Opinion: Free college for all, and must the ed commish be an educator?

Terry Cowgill lives in Lakeville, blogs at ctdevilsadvocate.com and is news editor of The Berkshire Record in Great Barrington, Mass. Follow him on Twitter @terrycowgill.

Two education initiatives caught my eye recently. The first, a bill that would require the state education commissioner to have significant classroom and school administrative experience, has cleared the House and is headed to the Senate. I’m trying hard to feel reassured but for some reason that’s not happening.

The bill strikes me as an overreaction to the appointment of Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s first commissioner, Stefan Pryor, who was not an educator but a reformer of the system who had co-founded Amistad Academy, a charter school in New Haven.

The state’s education establishment distrusted Pryor from the beginning. For one thing, he did not come from the typical background one would expect of an education leader or bureaucrat. Pryor doesn’t have a doctorate in education; he has both undergraduate and law degrees from Yale. He also took the lead on the proposed changes in the state’s teacher tenure system.

See the complete story at CT News Junkie.