Campbell Brown used to be an anchor at CNN. Campbell Brown is now married to Dan Senor, the former official prevaricator for the Avignon Presidency's excellent Mesopotamian adventure and a mysteriously popular television commentator on events far out of his depth. Campbell Brown also has taken it upon herself to be the latest rich and (semi-) famous person to parachute in and destroy the idea of public education. (And when the history of the Obama Administration is written, its willingness to go along with charter-school grifters at the behest of Arne Duncan is going to be a very big debit on the ledger.) Campbell Brown would like the Democratic candidates to come to an event she's having and debate about education. So far, as Peter Greene reports via Diane Ravitch's most excellent blog, the Democratic candidates have told Campbell Brown that, sorry, we all have unbreakable oral surgery appointments that night. Brown blames the teachers unions, which is not a surprise. She blames a teachers union every time a cloud passes in front of the sun.

Brown and some other reformster pilot fish will gladly claim they've been put upon by the union, because that makes them important. It's an old and venerable trick—hell, if I could get Campbell Brown to attack me in print, my bloggy street cred would go way up—but it doesn't always work. And to pretend that the Democratic party, which just fell all over itself lionizing the departing and union un-loved Arne Duncan—well, that party hasn't shown all that much concern about upsetting the teachers unions. At best, Brown is just a victim of the old internet adage "Don't Feed the Trolls." But it's just as likely that her Iowa shindig failed because she's just not that important or relevant.

As my old Irish gran' would say, who the hell is she when she's at home?

By the way, John King, your new Secretary of Education, has a fine track record of getting results and an interesting method of achieving them—kick out any student who might blow up the data set and turn the ones who stay into extras in a Pink Floyd video.

I've visited this school, and I noticed that children are not allowed to talk in the hall, and they get punished for the most minor infraction. And when I talked with John King afterwards, I said, "I've never seen a school that serves affluent children where they're not allowed to talk in the hall." And he said, "Well, that might be true, but this is the model that works for us, we've found that this is the model that our kids need."

So I asked him, "Are you preparing these kids to be leaders or followers? Because leaders get to talk in the hall. They get to talk over lunch, they get to go to the bathroom, and people can trust them. They don't need surveillance and police officers in the bathroom." And he looked at me like I was talking Latin, because his mindset is that these children couldn't do that.

Tiny automatons with good test scores. This is not what Horace Mann had in mind.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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