Governor Hogan has appointed two new members to the State Board of Education. As reported by the Maryland State Department of Education,

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Ed.D. of Montgomery County and Andy Smarick of Queen Anne’s County were appointed by Governor Larry Hogan to fill two seats on the 12-member board vacated by the departures of Charlene M. Dukes, Ed.D. and Donna Hill Staton, Esq., whose terms ended in 2014.

Andy Smarick spoke at the 2013 MACo Winter Conference on alternative education and charter schools. Both appointees have strong backgrounds in education policy and reform.

Dr. Finn is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, where he is Chairman of the K-12 Education Task Force. He also is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where his primary focus is reforming primary and secondary schooling. Dr. Finn has led Fordham since 1997 after many roles in education, academe and government, including professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. He also served as an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and was legislative director for U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Mr. Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a national nonprofit dedicated to helping education organizations – in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors – become more effective in their work and achieve dramatic results for students. He served as a deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education and an education aide at The White House Domestic Policy Council. Mr. Smarick also helped launch a college-preparatory charter school for under-served students in Annapolis and was a member of Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s Commission on Quality Education.

For more information, read the press release from the Maryland State Department of Education here, and our previous posts, Maryland’s Governor-elect Could Alter State Education Board Membership, and MACo Features Innovations in Education at Winter Conference.