The Daily Beast published a piece by former CNN host Campbell Brown on a controversial California education trial without disclosing Brown's ties to anti-teachers union groups.

Earlier this year, lawyers spent “more than two months" in state court arguing the Vergara v. California trial, a case which The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss called a “deeply misguided lawsuit” that “is ostensibly about one thing -- protecting students -- but is really about attacking teachers unions and the due process rights for teachers.” On May 29, The Daily Beast ran a piece by Brown titled, “Vergara v. California: The Most Important Court Case You've Never Heard Of,” which asserted that the trial “is about equity” because it “takes aim at laws that go directly to the heart of a good education”:

Vergara v. California takes aim at laws that go directly to the heart of a good education: the ability to have, keep, and respect good teachers and dismiss utterly failing ones. Specifically, the suit challenges California laws that create three sets of problems, all of them undermining a school's ability to act in the best interest of students.

What Brown doesn't bother to mention and what The Daily Beast neglects to include in the post is that Brown has multiple conflicts of interest when it comes to matters of education, especially teachers. Brown's husband Dan Senor sits on the board of StudentsFirstNY, a group that actively opposes teachers unions and tenure. In addition, Brown launched a venture last year called the Parents' Transparency Project (PTP), a purported “watchdog group” that Mother Jones' Andy Kroll took a closer look at in October 2013:

Shortly after it was launched in June, PTP trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual misconduct. When several Democratic candidates declined, perhaps fearing they'd upset organized labor, PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack ad questioning whether six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and Anthony Weiner, had “the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions.”

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Another consulting firm working with Brown's group is Tusk Strategies, which helped launch Rhee's StudentsFirst. Advertising disclosure forms filed by PTP list Tusk's phone number, and a copy of PTP's sexual-misconduct pledge--since scrubbed from its website--identified its author as a Tusk employee. (Tusk and Revolution declined to comment. Brown referred all questions to her PR firm--the same one used by StudentsFirst.)

The New York Daily News also reported that Brown recently launched a website to “influence the direction of [New York City's] ongoing contract talks with the teachers union.”

Vergara v. California has significant implications for the future of teaching in the state. LA Weekly referred to the case as the “Vergara Time Bomb,” asking if “a judge [will] tear down California teacher protection laws,” while Daily Kos concluded that “The Vergara lawsuit has nothing to do with a good education for the disadvantaged, and has everything to do with destroying the power of unions. And if it succeeds, it could set a very dangerous precedent across the nation.”

The Wall Street Journal already has a documented disclosure problem when it comes to Campbell Brown, and it appears The Daily Beast is following suit.