CURMUDGUCATION: NAEP Board Gets DeVosian Additions

CURMUDGUCATION: NAEP Board Gets DeVosian Additions

NAEP Board Gets DeVosian Additions

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos just announced six new appointees (and one returnee) to the National Assessment Governing Board. These are the folks that oversee the National Assessment of Educational Progress aka NAEP aka the nation's report card aka that big standardized test that everyone tries to use to prove a point every year.

So who did we get?

Returnee Alberto Carvalho, plus Frank Edelblut, Eric Hanushek, Reginald McGregor, Martin West, Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst, and Carey Wright.

It's the reformster-heavy kind of group you would expect from DeVos. If the Curmudgucation Institute had a graphics department, they would totally be working on some sort of Snow White and the  Seven Dwarfs art.

Hanushek is an economist specializing in linking children's earnings to teacher effectiveness (I mean, what else could it be, right?) and who just recently mused that teacher pay should be linked to measures of teacher effectiveness, even though we don't have any.

Whitehurst is, for me, a mixed bag. A Brookings guy (boo) who once did a pretty good job of trying to get DeVos to say non-dumb things about choice (yay), but whose name is also on a "report" that argues we should test more (boo) and that when it comes to teacher evaluation, administrator observations should be more like VAM (booooo).

West is a professor at Harvard's uber-reformy GSE and editor-in-chief of Education Next, the Harvard CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: NAEP Board Gets DeVosian Additions