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Education Department To Create Two Offices
Move to Combine Scattered Programs
By Brian Faler, The
Washington Post, September 23, 2002
For more articles on disabilities and special ed visit
www.bridges4kids.org.
The Department of Education announced last week some
reorganization plans that will allow it to create two offices:
one to run its experimental programs and another to coordinate
programs designed to help ensure that the nation's classrooms
are safe.
The Office of Innovation and Improvement will gather almost 30
experimental and pilot programs scattered within the
bureaucracy. Those initiatives range from those intended to
help prevent teenagers from dropping out of school to those
assisting charter and magnet schools.
The office is slated to receive about $2 billion and employ
about 100 people. It will be run by Nina Shokraii Rees, a
domestic policy adviser to Vice President Cheney and a former
education analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
The other office, the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools,
will gather 10 programs the agency runs to help prevent
violence and drug and alcohol use, and foster good character
and citizenship.
The division, which will also spearhead the agency's contacts
with the Department of Homeland Security, is scheduled to
receive about $500 million and employ about 50 people. The
office will be run by Eric Andell, a former Texas appeals
court justice and a senior adviser to Education Secretary
Roderick R. Paige.
Deputy Secretary William Hansen said the moves, which will
take effect Oct. 1, are needed to implement President Bush's
"No Child Left Behind" education program that was signed into
law last winter, to eliminate redundancies within the agency
and to allow department offices to better focus on their
individual missions.
Most of the programs being transferred had been housed within
either the department's Office of Elementary and Secondary
Education or the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement.
Hansen said the changes will not add to the overall budget or
cause any programs to be cut. He called the costs associated
with the moves minimal.
Reggie Weaver, president of the National Education
Association, said it is too early to judge the wisdom of the
changes. But he said he favors any programs that help ensure
the nation's children get a decent education.
A Democratic congressional aide wasn't so generous,
questioning whether the offices would be used to push some of
Bush's more controversial education policies.
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