Jonathan Pelto asks whether the Connecticut House of Representatives will approve the nomination of a charter school executive to the State Board of Education.
Governor Dannell Malloy nominated Andrea Comer, the chief operating officer of a charter school to the state board, where she will exercise influence over issues that directly affect her organization, as well as the continued expansion of charter schools in that state.
Malloy is mad about charter schools. He chose a charter school founder, Stefan Pryor, to be his state commissioner of education.
“If Andrea Comer, the Chief Operating Officer of FUSE/Jumoke Inc., finds herself on the State Board of Education, she will certainly be in a “unique” position to directly and indirectly impact her job, her employer and the industry she has worked so hard to represent. Prior to working for FUSE/Jumoke, Inc. she worked for Achievement First, Inc., the even larger charter school management company co-founded by Stefan Pryor.”
Charters in Connecticut that have the best success are known for having very small numbers of English language learners and students with disabilities. Comer’s charter is one of them.
Connecticut has leadership that disdains public education. Privatization is all the rage in the Nutmeg State.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In 2008, I could not have imagined things like this going on in the United States of America. Now in 2013, these things are becoming common place with Politicians looking for campaign contributions.
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No surprise at all. We’ve got one as the State Commissioner of Education already.
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Rumor has it that Malloy is angry at public schools for not meeting his needs when he was a student in Stamford.
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Charter schools always cherry pick parents and students and even then they cannot perform. So when the puppetmasters give orders to the puppet, governor, he jumps or will be wiped out. This is how it rolls now. Read the DOE OIG report. DOE-OIG/A02L0002.
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Some interesting comments about how an essay by Issac Asimov lamenting America’s hatred of intellectuals and its “cult of ignorance” is alive and well with today’s reformers.
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It amazes me the number of people who can tell you the names of all the Kardashian sisters, but who don’t know anything about how their government works. I once read that our dislike of intellectuals goes back to our egalitarian roots, which confuses me since Jefferson, Madison, Paine, etc. were not exactly morons. Without their intellect and their enlightenment, their would be no United Sttes of America.
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I think it goes back much farther. If you’re interested in this aspect of American history, I recommend Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which you can find easily on Amazon. Hofstadter’s history puts America’s strong religious–especially charismatic and fundamentalist religious–at the center of our cultural distrust and outright hatred of intellectualism. The Founders were one several brief episodes when the culture was more tolerant and encouraging of intellectualism.
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