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Trump Taps Stanford Researcher for NCES Commissioner

By Alyson Klein — January 04, 2018 1 min read
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President Donald Trump has appointed James Lynn Woodworth to the top post at the National Center for Education Statistics. He’ll serve a six-year term as commissioner, ending in June of 2021.

Woodworth is currently a quantitative research analyst at the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank. CREDO has done extensive research on charter schools, school closures, online education, and other issues. Before that, he served as a distinguished doctoral fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. (That department is headed up by Jay P. Greene, who has written extensively about school choice.)

Before that, Woodworth spent 11 years as an Arkansas public school teacher. He’s also a Marine Corps veteran.

NCES is part of the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education. It collects, analyzes, and publishes statistics on education and public school districts, and conducts international comparisons of education statistics.