One of the perks of being Secretary of Education is that he or she selects member of the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which is the oversight body for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The board is designed to be bipartisan and to represent people from different walks of life. As the NAGB website states, The Governing Board is made up of 26 members, including governors, state legislators, local and state school officials, educators and researchers, business representatives, and members of the general public. Members are appointed by the U.S. secretary of education.
When I was appointed to NAGB by Secretary Richard Riley on behalf of the Clinton administration in 1998, the board was truly representative and diverse and collegial. We worried constantly, as did Congress, about keeping “politics” out of the decision making process.
That was then, this is now. Now we have a Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, who is actively hostile to public education. It is reasonable to assume that she wants NAEP to show public schools in the worst possible light to provide ammunition for her crusade to destroy them. No one questions whether her selections are “political.” Of course they are. Unlike Secretary Riley and other secretaries, no one she selected disagrees with her dire diagnosis of public education.
Peter Greene writes here about her choices for NAGB here. Here are the folks who will shape future assessments. My only hope, as a former member of the board, is that their ability to mess up NAEP will be constrained by the professional staff, unless she has replaced them with rightwing zealots and by the limited nature of the decisions that the board makes (whether and when to test the arts or history or civics or “grit”).
After four years in which to replace retiring members, DeVos will have put her stamp on NAGB. Perhaps the standards will become so high that no one reaches NAEP Proficient, not in public schools or charter schools or religious schools, and we can declare all of American education a disaster and throw up out hands in feigned despair. Greene sees the slant of this board as reason not to take NAEP results seriously in the future. The media, however, will continue to see NAEP as the gold standard, so I am hoping the new additions will not render it useless.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“West is a professor at Harvard’s uber-reformy GSE and editor-in-chief of Education Next, the Harvard GSE publication that carries work from the Fordham-AEI-Bellwether axis of reformsterdom.”
That may be the most perfect one-sentence description of ed reform ever written 🙂
It’s amusing because one of DeVos’ favorite hobbies is scolding others on how they supposedly shut down speech and debate. Yet she exists inside a pure echo chamber of people who agree with everything she does and says.
There are no public school supporters or advocates permitted inside any of her groups and she never meets or speaks with any of them.
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I was living and working in Michigan when DeVooDoo started Amway. HOLY COW … talk about snake oil.
Her minions knocked on my door several times and didn’t understand, “NO.”
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One of my favorite lines from Peter (who writes so many wonderful lines):
Oh, baloney. Name one “innovation” that has come out of a New Hampshire charter and spread through the education world.
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I read the other day that the US Department of Education has the lowest public favorability ratings of any federal entity with the exception of ICE.
Maybe they should think about providing some actual benefit to students who attend public schools. I don’t think anyone hires and pays these people to launch political attacks on the schools 90% of US students attend.
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Peter has done a great job, as usual, in identifying the new members of the Governing Board for NAEP. Here are couple of additional connections that may offer a perspective on who has oversight of the NAEP Governing Board.
NAEP’s activities are conducted under the leadership of the Commissioner for the National Center for Education (NCES) and NCES is an arm of the Institute of Education Sciences.
Dr. James Lynn Woodworth who heads the NCES is a “Waltonist.” Trump nominated him (and Congress affirmed) the six-year appointment of a new Commissioner for the National Center of Education Statistics in January 2019. Dr. Woodworth was recruited from his job as a data analysis at the Walton-funded Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). He also has a Ph.D. in educational policy from the Walton-funded Arkansas School of Educational Reform. Woodworth’s term is for six years. This means that he has oversight past the elections of 2020.
Woodworth is not entirely his own boss.. The NCES is an arm of the Institute of Education Sciences. The IES also has a relatively new Director, a Trump appointee affirmed by Congress. He is Dr. Mark Schneider, who once served as Commissioner of NCES, became a VP at the American Institute for Research, and President of College Measures, a college student dashboard based on data.
Schneider has been acquainted with economist Eric A. Hanushek, now on the NAEP Board, for many years. For example, Hanushek served on the Board of NCES back in 2005, when Schneider was Commissioner of NCES. Hanushek is all in for testing strategies that make teachers look incompetent. The data/testing “professionals” who might give some stability to NAEP also have deep connections to forms of accountability favored by Devos/Waltons/charter enthusiasts.
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Corrections to your last sentence:
“The media, however, will continue to see NAEP as the FOOL’s gold standard, so I am hoping the new additions will render it useless.
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NAEP will be used by Hanushek and Company to hype stacked ranking and merit pay. That will be funny to observe because stacked ranking and merit pay simply do not work. It will also be saddening to observe because the nation’s report card will be destroyed by value-added algorithms. So the new oversight body will be both ridiculous and counterproductive, a reflection of DeVos, — a reflection in general of multibillionaires and multimillionaires in government.
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ghouls and tools
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and fools
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“Soulmate” Edleblut’s 7 kids are homeschooled.
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