Jonathan Pelto, a close observer of politics and education in Connecticut, says that State Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor must go.

He is the leader of the privatization movement in the state, more devoted to charters than to public schools, which most children attend.

Pryor’s management of the Connecticut Department of Education has become the personification of what happens when arrogance, elitism and corporate driven interests replace a commitment to honesty, transparency and a commitment to doing what is right for the people public officials have a sworn duty to serve.

From the moment Stefan Pryor arrived in Connecticut, the Malloy administration’s education policy has been consistently designed to destroy local control, belittle and demean teachers, reduce parental involvement, undermine our public schools and divert scarce public resources to out-of-state consultants and carpetbagging staff. Pryor’s tenure has been dedicated to a preoccupation with turning our schools into little more than standardized testing factories.

Corporate reformers in Connecticut cynically manipulate rhetoric about the achievement gap to destroy public confidence in public education, ignoring the fact that Connecticut has one of the best school systems in the nation. The issue in Connecticut is and must be equity, not the destruction of public education.