Hoover fellow Williamson M. Evers has been appointed a senior adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Education, the Iraq Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) announced. Evers is part of an international team of civilian and military advisers in Baghdad who were recruited by the CPA to assist the interim management of the education ministry.
Evers, 54, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the Institution's Koret Task Force on K–12 Education. He is on leave from Hoover during his service in Iraq. Evers's research concentrates on education policy—especially as it pertains to curriculum, teaching, testing, and accountability in elementary and secondary schools.
"My interest in the modern Middle East goes back to a course I took as an Stanford undergraduate, taught by two curators of Hoover's Middle East collection, Michel Nabti and the late George Rentz," he said.
The Iraqi Ministry of Education has historically operated the elementary and secondary schools and vocational centers across the nation of Iraq. The ministry has been responsible for building and outfitting schools, setting curricula, publishing textbooks, testing students, and auditing school performance.
The CPA, a joint civilian-military administration leading the rebuilding of Iraq, has asked the members of the Senior Advisory Team to act as resource people for Iraqis both inside and outside the ministry who want to restart Iraqi schools and begin the process of educational reform.
Evers serves as the president of the board of trustees of the East Palo Alto (Calif.) Charter School. He has also served as a member of the California state testing system's content panels for history and mathematics. These two panels oversee all proposed questions for these subjects for the statewide standards-based tests given to California children in the public schools, grades 2–11. He also served on the panels that proposed the grading guidelines for California's and Texas's history standards tests.
Evers was an education policy adviser to President George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, and he served as a member of the education advisory committee for the transition. In 2001, President Bush appointed Evers to the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars, which selects the nation's top high school seniors based on their achievement in academics and the arts. In addition, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige named Evers to the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board, on which he served until Congress reorganized educational research activities in late 2002.
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. This commission drafted grade-by-grade standards for reading, writing, mathematics, history-social studies, and science in the state's public schools. While a commissioner, Evers was on the committees that developed mathematics and science standards.
The Hoover Institution, founded at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the 31st president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center for advanced study on domestic public policy and international affairs, with an internationally renowned archives.
