Powers: Left-wing teacher groups launch sexist crusade

The "war on women" isn't just for Republicans. Left-wing organizations in New York City have launched their own misogynist crusade against former CNN anchor turned education advocate Campbell Brown.

Brown is running the Partnership for Educational Justice, which she founded to challenge teacher tenure and other rules that protect underperforming teachers.

For this, she has been on the receiving end of a sexist assault by the American Federation of Teachers and opponents of education reform. AFT President Randi Weingarten took to Twitter to accuse Brown of not being balanced in her approach to school reform because "she's married to Romney adviser Dan Senor."

To Weingarten, women are not people with thoughts of their own. No, they're empty vessels who do their husband's bidding.

In an interview last week, Brown noted to me that in all of the times her husband has expressed his opinion publicly, "never once has anyone asked him how I influence his views on anything."

The teachers union-affiliated Alliance for Quality Education (AQE), and New York Communities for Change, which replaced the now-defunct ACORN, launched a website called "The Real Campbell Brown: Right-Wing. Elitist. Wrong about Public Schools," which depicts Brown as a marionette holding a GOP sign, presumably because her husband is a Republican.

Brown told me that for the decades she worked in journalism, she was a political independent. After leaving the business in 2010, she registered as a Democrat to vote in the New York City primary. She later registered as a Republican for another primary. Today, she's not registered with either party. As for political donations, she told me she has given to five campaigns, all Democrats who were supportive of school reform. These groups and teacher unions know all of this, yet they have chosen to ignore it.

Never mind that Brown has recruited major Democratic talent to work with her, including former Obama staffers Robert Gibbs and Ben LaBolt. The chairman of her organization is David Boies, who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and spearheaded the legal campaign in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage.

There has been no suggestion that these men —none of whom is an education expert — lack the intellect or standing to have an opinion on this topic, whereas Brown has been cast as an interloping bobble head. Education historian Diane Ravitch told The Washington Post of Brown, "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. ... 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."

It's the same "nonsense" that Boies, Gibbs and LaBolt embrace. But, that's OK, they're men.

Kirsten Powers writes weekly for USA TODAY.

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