This one almost got by me: The White House late last month announced four more nominations to the National Board on Education Sciences.
The newest nominees are Anthony S. Bryk, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching at Stanford University and the co-founder of the Consortium on Chicago School Research; Kris D. Gutiérrez , a professor of learning and literacy at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the immediate past president of the American Educational Research Association; Atlanta school superintendent Beverly L. Hall, and Robert A. Underwood, the current president of the University of Guam and a former delegate from that territory to the U.S. House of Representatives.
The board, as you’ll recall, was created to offer independent advice to the Institute of Education Sciences, which is the main research arm for the federal education department. But its ranks thinned dramatically in the transition from one administration to another and the board now has just seven of its 15 members.
So whatever happened to the President Obama’s first four nominees to the board, which were announced back in February? (That would be Deborah Loewenberg Ball, Adam Gamoran, Bridget Terry Long, and Margaret R. (Peggy) McLeod, in case you’ve forgotten.) Word is that their nominations have recently been approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and sent to the full Senate. You can keep track of the progress of all the President’s nominations—if that sort of thing interests you—at this handy website.
UPDATE: IES Director John Easton tells me there are currently six—not seven—sitting board members. That means one more person is left to be nominated.