City of Newark
New Haven has a new direct connection to the Malloy administration for school reform — a connection that began in City Hall.
That connection is Stefan Pryor. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has named Pryor his new education commissioner.
Upon hearing the news Tuesday, Yale administrator Michael Morand sent Pryor a text message: “Welcome home.”
Morand knew Pryor since they took turns representing Ward 1 on New Haven’s Board of Aldermen. The two have kept up as Pryor went off to bigger pastures — but stayed in touch with people back in New Haven like Morand about education and other local developments.
“This is not an outsider. This is a homecoming,” Morand said. “He is extraordinarily energetic. He combines big-picture strategy with sweating the details. He is neither up in the clouds nor stuck in the weeds. … He has grown incredibly in terms of his own leadership.”
Pryor, the 39-year-old son of two schoolteachers, first honed both his government and his school reform chops in New Haven. He developed a reputation for hard work and collegiality; he rarely if ever got caught up in political or personality disputes.
He served as an alderman while a Yale student. Then he became a top policy advisor to then newly-elected Mayor John DeStefano from 1994 through 1997. Pryor helped design New Haven’s neighborhood anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI). (Pryor left before the agency became mired in scandal, drawing the FBI into its offices to seize computers.) He co-founded New Haven’s nationally lauded Amistad Academy charter school. He also worked on an early version of school reform, a planned partnership between Yale and the city to create around-the-clock “community schools” in places like West Rock.
That plan never took off. But Pryor — and, eventually, New Haven school reform — did.
Frank Carrano, former head of the New Haven teachers union, got to know Pryor through serving on volunteer education projects together in New Haven, including organizing meetings for Amistad Academy. “I see him as a wonderful convener, someone who can bring people together, someone who can create an atmosphere of collaboration,” Carrano said. “He’s a really good administrator.”
Pryor left New Haven for the Big Apple, where he worked on school reform for a business group called Partnership for New York City. After 9/11 he worked for that agency and then the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (eventually as president) on rebuilding businesses in the wake of the terrorist attack.
Then Pryor followed another charter school-minded Yale grad to Newark: Cory Booker. He became Mayor Booker’s deputy mayor in charge of economic development. Among the projects he spearheaded in that role is Teachers Village, where three charter schools will be located right by apartments where the teachers will live. A spokesman for the project’s developer Tuesday praised Pryor’s “combination of common sense and smarts” in getting it off the ground.
Now Pryor is leaving the Newark post to come to Connecticut and take up Malloy’s promise to address the state’s achievement gap, among other educational challenges.
In that role, he’ll be a valuable speed-dial listing for his former boss — DeStefano, who’s still New Haven’s mayor and now embarked on an ambitious school reform project of his own.
In addition to his Newark government job, Pryor has traveled to work pro bono to help rebuild school systems in Chile and Haiti after their earthquakes. One of his fellow volunteers said from Haiti on Tuesday that he considers Pryor “one of the hardest-working guys I’ve ever met… Everybody likes him.”
But he is still part of the corporate plutocracy.He will sell out the public school system to the hedge funders.