Trump Selects Two People for His Education Transition Team
According to a September 19, 2016, article written by Andrew Ujifusa of Education Week, according to “multiple sources,” Donald Trump has two individuals in line to lead his transition team in education if Trump becomes president.
The first is Williamson “Bill” Evers:
Evers served as an assistant secretary for policy at the U.S. Department of Education from 2007 to 2009, and also was an adviser to former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in 2007 under President George W. Bush. …Evers has an extensive background in academic standards. He was appointed by two former California governors, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger, to serve on two separate standards commissions. And he’s been a big critic of the Common Core State Standards. In a 2015 op-ed for Education Week, for example, Evers said advocates of the common core were subverting a key aspect of the American civic system….He’s also written about struggling schools, mathematics, and school funding, among other topics. Evers has served on a county board of education in California, where he’s also been on the board of directors for a charter school.
Bill EversIt should be noted that the Republican bandwagon of Common Core as a federal takeover came years after numerous Republican governors and state education chiefs signed on to an as-of-yet non-existent Common Core in 2009 in the wake of then-US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s dangling almost $400,000 in front of those officials for a contest to create federally-funded, Common Core testing consortia. Moreover, the Common Core MOU (memorandum of understanding)clearly stated that the federal government would be all over Common Core except for directly funding it.
Moving on.
The second Ujifusa-noted Trump tap is Gerard Robinson:
Robinson served as Florida’s education commissioner from 2011 to 2012, and has also served as Virginia’s education secretary and as the president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. …Robinson resigned as the Florida chief four years ago after a difficult year in office. He left the job not long after a controversy surrounding a precipitous drop in proficiency rates on the state writing exam—the state board responded by lowering the pass score on the test. Some also criticized the state education department’s handling of Florida’s A-F accountability system on Robinson’s watch, and how he handled English-language learners with respect to A-F school grades.
Gerard RobinsonI wrote about Robinson in this 2013 post about Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change (Jeb Bush, who tried to hold onto Common Core as long as he could):
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