Education Week
Since his appointment as the U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan has championed an approach to school reform based on research. In public appearances from Denver to Brooklyn, Duncan has emphasized the importance of data in measuring long-term student success and in determining which programs should be expanded, and which scrapped.
Duncan’s determination is backed by the unprecedented education funding, up to $100 billion, in the federal economic-stimulus bill. It was further reinforced by the choice of John Q. Easton as the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, the nation’s engine for educational research, evaluation, assessment, and statistics...