New Board of Ed members

As I mentioned Tuesday, there were two new members of the Board of Ed sworn in before the meeting. The Governor's press release went out later that day and says the following:

About Martin West:
Martin West is an associate professor of education at Harvard Graduate School of Education and a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also deputy director of the Harvard Kennedy School's Program on Education Policy and Governance and executive editor of Education Next, a journal of opinion and research on education policy. He studies the politics of K-12 education in the United States and how education policies affect student learning and non-cognitive development. In 2014-15, he worked as senior education policy advisor to the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. He previously taught at Brown University and was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he is now a nonresident senior fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Government and Social Policy from Harvard in 2006 and his master’s in economic and social history from Oxford University in 2000.

About Amanda Fernandez:
In 2016, Amanda Fernandez, co-founded Latinos for Education, a non-profit dedicated to developing, placing, and connecting essential Latino leadership in the education sector. She was previously a vice president of Latino Community Partnerships at Teach For America, where she engaged with the Latino community for recruitment, development and advancement of staff and alumni. She led multiple efforts to highlight the need for Latino leadership in the education sector. While at Teach For America, she launched national summits focused on professional development for Latino staff, and boosted participation from 40 people to more than 300 participants and speakers. She also led the launch of a CEO sponsored Latino Advisory Committee, which fostered leadership and community building within the Latino population at Teach for America. Earlier in her career, she worked as director of organizational consulting at The Bridgespan Group, an organization that helps nonprofit and philanthropic organizations develop strategies and build their organizations. She received her bachelor of arts’ degree from Western Illinois University and a master’s degree from Fordham University.

So what do we need to know?
West is serving out the rest of Roland Fryer's term (which goes through June of 2020). West by far has the larger online footprint. Beyond his work at Harvard, he's easiest to find as the editor of Education Next, which is on the ed-reformy end of things. You can see some of his thinking in the conversation he had this spring on the "Building Excellent Schools," a training organization for charter school leadership. For example:

“For those, like me, who think that the expansion of school choice is a promising way to improve outcomes for American students, charter schooling has proven to be politically more successful, more palatable, and able to benefit from bipartisan support,” he says, pragmatic as ever. “I think it has demonstrated that when the right conditions are in place it can really produce dramatic improvement for students who have been poorly served by traditional school districts.”

His most recent research (that's been discussed popularly) was something over the summer on students not seeing long term negative impact in being held back in school; this is of course in contrast to four decades of research that found that students are harmed by being held back. He also formed the joint research project of Boston charters and MIT and Harvard researchers on character education, funded by the Walton Foundation. You can find his appearances on CSPAN here. Among them are his testimony before the HELP Committee as they considered the revisions to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. That largely focuses on testing and its impacts; he believes testing is efficacious, as it is reflective of long-term earning ability. Frankly, his testimony is a bit more nuanced than I expected, conceding, for example:

t some evidence suggests that heavy handed test-based accountability policies can promote rote, teacher-directed instruction and encourage schools to focus narrowly on test-preparation skills rather than ensuring that students are exposed to a curriculum rich in academic content. These tendencies may be strongest in schools with high minority and low-income populations, which typically face the strongest pressure to improve (Diamond and Spillane 2005).

and likewise:

the level at which students perform at a given point of time is a poor indicator of school quality, as student achievement is heavily influenced by factors outside of a school’s control. Measures based on the amount students learn from one year to the next can provide a more accurate gauge of schools’ contribution to student learning (Deming 2014).

...which is why he favored testing multiple times in elementary school. That's an argument, note, in favor of measurement of student growth. In the same testimony, he also argued in favor of moving much authority back to the states.
In terms of his political history, he was an advisor to Mitt Romney in his campaign for president, and he worked for Senator Lamar Alexander. He was among those who more than once said he had no interest in working in the Trump administration, however.

Fernandez, who has been appointed to a full five year term, prior to founding Latinos for Education, was the Vice-President for Diversity and Inclusiveness at Teach for America. Prior to that, she worked for Bridgespan in recruiting, which I know will raise concern in some quarters. Latinos for Education describes itself as:

Our mission is to develop, place and connect essential Latino leaders in the education sector. We are building an ecosystem of Latino advocates by infusing Latino talent into positions of influence.
We believe that Latino leaders should be at the forefront of creating an equitable education for Latino students. Latinos for Education prepares nuestra comunidad to break down barriers to educational opportunity for the next generation of Latino students.

Her other local education connection is a seat on the KIPP Massachusetts (charter) advisory board. She was the speaker at the Boston University School of Education convocation this spring, where she spoke of the importance of valuing your identity, working with passion on the struggle, and rising together.