Hilary Pennington, who has led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success efforts for the past five years,  emailed her colleagues that she was leaving the foundation. Before joining Gates, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and CEO of Jobs for the Future, which she co-founded. Inside Higher Ed reports that Tom Dawson, a senior policy officer left Gates over the summer and is working at Laureate Higher Education Group, a network of for-profit colleges. Pennington's deputy since early 2010, Mark David Milliron, who formerly led the League for Innovation in the Community College, is also leaving Gates.

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Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy was expected to appoint Stefan Pryor, now the deputy mayor of Newark, N.J., to be Connecticut's next commissioner of education, according to CTMirror.org. Pryor is co-founder of a Connecticut charter school and later led redevelopment efforts in Manhattan after 9/11. He will succeed Mark McQuillan, who resigned in December, and Acting Commissioner George Coleman who has held the interim post since then.

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Champlain College named former Seventh Generation CEO Chuck Maniscalco to be the Burlington, Vt. college's vice president of strategic initiatives, where he is leading Continuing Professional Studies Division.