Gadfly is pleased to note that Phoebe Cottingham has been named commissioner of the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance at the Department of Education (within the new Institute for Education Sciences that replaced the old Office of Educational Research and Improvement). Besides being smart, dynamic, and savvy, Cottingham has long been known to education reformers as an exceptionally foresighted program officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation, which - largely through her labors - has been at the forefront of efforts to bring serious research design (especially "randomized field trials") to K-12 education. Washington will benefit from her knowledge and experience. At the Department of Education, she'll head efforts to evaluate key federal programs, including Title I and Reading First. She'll also have the thankless job of trying to bring sense and rigor to the activities of the ten "regional education laboratories" that have been around forever and that are a deeply entrenched establishment themselves. (A recent report on reading in social studies, produced by one of these labs, is reviewed below. It gives you a good sense of what's wrong with these outfits.) Kudos to Drs. Paige and Whitehurst for having the courage to put a serious researcher in charge of the department's self-assessment.
"Cottingham named commissioner for education evaluation and regional assistance," U.S. Department of Education press release, July 24, 2003