The New Colorado Senator

TW: Amidst all of the drama about who will be appointed to the Illinois and New York Senate seats, little has been made of who would fill the Colorado seat of new Sec. of Interior, Ken Salazar. Mike Bennett was appointed to fill the seat yesterday by Gov. Ritter. Bennett has an interesting background (in a good way); attorney, businessman, school reformer all by the age of 43.

From New Yorker:
"...a new superintendent named Michael Bennet, one of a loose cadre of former business, military, and government leaders, all education novices, who have taken control of some of the largest, most troubled school systems in the country...Bennet is, at forty-two, one of the youngest. A former editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal who had become bored by the legal profession, he spent his thirties making a small fortune as a corporate-turnaround artist. Then his thoughts shifted to public service.

In 2003, when a friend, John Hickenlooper, was elected mayor of Denver, Bennet became his chief of staff. Two years later, the superintendency came open for the fifth time in a decade, and Hickenlooper suggested that Bennet apply.

To Bennet, who aspired to public office, running an urban school district seemed more likely to end a political career than to launch it. Most of the children in the district were poor, and eighty per cent were minorities, including a huge number of Latino immigrants. Nationally, Latinas are twice as likely to become mothers in their teens, and Latinos of both sexes are two times as likely to drop out. Moreover, while student achievement is closely correlated with parental involvement, many Denver parents hadn’t attended high school in their native countries, and some were illegal residents in their new one. The illegals tended to steer clear of public institutions, including their children’s schools.

Still, Bennet was struck by the fact that a few schools across the country had raised the test scores of their poor and minority student bodies—successes that seemed counter to the idea that underlying social conditions had to be redressed before disadvantaged minority students could do well. As Bennet studied those exceptional schools—a Knowledge Is Power Program charter school in the Bronx, public schools in Norfolk and Aldine, Texas—he began to think about how some of their strategies might be expanded to reform a whole district. Ambitions began to coalesce, and the school board chose him over two strong minority candidates..."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/01/15/070115fa_fact_boo