The hiring machine is finally cranking up over there at 400 Maryland Avenue, in fact outpacing the Reform-o-Meter's ability to keep up. (Well, I shouldn't blame the Reform-o-Meter. It is always willing. I'm the one who has fallen behind!)
So today we'll play catch-up by giving three of the newest senior officials of the U.S. Department of Education the R-O-M treatment: the nominees for Under Secretary, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Vocational and Adult Education. (We'll tackle Jim Shelton and Peter Groff, respectively the new heads of the Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, later.)
To be honest, none of these three positions is critical to K-12 education reform. The Under Secretary job is focused on higher education, IES, of course, concerns research, and OVAE is mostly focused on community colleges. So all three appointments together merely merit a 2 on the significance scale (of 1-10).
Let's start with Martha Kanter, the designee for Under Secretary. I can't find much about her, though this Chronicle of Higher Education blurb is pretty good. The main thing to know is that the Obama team chose a community college official as its top "higher ed" person. This is generally a good sign, as there's less politically-correct nonsense coming out of community colleges, they are remarkably agile and entrepreneurial entities, and they don't have ed schools. So to the extent that this selection has any significance for elementary and secondary education (and maybe it doesn't), I'll give Obama and company mildly good marks.
John Easton's selection as director of IES has more upside, in my view. From what I've learned about him, from both published sources and conversations from insiders, I think he's an inspired choice. While it's true that he's unlikely to embrace "gold-standard" randomly-controlled trials to the extent that his predecessor, Russ Whitehurst, did, that's not such a bad thing. As a colleague told me, it's appropriate to relegate RCTs to their "rightful place in the toolbox," rather than treating them as hammers always in search of nails. His work in Chicago has also focused on providing policy-relevant information to decision makers, something the Whitehurst-era IES struggled to do. And nothing in his record indicates that he would be "anti-reform" on the issues.
As for Glenn Cummings, the choice for Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Office of Vocational and Adult Education, the news is not as good. (By the way, I don't plan to comment on every DAS appointment, but I started researching Cummings because I'd thought he'd been nominated as Assistant Secretary. Not so, as Politics K-12 reported.) Yes, he's another community college official, so that's good. But according to a friend in Maine, while Cummings is smart and thoughtful, as Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives he voted against a charter school bill, against allowing religious schools to participate in the state's "town tuitioning" (i.e., voucher) program, and in favor of a bill that would have expanded the reach of teacher collective bargaining agreements.
So how does this all add up? All in all, I'd say the group deserves a "Luke Warm" rating. What say you?
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