Thursday, April 30, 2009

Musings about NAEP

http://ed-policy.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-musings-about-naep.html

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think you are on the wrong track. But his appointment might represent a significant policy shift at least from within the DOE.

Bill Evers has significantly compounded the problems. Not cured them.

This is from Wikipedia -
During the 1970s and '80s, Evers was involved in the libertarian movement in the United States and the Libertarian Party specifically.

In 1980, he was the Libertarian Party candidate for Congress in the 12th Congressional District of California. For several years he edited the left-libertarian magazine Inquiry. At the time, he was considered a radical (he was a prominent member of the party's Radical Caucus) and an ally of Murray Rothbard against Ed Crane and his supporters.[1]

In 1993, Evers helped defeat an effort to eliminate the LP membership Pledge and moderate the LP Platform. He was still a member of the Libertarian National Committee as of March 1996. [2]

In the late 1990s, Evers began to work in the Republican Party, serving on George W. Bush's transition team after the 2000 election and acting as a Bush adviser in the 2000 and 2004 campaigns and as a McCain adviser in 2008.[3]

In California, Evers has also served on the Republican State Central Committee and acted as an adviser to several Republican gubernatorial campaigns.[citation needed]

Education activism
In 1995, while one of his children was a third-grader at Escondido Elementary School in the Palo Alto Unified School District in California, Evers became an outspoken participant in the Math Wars over the teaching of mathematics.

He became a leading member of the steering committee of a group called HOLD (Honest Open Logical Debate) on Math Reform[4] and organized a publicity stunt in which a toilet was mounted on the back of a pick-up truck and driven to a protest outside the school district headquarters. There Evers ceremonially flushed the new curriculum.[5]

From 1996 to 1998, Evers was a commissioner on the California State Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards. At the Hoover Institution, he joined its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, which was formed in 1999.

In 2001, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. From July to December 2003, he served as a senior education adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority during the U.S. occupation of Iraq. [6] In 2004 he was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Education in California.

On February 8, 2007, Bush nominated Evers to be an assistant secretary of education. His confirmation by the Senate was announced on October 17, 2007.[7]

The eight-month delay was largely attributed to enemies he made during the Math Wars.[8]"

October 17, 2007

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings today announced that the U.S. Senate has confirmed Williamson M. "Bill" Evers as assistant secretary for the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education. As assistant secretary, Evers will serve as the principal adviser to Secretary Spellings on all matters relating to K-12 and higher education policy development and review; performance measurement and evaluation; and budget processes and proposals


At least this gives you some idea of how powerful the other side really is.

dan dempsey said...

It was said:
I think you are on the wrong track.I can hardly be on the wrong track on this because I made no comment.

I look for things that may be of interest to the reader. The act of posting material is not an endorsement of the material.
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Thank you for the information you provide.

Anonymous said...

I've asked Mr. Evers for his pov, because it strikes me that a former Undersecretary of Education would also be the founder of a Palo Alto's parent group, since the DOE endorsed the very math he is so critical of by flushing it down a toilet in a protest. And then to write about an improvement in education, when we can all clearly see otherwise. As far as academics are concerned most schools are in crisis. The NAEP is losing credibility by publishing such tripe. They are living in a fantasy.