Jon Pelto has taken the first steps towards running for Governor of Connecticut. He has formed an exploratory committee to determine strategy and a course of action. If you want to help Jon, the information is available in this post.
In a democracy, anyone should be able to run for office, but the process is so cumbersome and expensive that it discourages those like Jon who don’t have access to vast wealth.
Jon is running in large part to demand that the government of Connecticut strengthen and protect the public schools for which it is responsible. His campaign is a protest against Governor Malloy’s favoritism towards charter schools and his antagonism towards the state’s educators. Jon wants a great public school system for all children, not a dual school system of publicly funded schools, one funded and controlled by the people, the other funded by the public but free to choose its students and run by a private, unaccountable board.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder how many underfunded but successful campaigns that harness people’s opposition to Ed Deform it will take before the politicians, who inhabit the Ed Deform echo chamber, get a clue about the strength of the opposition to Ed Deform across the country? Part of the reason why the politicians are so clueless about this is that they have been so successful. They have created a reign of terror as well as a reign of error, and teachers, administrators, and curriculum editors and writers are AFRAID to speak up.
And this is always a problem for totalitarianism–for any of these attempts to implement distant, centralized command and control. Distant, centralized authorities tend to be stupid because they do not draw upon the knowledge and expertise of their communities. They make people afraid to dissent and the lack of dissent reinforces the authoritarian in his or her existing beliefs, however wrong headed those may be.
Distant, centralized authorities are STUPID in addition to being venal and corrupt.
The last thing that the United States needs is a Common Core Curriculum Commissariat and Ministry of Truth. The last thing that it needs is an invariant, mandatory national standards bullet list issued by an unaccountable, self-appointed central committee, written by amateurs and paid for by a few plutocrats who wanted on list to tag their assessments and educational software to.
“There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list.” –Edward Tufte, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint”
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I think it could take as few as one…which would likely spark a number of well-funded campaigns. The Ohio Governor’s race is one that, while the data-driven Republican incumbent is a big favorite, could be interesting. The Democratic challenger is picking up on education policy discontent, and his positions reflect positive signs. I think emails to candidates, especially challengers, are persuasive.
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There are many of these, all around the country. We’re going to see them popping up like tulips in the Noordoostpolder.
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