McMahon Likes Charters

Test scores matter, but they’re not the whole story in evaluating either a kid or a school.

That was the take of new GOP U.S. Senate frontrunner Linda McMahon as she visited a city at the heart of the national school reform effort. She was one of three statewide candidates who came courting New Haven’s Republican Town Committee Thursday night.

Two Jerrys joined McMahon in pitching their candidacies to the GOP Town Committee in a City Hall meeting room Thursday night in anticipation of their state party’s May 24 nominating convention: Consumer Affairs Commissioner Jerry Farrell Jr. , who’s seeking the Republican nomination for secretary of the state; and Jerry Labriola, the current state party treasurer, seeking to run against Rosa DeLauro in the U.S. Third Congressional District.

Also at the meeting, New Haven GOP Town Chairman chair Rick Elser (pictured with McMahon) was reelected.

McMahon showed up in New Haven a day after a Quinnipiac poll showed her pulling into the lead in the race for the GOP nomination to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd.

In a conversation in the hallway after presenting her creds as beltway outsider and an independent small business woman, McMahon said she had been very impressed with a past tour she had taken of the New Haven’s charter flagships, the Amistad/ Achievement First schools. She singled out the work of Dacia Toll, the Achievement First leader wooed by New York and Hartford to start similar charter schools.

“They were creating self-worth,” McMahon said of Amistad. She said she had not yet visited a New Haven public school.

“I do think we need more charters and magnet schools and freedom of choice,” she added

She was asked about the role of test scores in school reform plans.

“Total evaluation of student and school is not reliant on just a test score. But the score is important as a benchmark and is one tool of evaluation,” McMahon said.

That is one of the guiding philosophies behind a redesign of the No Child Left Behind Act currently underway by the Obama Administration, as well as a linchpin of New Haven’s nationally watched school reform drive.

For the past year McMahon has been sitting on the State Board of Education, which oversees local boards.

“I heard from principals [that] they would want more control, so I’m for that,” she said.

Under both the Obama and New Haven plans, principals of high-performing schools get more autonomy to alter work rules and make other changes.

But McMahon did not endorse Obama’s plan. Asked about it, she emphasized that she had not yet read the Obama outline in its entirety.

(Meanwhile, McMahon offered some surprising positions in an interview with CTMirror’s Mark Pazniokas. She said, for instance, that she’d vote to repeal the military’s ​“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” rule for gays.)

Meanwhile, congressional hopeful Jerry Labriola offered a simple way to view his platform: ​“Everything Rosa DeLauro stands for, I’m opposed to. I’d be happy to take your questions.”

Unlike 10-term Democrat DeLauro, Labriola would lack seniority, he acknowledged. But he’d be a reliable fiscal conservative, he claimed. Nevertheless, he said, he had paid the extra ten cents so that his blue and white bumper stickers, which he passed out to the committee members, would absolutely come off after the campaign.

Farrell (left, with Westville activist Eli Greer) touted the efficiencies he’d brought to the Department of Consumer Protection as an example of what he could help do across the state bureaucracies. He also pronounced himself against same-day voter registration and voting. It would involve extra costs in people and equipment, in effect an unfunded mandate, he argued.

Besides Chairman Elser, the officers elected to the New Haven Republican Town Committee were: Marlene Napolitano, vice chair; Joseph Corradino, secretary; Nancy Ahern, treasurer; Donald Boyce, assistant secretary; and Victor Fasano as parliamentarian.

The committee meets the second Thursday of the month. On March 25 it will choose twelve delegates for the May convention.