Tony Bennett, once the State Commissioner of Education in Indiana, then defeated by Glenda Ritz in 2012, then appointed as State Commissioner of Florida, then resigned after news broke that the state grades were manipulated to favor a charter school owned by one of Bennett’s major campaign contributors. After the scores were adjusted, the charter’s grade miraculously rose from a C to an A.
Bennett was leader of Jeb Bush’s “Chiefs for Change” and an outspoken advocate for the Common Core.
Now there is more scandal in the wake of Bennett’s Indiana tenure in office. One of his top aides has been questioned about his dealings with Cisco, for whom he worked before and after he worked for Tony Bennett.
AP reporter Tom LoBianco, who broke the original story about Tony Bennett and grade-rigging, wrote:
“A former top Indiana education official’s role in the sale of $1.7 million worth of videoconferencing equipment to the state by Cisco Systems Inc., where he worked before and after holding that state position, has added to calls to strengthen Indiana’s ethics laws amid a recent spate of boundary-pushing incidents.
“Todd Huston left his Department of Education job as chief of staff to former Indiana Schools Superintendent Tony Bennett in 2010 for a position with Cisco, where he had previously worked. He was involved in the 2012 sale of a new TelePresence videoconferencing system to the DOE that officials later determined was a waste of taxpayer money.
“Although Huston says he was careful to keep his work for the state and for Cisco separate over the years, good-governance watchdogs say his role in the sale violated the spirit of Indiana’s ethics rules designed to stop state employees from cashing in on their public experience in the private sector.”
More on Todd Huston: He now works for the College Board, whose CEO is David Coleman, architect of the Common Core standards:
https://www.collegeboard.org/about/leadership/todd-huston
Todd Huston
Senior Vice President, State and District Partners
Todd plays an integral role in the College Board’s mission to meet the needs of K–12 and higher education clients, as well as the needs of state governments. He directs key aspects of College Board strategy, as influenced and determined by external market trends, policy and standards.
Todd’s extensive experience in education includes serving as a local school board member, a member of the Indiana State Board of Education and as the chief of staff for the Indiana Department of Education. Most recently, Todd was the strategic business development manager at Cisco Systems, where he helped higher education and K–12 customers transform their operations and student experience with new technologies.
Todd earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Indiana University and is the father of two.
P.S. Todd Huston is an elected member of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Question: How many jobs can one man hold?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Left out is one of the most damaging things about Todd Huston – he is now an elected member of the Indiana House of Representatives representing HD37 and sits on the Education and Ways and Means committees. He is like the unwelcome house guest that will not leave and has his foot wedged in the door to continue to implement Bennett’s and the rest of the reform crowd’s policies.
Just sickening. Bennett was ethically challenged from the start. At first he was too slick to pin down, but now the evidence is coming out about his backstairs jobs.
Great word to describe Tony Bennett
..”slick.”
Another scamming “reformer” who was a Poli Sci major. What a gross misnomer, “Political Science” is. If there is science in politics, beyond survey research (which is usually conducted by sociologists), it escapes me. That field should be renamed “Political Profiteering.”
When in the hell is Indiana going to come to their senses and get this state out of the corrupt hands of republicans? Tony Bennett and his minions still have their dirty hands in the lives of our public education students..even though he has been gone for two years. He still plays a role..that should put up a huge red flag to every Indiana voter with any common sense. I am a resident of this state and I am getting tired of reading all of these horror stories about our public school system and it’s kids being bought and sold. ENOUGH!
I wonder who’s dumber–the snake-handling, backwoods yokels in the Indiana statehouse or the corn-gnashing hicks who elected them. When I see this kind of foolishness going on in my home state, I’m not proud to be a resident of Indiana. No wonder people treat us as fly-over territory.
It used to be that Hoosiers represented the moderate, modest middle ground: temperate in speech, modest in manners, thoughtful in deliberation, with sophisticated thinking tempered by good, old-fashioned common sense. No longer….