By Juana Summers | NPR Education
“Celebrities are becoming a prominent fixture in the debate over K-12 education.
This week Whoopi Goldberg used her platform on ABC’s The View to speak out against teacher tenure.
“To me, bad teachers don’t do anybody any good. So the union needs to recognize that parents are not going to stand for it anymore,” she said.
Goldberg followed up with a YouTube video, responding to the backlash she’d received after making those statements. Her mother, she notes in the video, was a teacher, and Goldberg describes herself as “all about teachers.”
“I like great teachers. I don’t like bad teachers, so I don’t think bad teachers should be given the gift of teaching forever — badly,” she says.
Goldberg follows Campbell Brown, the former CNN anchor, into the tenure debate ignited by the California lawsuit. David Boies, the high profile trial lawyer known for his role in the legal challenge that overturned California’s gay marriage ban, also recently joined Brown’s group, the Partnership for Education Justice.”