Clueless Campbell Brown Lacks Common Sense.

In the New York Post today the clueless Campbell Brown wrote an article called A 'common sense' NYC teachers contract.  In the article she recommended what changes should be made in the next teachers contract being negotiated with the De Blasio administration.  Of course, she's still on the kick that teachers accused of sexual misconduct should be terminated by the Chancellor even when the independent arbitrator, who are selected by both sides, when presented with the actual evidence or lack thereof found no sexual misconduct.

Interestingly, Campbell Brown now suddenly demands that parents and students have input into the process.  Funny, when Michael Bloomberg was Mayor and excluded parent and student input, Ms. Brown never bothered to include that in her demands.  I wonder why the change of heart? Furthermore, Ms. Brown wants ATRs to have a time limit while failing to identify the real problem the "fair student funding" that forces principals to hire the "cheapest" and not the "best teachers" for their students. Moreover, Ms. Brown wants "merit pay" and eliminate seniority and education as a factor to determine salary level.  Finally, Ms. Brown wants teachers to be available 24 hours a day for parent correspondence, as if we teachers don't have families and obligations of our own.Her ideology seems to interfer with the facts but that's nothing new when it comes to the clueless Campbell Brown.

The bottom line is that Campbell Brown's 'common sense' contract lacks "common sense" since she ignores the root cause of the issues and her ideological bent is showing by first ignoring Mayor Michael Bloomberg's exclusion of parent input only to demand it now that Bill de Blasio is Mayor.  To me Campbell Brown is clueless, a hypocrite, and most importantly, an ideologue that ignores the facts just to get her warped point of view some attention.

Note:  As I predicted, Leslie Brody of the Wall Street Journal conveniently ignored my letter to her and failed to mention the role the DOE budgeting practice that resulted in the formation and maintenance of the ATR pool.  In no place in her article did she mention the "fair student funding" that required principals to hire the "cheapest" and not the "best teachers" for their students.  To me her failure to mention this shows that she is a corporate education reformer since these groups must  ignore this issue to demonize veteran teachers.   While her article didn't call the ATRs "unwanted or bad teachers".  Her failure to address the DOE budgeting issue was a "fatal flaw" and shows that she either doesn't understand the process or refused to write about it since it wasn't convenient to what she was telling the public.  In either case, Leslie Brody did a poor job explaining the problem.

Michael Mulgrew was quoted in the article that three quaters of the ATRs are offered positions.  However, he was being disingenuous since approximately 5% of them are actually appointed to a permanent position the rest are covering long-term leave replacements or "provisional hires" who will be dumped back into the ATR pool at year's end.