When I served in the George H.W. Bush administration, I was Assistant Secretary for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement.
OERI, as it was then called, had almost no discretionary money. There was very little opportunity for any initiatives, which may have been a good thing at that time. I became very involved in advocacy for national standards, which I now regret. I also spoke up for the national goals (remember them?), most of which were out of reach (like, we will be first in the world in math and science by the year 2000). OERI has since been pretentiously renamed the “Institute for Education Sciences.”
However, there is one thing that I am very proud of. I initiated a statistical review of the history of American education and the best brains in the Office of Research gathered the data to show the progress of education. It was published in 1992.
It is called 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait.
I still refer to it when writing essays that require historical CONTINUE READING: My Signal Contribution to the U.S. Department of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog