Williamson Evers, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Institution's Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, has been appointed to the Mathematics and Science Scientific Review Panel at the Institute of Education Sciences, United States Department of Education. The institute is creating standing panels as the first step in establishing a rigorous and mature scientific peer review process.
Evers, who specializes in research on education policy, serves on other panels and boards. He is a member of the California state standardized testing system's content review panels for history and mathematics and a member of the policy board of the California History–Social Science Project. Evers was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Education in November 2004. 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. 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, throughout the life of the commission.
Among his recent publications are 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 cocontributor, 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.
