Campbell Brown

Voters have demonstrated time and again that candidates who buck the teachers' union are rewarded.

Some women are smarter than men, and some aren't. But to suggest to women that they deserve dominance instead of equality is at best a cheap applause line.

When I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste.

Our educational establishment is failing; it is past time for courage, honesty, and action commensurate with the need, particularly here in the United States.

As David Cameron realizes, we do not have time for the tweaks and increments favored by institutions built to resist change.

Education has not traditionally been a large concern in presidential elections, presumably because the president does not run schools.

It is unimaginable that anyone, right or left, can aspire to be president without having thought about this. Every candidate has the stage; the Republicans have used it to fuss unproductively over the Common Core. The Democrats have all but refused to speak.

If Boston charters can be stymied despite their extraordinary success, charters anywhere can be stopped.

Charter opponents often try to delegitimize strong testing results like those in Boston by attributing them to excessive test prep - as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio did recently.

In 'The Founders,' his new book about top charter schools, Richard Whitmire traces both the 'revolution' these schools brought about in many American cities as well as a parallel phenomenon, 'the charter pushback campaigns.'

More and more parents and voters have rejected the teachers' union antiquated, top down, one-size-fits-all approach to education and continue to elect candidates who embrace reform that celebrates students and empowers parents.

Perhaps there is no greater evidence that the teachers' union has swung too far out of the mainstream that they both have been a target of near-constant criticism from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Human faces shouldn't get lost amid the statistics.

While the protection of speech is at the bedrock of our democracy, it's critical as a nation that we exercise our right every day - and that includes embracing and engaging with those we may not agree with.

My favorite stories are about kids who refuse to give up; their homes and schools may have been destroyed; they've probably had to rely on themselves more than a lot of adults do, and they've resisted the many bad alternatives that city life offers to poor teens.

I was born and raised in Louisiana - a small town called Ferriday, north of Baton Rouge.

The protests and pain over the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown had me wondering if we can ever experience the world as others do. For no matter how disputed the circumstances of both cases, many people see what happened in black and white.

Our education system is not preparing young people for the world they will face.

The consequences of substandard teaching go far beyond whether college or a good job is in reach. They affect earning potential, with implications throughout a person's life.

What is happening with automation and globalization, that's not going away.

The president has been more than willing to challenge the National Rifle Association, but that is like a Republican president standing up to labor unions - not a move that risks anything with his core supporters. Mr. Obama could show some real bravery by taking on Hollywood.

As anyone who has recently seen PG-13 movies knows, the level of violence in them has increased to the point of making the Motion Picture Association of America's voluntary rating system meaningless.

Parents should be allowed to choose which cable or satellite channels - sources of the most extreme content - come into their homes.

Mr. Obama is particularly well positioned to challenge Hollywood because of his special relationship with the media world's elites. They might be more likely to heed criticism coming from Mr. Obama than from any other president or member of Congress.

The 8 P.M. hour in the cable news world is currently driven by the indomitable Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Grace, and Keith Olbermann. Shedding my own journalistic skin to try to inhabit the kind of persona that might coexist in that lineup is just impossible for me.

Every education law should be based around the question, 'Is this good for children?' And it's not.

I'm not going to do opinion. That's not who I am.

You're never going to hear me say, 'Well, I've been critical of Obama five times, so now I need to be critical of McCain five times.' That is a false equivalence, and that's what I think is wrong with journalism.

I have had enough of the sexist treatment of Sarah Palin... I call upon the McCain campaign to stop treating Sarah Palin like she is a delicate flower who will wilt at any moment.

Sadly, journalism doesn't always state the obvious.

To assume that someone's views are invariably influenced or shaped by his or her partner is lazy. It is an intellectual crutch we grope for when we do not have an effective counter to someone's argument.

It's the way tenure works, together with dismissal protections that tenured teachers have, that no other public employee has, which makes it almost impossible to remove a grossly ineffective and incompetent teacher or, in some cases, even an abusive teacher.

I'm trying to get my head in the game, think about the questions I wanted to ask, breast milk is flying everywhere - over my notes - and I - how do you 'lean in' at that moment? What is the equivalent of that for Wolf Blitzer or Joe Scarborough?

I'm moderating one of the presidential primary debates right after I've had a baby. I'm sitting in a dirty closet on the floor behind the auditorium where this debate is taking place between Obama, Hillary Clinton, and I'm pumping breast milk... twenty minutes before I'm going on.

I don't think it's fair that we cannot guarantee every child in this country a great education and that, in New York City, in some cases, your child is at risk in some part because of the policies the union endorses.

Put together, what we want is a system that supports, protects, and properly pays good teachers and makes it possible in a responsible and fair way to remove teachers judged to be incompetent or abusive - that's it.

Heartless zealotry, whether from the religious right or from the teachers' union on the left, is always troubling.

We will fiercely challenge those forces within the education establishment who impede innovation in our schools and who protect and defend inequality and institutional failure.

While the rest of the cable news world moved to opinion, CNN allowed me to stay true to my hard-news roots and supported me with a true commitment to old-school journalism.

I'm pretty sure the last time any anchor could honestly ignore ratings was well before I was born.

I knew on the day that I accepted my job at CNN that a ratings victory at 8 P.M. was going to be a formidable challenge. As I have been told over and over, this is the toughest time slot in cable news.

The simple fact is that not enough people want to watch my program, and I owe it to myself and to CNN to get out of the way so that CNN can try something else.

Education never quite gets the attention it deserves in presidential campaigns, but monster flip-flops surely do.

Gay marriage passed in New York because four Republican legislators crossed party lines. They did it in part because they had true bipartisan financial support.

Planned Parenthood has a large target on its back.

When an organization is willing to support only lawmakers who are with it 100 percent of the time, it virtually guarantees that the debate will be bitterly partisan.

Most of Planned Parenthood's work focuses on health care for low-income women: things like screenings for breast cancer and diabetes, and family planning.

My cousin in Louisiana started a small company with a little savings, renovating houses. A single mom, she saved enough to buy a home and provide child care for her son. When the economy went belly up, so did her company. She was forced to sell her home and move in with her parents.

In a situation where it's the child or the adult, I'm going with the child.

Experience is a legitimate issue when John McCain raises it about Obama, and it's also legitimate for us to raise it about Palin.