PHOENIX โ Pressured by Gov. Doug Ducey, the president of the state Board of Education quit today.
Greg Miller said aides to the governor told him they wanted him out as the top board official. Miller said Ducey, who is due to make new board appointments as early as this week, believed the change would help smooth over what has been at best a rocky relationship between the board and state schools chief Diane Douglas.
Miller, however, said he saw no reason to stay on at all as a rank-and-file member. So he said he agreed to quit if he could control the wording of the press release, the timing of the announcement and got some assurances that the charter school he runs would get "political protections that I no longer could provide.''
There was no immediate response from either the governor's office or Douglas.
Today's action caps what has been an ongoing feud between the school superintendent and the education board over control over the education agenda in Arizona.
Douglas, elected in 2014, has claimed she has a mandate from the public to pursue her agenda. That includes ridding the state of the Common Core academic standards.
By contrast the board, most of whose members are appointed by the governor, has not only approved the standards but continued to implement them.
The differences erupted into a pair of lawsuits over control who controls the board's staff. That issue was supposed to be resolved with a change in state law approved earlier this year and signed by Ducey.
But Miller said there have been ongoing issues, with Douglas continuing to refuse to provide the board with the staff necessary to do its own work.
