John Q. Easton, executive director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, will be nominated by President Barack Obama to head the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. The Institute was created in 2002 to provide rigorous research and evaluation on education programs and policies and to report a wide variety of data, including data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Easton will oversee four national research centers. Easton’s successor at the Consortium has not been named.
Easton has been associated with the Consortium since its inception in 1990. He became deputy director in 1997 and executive director in 2002. He also served two stints as research director for the Chicago Public Schools, first from 1994 to 1997 and most recently from 2001 to 2002. From 1989 to 1994 he was director of research at the Chicago Panel on School Policy, where he led a study of the effects of decentralization on CPS.