Commissioner Dianna Wentzell has been on the job just over a month at the helm of Connecticut’s Department of Education. She has been welcomed with a debate over the future of education in the state that is thick with challenges and fraught with political controversy. Pick an agenda item: Common Core Standards implementation; teacher evaluations; narrowing the achievement gap between rich and poor districts; meeting and funding the growing demand for special education; and the perennial conundrum of how to fund education in the state. Any one would be in itself a full-time job. Fortunately, the new commissioner knows her stuff. With a 25-year career in the state’s public school system — 12 years in the classroom — she served most recently as the chief academic officer for the state education department. Experience counts for something — except, apparently, for Governor Dannel P. Malloy.

The governor has vetoed a bill that won overwhelming support in the state House of Representatives (138-5) and a unanimous vote in the state Senate that required state education commissioners to have at least five years experience as a teacher and three years as a school administrator. Notwithstanding the welcome appointment of the new commissioner, the governor has secured the enmity of the state’s largest teachers union, first through the appointment of Ms Wentzell’s predecessor, Stephen Pryor, in his first term, and now with the veto of this popular measure to require the Commissioner of Education to have some actual experience in education. (Mr Pryor, a lawyer with a background in economic development who also co-founded a New Haven public charter school, would not have met the new standard.)

Gov Malloy explained his veto by saying that it “encroaches on the purview of the chief executive of the state to select a candidate who s/he deems the best candidate.” Alan Taylor, the chairman of the State Board of Education, fell in line behind the governor by suggesting “there may be times when future boards and governors decide that they need something else.” In other words, there are times when educational goals are a priority, and there are times when political goals are a priority. Call it the governor’s education/politics priority toggle.

We encourage the legislature to keep education as the priority in the commissioner’s office by overriding the governor’s veto at the constitutionally-required veto session on July 20. If those lawmakers who originally supported this bill muster the effort for a little follow-through, Connecticut can upgrade the professional standards of its Department of Education to match those already in place for commissioners of the Department of Public Health, the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services, and the Corrections Department. With all the critical issues now facing the state’s public schools, it is important to disable that switch that moves so easily from education to politics.