School & District Management

Former ED Research Chief to Head Southern Education Foundation

By Sarah D. Sparks — October 08, 2010 1 min read
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Before there was the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Education Research and Improvement explored innovations and effectiveness in America’s schools. Now one of its leaders has been tapped to lead the nation’s oldest education charity.

C. Kent McGuire, dean of Temple University’s education college and former assistant education secretary for OERI under the Clinton Administration, has been named president of the Southern Education Foundation. McGuire succeeds outgoing president Lynn Huntley as of Nov. 8.

McGuire is considered a national expert on school finance and recruiting teachers for high-need schools. During his tenure at OERI, McGuire argued passionately to bring scientists from non-education fields into education research and also to push researchers to connect their findings to classrooms &mdash both of which continue to be top priorities for the modern IES.

As McGuire put it in a keynote address for the at the May 2000 annual forum of the National Institute for Science Education: “We have increasingly elegant solutions that don’t stand a chance of happening except in the most unusual or special circumstances. We have not yet figured out how to move from describing problems, to developing solutions, to testing and evaluating these solutions, so that we have a set of ideas about reform that actually holds the promise of working within the day-to-day realities of most schools and school systems. This is where the suggestions for future research are least clear, least well developed, but so desperately needed.”

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A version of this news article first appeared in the Inside School Research blog.