Superintendent Vitti’s close relationship with Gary Chartrand

You are going to have to follow me for a second.  Mr. Chartrand had just finished ignoring hundreds of public comments and thousands of written comments, the overwhelming majority of which were against common core. He even ignored the head of the state PTA and she represents 300,000 thousand parents, guardians and teachers.

Then after listening to Commissioner Stewarts proposed changes to the accountability system, he implored her to listen to what others had said.

So what was different? The superintendents association, the parent teacher association and the teacher unions had also all come out for a moratorium against the accountability system, in fact everybody had, well except Superintendent Vitti who was so outraged he penned a letter (or so I am told as neither the Tampa Times nor the Times Union published it, sheesh people) panning the proposed changes, that is.

So did Chartrand who went to a conference to attract charter schools to town with Vitti , who attended a policy conference at Jacksonville University with Vitti where he praised the accountability system, who knows Vitti from their days at the state and who was basically his handpicked Duval County superintendent, just blow off the rest of the state and back up his boy?

Yes he did.

Some of you might think a cozy relationship with the chair of the state board of education is a good thing and if we had a competent chair I would probably agree with you even if I didn’t believe in everything they did. People are going to have legitimate disagreements. The things is we don’t have a competent person running the board, heck we don’t have a competent board at all and I have to say the commissioner seems less and less competent all the time too, but that’s another post.

Since Vitti has gotten here the 64 thousand dollar question is who is in his ear, whose counsel does he seek,  well it is pretty obvious now.