits-all federal mandates that benefit at-risk urban students tends to present counterproductive bureaucratic burdens for better-performing suburban and rural school districts. And there’s a compelling correlation over the last 40 years: The further America has moved from local control of education, the worse academic performance has become.

Creating national education benchmarks as a basis for comparison means you need students in very different communities to learn the same things. If education is fundamentally a “moral issue,” as Brown says, the content of the curriculum is unavoidably an ideological issue as well. 

It’s one thing when people in your community are instructing your kids. At least by virtue of proximity, they’re likely to be sensitive to the predominant local religious and political sympathies. It’s quite another when national union bosses, academics, and a cartel of corporate testing companies with Washington lobbyists—such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson—get to decide what your child is taught. 

If you followed last year’s controversy over revisions to the AP history guidelines, where, in the words of the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Stanley Kurtz, officials tried to “substitut[e] a more ‘transnational’ narrative for the traditional account” of U.S. history, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the allied interests deciding national education standards are anti-American. If politicians are already reluctant to discuss education, just wait until uniform federal standards mean that what science textbook your child is required to use becomes an issue in the presidential campaign. 

Many parents see what is going on and don’t just want to opt-out of onerous mandates, they want out of the public school system altogether. Nationally, the percentage of school children enrolled in private schools is 10 percent and declining, but the modest declines in recent years don’t necessarily mean public schools are more attractive to parents. The number of homeschooled kids has more than doubled since 1999 to 1.77 million. Kids in charter schools may technically be enrolled in public schools, but the rapid growth of charters is another reflection of discontent with traditional public schooling.  

And when you look at who’s enrolled in private schools, you see how the failure of public schools exacerbates inequality. Liberals are fond of caricaturing those who disdain public education as backward religious fundamentalists, but wealth is actually the likeliest marker for sending kids to private school. Those who have the means are much more inclined to send their kids to private school. Fourteen percent of families with a household income between $100,000 and $200,000 choose private school. For households that earn more than $200,000 it’s 26 percent. And, tellingly, the highest private school enrollment in the country is in Washington, D.C., where 21 percent of students are in private schools, and “private school families’ income is more than three times that of public school families, on average,” according to the Washington Post. Interestingly, the two most heavily Republican states, Wyoming and Utah, have the highest levels of public school enrollment, 93 percent. 

As to what it actually costs to educate a student, there often is little disparity between public and private schools. Last year, the AFT’s Weingarten bemoaned “the greatest challenges facing our public schools: underfunding and inequity.” More often than not, the persistently repeated claim that schools are underfunded is indefensible. 

In 2011, District of Columbia schools had the worst graduation rate in the nation and the highest per pupil spending, even under the interpretation of 2010 census data most favorable to the District. Different sources use different methods to calculate per pupil spending, placing the figure for D.C. either as low as $18,667 or as high as $29,409. For comparison, Sidwell Friends—some say Washington’s most prestigious private school, attended by Sasha and Malia Obama, following in the footsteps of Chelsea Clinton—tuition is around $35,000 a year. And Sidwell Friends has so much extra cash lying around it took out an ad last year looking to pay a barista $11.50 an hour to make the students lattes and smoothies. 

Sidwell Friends is also one of the more expensive private schools in Washington. At St. Augustine, a Catholic school, tuition starts at $5,300. Taxpayers could give poor students a solid private school education for considerably less than is being spent by the D.C.’s public schools. 

The list of reasons why public education is so expensive is as lengthy as it is dispiriting, but if Weingarten wants to complain about schools being underfunded, unions are in a position to do something about it. A 2011 study by the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation found that, across the country, public school teachers were being paid $120 billion over market value; among the study’s conclusions were that public school teachers make more than private school teachers and that, on average, people who leave their occupations to teach in public schools get a 9 percent increase in pay. In addition to union negotiators breaking municipal budgets, union waste and corruption remain rampant. In 2002, it came to light that the Washington Teachers’ Union president, treasurer, and a handful of other D.C. AFT leaders had embezzled $5 million. A federal judge lambasted the national AFT for allowing this to happen, saying, “It seems everyone in a responsible position fell asleep at the switch.” 

Here’s where Campbell Brown makes a salient point about the hullabaloo surrounding sweeping national initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core. At the end of the day, fixing a system this big, expensive, and dysfunctional may not be possible from within. If the goal is improving educational opportunities, Americans would be better served if politicians and angry voters channeled the energy that now goes into fighting Common Core and testing regimes into expanding school choice. 

“Do I want the federal government writing a curriculum for our schools? No! To me, that debate is a sideshow if you believe in school choice,” she says. “Just using New York as an example, bringing a good school to neighborhoods that, before charters arrived, really didn’t have a choice has really put pressure on the system overall and has changed the view of a lot of our politicians. You can’t deny what’s happened. And you can’t be a progressive and oppose better educational choices for low-income people. You can’t! I don’t understand how you can do that. There’s no justification for it other than pure politics, and that’s just unacceptable.”

If it were up to the Obama administration and teachers’ unions, only the rich would have a choice of where to send their kids to school. On November 10, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Justice Department in its lawsuit to shut down the Louisiana Scholarship Program, which has been operating successfully for seven years and gives a voucher worth around $5,500 to low-income families to help pay for private schooling. 

The Justice Department claimed the program was increasing segregation, but the only significant study, done by the University of Arkansas, found that student transfers resulting from the program “overwhelmingly improve integration.” The Fifth Circuit called the Justice Department’s rationale “disingenuous” and accused the Obama administration of trying to impose “a vast and intrusive reporting regime .  .  . without any finding of unconstitutional conduct.”

Unfortunately, there are reasons to be skeptical of what Campbell Brown is likely to accomplish that go well beyond politics. Education reform battlefields are littered with the failures of prominent and well-funded initiatives. The Gates Foundation has invested billions in improving schools, and last fall Microsoft founder Bill Gates gave a speech about the result of his efforts. Gates “used the word ‘naïve’ four times in describing the expectations he and his foundation had for the initiative,” is how the Washington Post summarized his remarks. At least Gates has had some success at getting something done, though his support for Common Core will hardly endear him to much of the country.  

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has also dabbled in education reform, and describing his particular initiative as naïve would be an understatement. In 2010, Zuckerberg went on Oprah with New Jersey governor Chris Christie and Senator Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, and announced he was donating $100 million to help the poorly performing Newark schools become “a symbol of educational excellence for the whole nation.” Earlier this year, a new book by Dale Russakoff, The Prize—which grew out of a series of ballyhooed New Yorker articles—chronicled what happened in Newark in the ensuing five years. The book’s conclusion? Zuckerberg’s generosity has “enriched seemingly everyone, except for Newark’s children.” 

But maybe the most head-scratching entry in the education reform sweepstakes is courtesy of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. The Sixth Sense director, who’d been involved in charitable efforts to help underprivileged students in his hometown of Philadelphia, traveled all over the country studying school reform in an attempt to spend his Hollywood money more wisely. Shyamalan ultimately wrote his own book: I Got Schooled: The Unlikely Story of How a Moonlighting Movie Maker Learned the Five Keys to Closing America’s Education Gap. Shyamalan is well-intentioned and frequently correct in his conclusions. But the neo-Hitchcockian auteur has a fondness for twist endings, so surely he can appreciate the irony when it’s pointed out that his book spends a lot of time discussing the supposedly impressive educational strides being made by Newark schools.

How can Campbell Brown succeed where so many expensive, high-profile attempts at education reform have fallen flat? Well, a little self-awareness goes a long way. Campbell Brown understands the roadblocks thrown in front of all of the wealthy dilettantes who came before her, and she intends to defy expectations. For one thing, far from trading on her celebrity, she’d already said goodbye to her high-flying career in broadcast journalism years before starting the Partnership for Educational Justice and the Seventy Four. Her interest in education reform was sparked by chance. 

“I became a mother, and it was a personal experience with a close friend of mine,” she says, that caused her to fall down the education-reform rabbit hole. “Obviously, with the opportunities in my life, I could send my kids wherever I wanted to, but a close friend who had no money and two sons was .  .  . zoned for a failing school, and she felt so much heartbreak and desperation trying to figure out what she was going to do about it.” 

Amusingly, Brown’s own story wouldn’t exactly make her your role model for educational attainment. In high school, she was expelled from a girls’ boarding school for partying. After two years at Louisiana State University, she transferred to Regis University in Denver to finish college. Her 2006 New York Times wedding announcement notes that she “spent her post-college years as a Colorado ski bum.” She then taught English in Prague back in the ’90s, when floating around post-Communist Europe was a voguish pastime for twenty-somethings. She took her time before settling on a career in TV, and while she paid her dues working at local affiliates in the Midwest, her rise to the top ranks of network news happened relatively quickly.  

The fact that Brown is at once an overachiever and someone who defies the Type A stereotypes is a big part of her appeal. Whether on camera or in person, she’s unpretentious and relaxed, but as teachers’ unions have discovered, it’s a mistake to underestimate her. For one thing, Brown is personally invested in a way that other would-be reformers have not been. Where the role of Gates and Zuckerberg was primarily to write large checks, Brown is in the Seventy Four’s ad hoc office every day helping shape a never-ending stream of education stories. And where technologists tend to see a failing education system as a problem reasonable people can “solve,” Brown appreciates the need to persuade people, knowing full well she might have to both fight the educational establishment and work with it. 

“There has long been the view, ‘If I just present the data, it’s so clearly in my favor, that people will come around,’ ” she says. “It’s a natural evolution that the reform movement is now saying, ‘Oh, well, the data alone is not going to win people over.’ .  .  . How do we, then, in order to make more progress, figure out how to tell the story better and engage in a debate that’s not just with each other, that’s with a much broader audience?”

For a former journalist, figuring out how to tell the story of education reform had an obvious solution. Still, Brown is sensitive to the fact that some might perceive what she’s doing as more advocacy than journalism. “Tell me a news site that doesn’t take a position. Name one. I’m just admitting it! I’m saying that I spent my life as a journalist and I have always had strong opinions about things, so isn’t it better for my readers or my viewers to know what my opinions are going in? Don’t you think that would help them trust me more?” she says. “I think the idea that we pretend to be objective when none of us is has hurt our credibility. I mean, give me a break. Maybe it’s because they are accustomed to seeing me in my previous role, but if they think I don’t have opinions they’re crazy.” 

Brown’s thoughts on journalistic delusions are refreshing, especially coming from someone who used to share an anchor chair at NBC with Brian Williams. Nonetheless, she’s worked hard to set high standards at the Seventy Four, and while the site isn’t afraid to advocate, it also frequently publishes opposing views. Given how poorly covered education is, Brown sees a real opportunity to influence the debate.

“You need a bigger platform if you want to bring everyone into the conversation. That’s the idea behind [the Seventy Four]. Its time has come,” she says. “I know a lot of people get down about ‘Why haven’t we made more progress?’ but I don’t feel that way. We’re going to make giant leaps and bounds in the near future.”

As infectious as this optimism might be, it’s understandable that not everyone shares it. What all can agree, though, is that if we need a national conversation about the future of America’s schools, it’s going to be a lot more honest—and a lot more lively—if Campbell Brown is the one leading it. 

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.