For most of Trump’s term, he failed to appoint enough members to the National Board for Education Sciences, which has not had a quorum to meet since the end of Obama’s term. Suddenly he announced a flurry of names for the board, and the education research world was shocked to see that Trump’s list included no bona fide education researchers.
The board is supposed to advise the director of the Institute for Education Sciences, but Trump’s eight nominees are unqualified to offer much advice.
Science magazine reports:
One month before his term expires, President Donald Trump has revived a moribund federal education research advisory panel by appointing eight members who appear to have no expertise in the subject area.
The National Board for Education Sciences (NBES) provides guidance to the director of the Institute for Education Science (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. But the lack of a quorum on the 15-member presidentially appointed board has prevented it from meeting since the waning days of the Obama administration.
That lengthy presidential snub of the panel was part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to shrink government that resulted in a reduced flow of scientific advice to various federal agencies. That effort has had a particularly dramatic impact at regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, where the administration dismantled or dramatically reshaped several science advisory panels. For education researchers, a mothballed NBES deprived them of a high-level conduit for using their methodological expertise to help shape federal policies meant to improve education outcomes for all students...
The member with arguably the highest public profile is John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He served in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush, and authored the so-called “torture memos” that provided the legal justification for the war on terror waged in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks. Yoo has also been vocal in defending Trump’s action during his impeachment and in his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Two other appointees–Michael Anton and Larry Schweikart—have also stridently defended Trump against what they see as existential threats to national security posed by liberal politicians. Anton spent a year at the National Security Council before becoming a regular presence on social media, and Schweikart, who retired in 2016 after 30 years as a history professor at the University of Dayton, is the author of “48 Liberal Lies about American History” and “A Patriot’s History of the United States.”
Some of the others have backgrounds in banking or finance.
Having worked in the first Bush administration in the research area, let me say that I take exception to the use of “science” in the large and diffuse field of education. Much of what is appropriately studied is qualitative, not quantitative. The effort during the second Bush administration to turn the Office of Educational Research into the Institute of Educational Sciences was pretentious, in my view.
Be that as it may, the advisory board to the National Center for Education Statistics included many of the best qualified education researchers in the nation. The director could justly turn to the board for sound advice about education policy and the needs of the field.
My hunch is that these eight people appointed by Trump think they will have an important role in deciding the nation’s education policies. They won’t. They will sit through sessions that are technical in nature and listen to presentations about research priorities. These presentations, for the uninitiated, are likely to bore them. I suspect that many will quit before their terms expire.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Trump is a bitter man and he wants to leave a real mess for the next administration. Along with that scenario, his appointments have always been willy nilly based more on right wing ideology or loyalty to the Trump Cause. The Trump Cause being anything which benefits Trump.
and with Trump the narcissism is so great that he pushes many things which he presumes will benefit himself, but which then actually create chaos
I will be so glad when this immature little boy is gone, gone, gone. He has the Peter Pan syndrome. Trump is an immature, narcissistic man who has relationship conflicts and anxieties, especially when he does not get way. A little boy who bouts and throws things or fires people who do not agree with him
First, let it be said that while under Bush and continuing through Obama IES demanded the presumably highest standard of results from randomized assignment studies for research proposals while ignoring evidence entirely in its policy preferences. The research standard led the presumptuously named What Works Clearinghouse to be dubbed the Nothing Works Clearing House because it is nearly impossible to conduct rigorously controlled studies in education settings, especially since eliminating poverty and racism was abandoned as a goal. My inclination is to be cynical and say that the smarter folks in conservative circles knew this full well and intended to use it to deny progressive education initiatives while using their legislative dominance to push through their agenda. Trump’s appointments abandon all pretense.
Exactly right.
I agree. I think the fact that someone affiliated with the labor movement is under consideration to lead the DOE is the main reason for the revival of this committee. Conservatives want to use this hand picked team to offer a counter narrative to any of Biden’s education proposals. The charter lobby is likely behind trying to revive this zombie.
“The effort during the second Bush administration to turn the Office of Educational Research into the Institute of Educational Sciences was pretentious, in my view.”
Yes, the move was pretentious and it has had a corrosive effect on qualitative inquiry and research. The IES ushered in a new standard for research: Randomized Control Trials, RCTs of the kind typical in medical practice and research and large misrepresentations of educational research. Students and teachers were treated as guinea pigs, easily assigned to “interventions.” The net result is a loss of federal funding for research that might provide insights beyond that horrible “What Works Clearing House” where the ratings schemes are all too dependent on standardized test scores in reading and math.
Kevin Welner has a wonderful parody in his book “Potential Grizzlies” about the shortcomings of “randomized control trials,” in which everything is never equal.
So many variables, so little control.
I don’t think it was the idea of having Randomized Control Trials that was the real issue. To me, what I see in ed reform studies is non peer-reviewed research without any randomized control that makes outlandish claims of success that would never be condoned in any scientific setting.
I believe that using any rigorous scientific method would have forced all funding of ed reform to stop for failing to do anything.
There is no such thing as a RCT in which the rate of attrition of participants in a RCT is forbidden to be examined or revealed. Just because ed reformers claim it is an RCT does not make it so.
If real science was applied to ed reform, it would have ceased to be funded or supported years ago.
Trump is paying back some donors with these resume padding appointments. They will do nothing except include this spot on their resumes.
over and over we see this pattern
Hello Diane As Carl Sagan regards in GregB’s note here, rightly interpreted, “science” means scientific method, and NOT what (I think) you are rightly responding to, which my guess is, interpretations of science that flow from positivism (positivist science), or science interpreted as legitimate as applied ONLY to the fields of natural and physical data, or that qualitative data is somehow unscientific.
Scientific method . . . can and is applied to all sorts of human data in the many human fields. What differs is the data; and of course human data includes that human beings ask questions that, as your note suggests, aim not only at “What is it?” but also “What good is it?” and further, “Is it worthwhile to do?”
But “paying attention to the data” and adjusting one’s research accordingly is a fundamental tenet of empirical method itself. It follows that giving an account of human data and its many derivatives doesn’t mean it’s somehow less critical. It does, however, point to the human-on-human aspect of the research which, while it opens the window on many aspects of human research, also calls into question the researcher’s horizons on several counts.
What is uncritical, however, is the idea that, to be “scientific,” human data is supposed to respond to researchers’ questions in the same way that un- or nonconscious and non-human data responds; and that no methodological transitions need to be made or, if they are made, then empirical method is automatically ruled out as . . . NOT applicable.
Now THAT’s an unscientific and BTW philosophically naive view that, unfortunately, many scientists still harbor. CBK
What differs is a) whether the so-called “data” are valid enough to merit using the term and b) whether the data are sufficient to warrant the conclusions drawn, both NOT the case with regard to standardized test scores and the conclusions drawn from them by Ed Deformers and by far, far too many journalists. I am constantly appalled by the naivete of journalists who simply assume that the state standardized tests validly measure what they purport to measure. One almost never encounters one who peeks behind the curtain.
Bob I hope you can see that I’m just trying NOT to throw out the babies with the bathwater . . . to throw out critical method as belonging to education with bad or dogmatic science which, as Sagan suggests, and BTW with religion also, is the very human flaw we are all prone to bring to both . . . and to extreme rejections of either.
Science itself emerged in history from inquiring people who wanted to bring critical empirical method to their understanding. That so many stopped-dead at the natural-physical sciences, and then at statistics is more about their flawed philosophical underpinnings than about the sciences and related fields themselves. When they STAY IN THEIR LANES they have proven their worth many times over.
On the other hand, to get people to consider their centuries-old philosophical flaws is . . . sigh . . . quite another matter. CBK
So, they were surprised when Ludwig W. declined their invitation. He was NOT one of them.
Oh yes. The problem with the deformers is NOT with the scientific method or with the very useful concepts of data and rigor but, rather, with their misunderstandings about these, their own lack of rigor and awareness of the limitations and proper uses of scientific techniques. Well, let’s just totally disregard variables like poverty. Well, let’s just assume that the test questions validly test for what they purport to test for. Well, let’s just assume that the “standards” are testable and make sense and cover the ground they need to cover. All false.
Bob You write: “Well, let’s just totally disregard variables like poverty.”
That’s not only insanely ignorant of them, but it borders on being hilariously funny. CBK
All this would be funny if it weren’t so tragic.
So, yes, I do indeed see what you were saying, CBK, about now throwing out the baby, and I emphatically agree. Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that.
Trump is trying to get into place people who will further his fascist indoctrination in nationalism education program–the one he promised, at length, during the Repugnican Convention.
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
For what it is worth, I think Trump is leaving a Trump loyalist shadow government in place in every federal agency because he plans to return to power. He wants his people in place to not only sabotage the Biden administration but to be there when he is president again.
I also do not think Trump is going to wait until 2024. Before Biden even takes the Oath of Office, Trump will be holding rallies and tweeting in an effort to start a Civil War to keep him in the White House. In fact, Trump is already doing that. No telling what kind of secret meetings his sons and son-in-law have been having with leaders of militants like the Proud Boys enlisting them in Trump’s soon-to-be revolutionary army.
To avoid arrest, Trump will probably declare he has to leave the country and fight from a safe haven like North Korea or Russia as a president in exile who was forced out by the alleged Biden crime family. This way Trump will also be in a position to not pay back the loans that are coming due. But that won’t stop the lenders from taking any Trump property that was put up as collateral.
Will Trump still have money? Of course, his deplorable, easy to fool, racist followers are donating million to him now and for sure he will take that money with him one way or another. And, even after Trump has fled the country claiming he is a president in exile, some of those hardcore Trumpists will still e donating to his traitorous Civil War fund.
The only way this will end is if someone very close to him shoots him in the back of the head.
Are you reading this Ivanka? To distract her lecherous father, all she has to do is sit on his lap and rub back and forth. Once his eyes glaze over and his slobbery, tiny mouth falls open as he pants for air to feed his racing heart, she can pull the trigger before anyone can stop her.
I agree that Trump will do whatever he can to disrupt the Biden presidency. He will hold rallies and proclaim endlessly that he is an illegitimate president.
But I promise you that the career workers in every agency will identify every Trump plant. If they are in an appointment with a term, Biden will have to accept their presence. But if they are not appointed for a term or in civil service, they will be kicked out.
Say it ain’t so, Joe!