President Obama Fills Three Positions on National Board for Education Sciences


July 2016

President Barack Obama announced the appointment of AERA past-president Jeannie Oakes, Presidential Professor Emeritus in Educational Equity at the University of California, Los Angeles, to serve on the National Board for Education Sciences (NBES) on July 13.

In addition to Oakes’s appointment, President Obama re-appointed two current NBES members. David Chard, president of Wheelock College, and Larry Hedges, Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Social Policy at Northwestern University, will serve a second term on the Board.

The appointments fill three of seven unfilled positions on the Board, which has not met due to these vacancies. The Friends of IES—of which AERA is a founding member—sent a letter to the White House in June 2016 encouraging the appointments be made expeditiously.

The NBES performs an important function of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The Board is responsible for considering and approving priorities proposed by the IES director to guide the work of the agency, for presenting the IES director with recommendations for strengthening education research and the funding of the Institute, and for soliciting advice and information from the field regarding priorities for IES.