Williamson M. Evers
Research Fellow

Expertise: Education policy, especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, and accountability from kindergarten through high school; Iraq reconstruction

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Williamson M. Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Institution’s Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, specializes in research on education policy especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, accountability, and school finance from kindergarten through high school. Evers was the U.S. assistant secretary of education for planning, evaluation, and policy development from 2007 to 2009. He was a senior adviser to U.S. secretary of education Margaret Spellings during 2007. From July to December 2003, Evers served in Iraq as a senior adviser for education to Administrator L. Paul Bremer of the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Governor Pete Wilson appointed Evers to the California State Commission for the Establishment of Academic Content and Performance Standards, where he served from 1996 to 1998. Evers was elected in November 2004 to the Santa Clara County Board of Education, on which he served until February 2007. He is the immediate past president of the board of directors of the East Palo Alto Charter School, a board on which he had served from 1997 until 2004.

Among his recent publications are:
--the chapter on high-spending, low-performing school districts in Courting Failure (2006);
--the mathematics chapters in Reforming Education in Florida (2006) and in Reforming Education in Arkansas (2005);
--the chapter on fixing failing schools in Within Our Reach: How America Can Educate Every Child (2005);
--Testing Student Learning, Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness (coeditor, 2004);
--the chapter on curriculum in Our Schools and Our Future (2003);
--Teacher Quality (coeditor, 2002);
--School Accountability (coeditor and co contributor, 2002);
--School Reform: The Critical Issues (coeditor, 2001);
-- the chapter on standards and accountability in A Primer on America's Schools (2001);
--What's Gone Wrong in America's Classrooms (editor and contributor, 1998).

He has written opinion columns that have appeared in Education Week, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. He is a member of the editorial board of Education Next (formerly Education Matters).

Evers received his B.A. (1972), M.A. (1978), and Ph.D. (1987) degrees in political science from Stanford University.