President Bush has announced that he will designate Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst as the acting commissioner of education statistics.
The Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics was left leaderless in January after the Senate failed to confirm the nomination of Robert Lerner, a Rockville, Md.-based social scientist, for the job. The controversial Mr. Lerner had been heading the statistics agency under a presidential “recess” appointment since December 2003, but his appointment expired in January. (“Spellings to Face Senate Panel This Week,” Jan. 5, 2005.)
Mr. Whitehurst is the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, which oversees the statistics center, and he will continue in that job.