President Biden has appointed Ruth López Turley, director of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research and professor of sociology, to the National Board for Education Sciences.
The nonpartisan, 15-member board advises and approves priorities for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research, statistics and evaluation arm of the Department of Education. Ex officio members of the board include the commissioners of the National Education Centers as well as the directors of the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Science Foundation.
“I’m very honored to serve on this board,” said Turley. “As a nation, we have so much to do to make educational opportunities more equitable, and we need to ensure that these efforts are informed by rigorous research, directly engaged with community partners.”
Turley founded the Houston Education Research Consortium (HERC), a program of the Kinder Institute. She also founded the National Network of Education Research-Practice Partnerships , which develops, supports and connects over 60 partnerships like HERC throughout the country.
Turley is eager to use her expertise to help advance IES’ mission to share scientific evidence in a useful and accessible manner.
“We need to make the most of our nation’s investment in education research,” Turley said. “Over the past decade at HERC, we’ve learned how to make research more relevant, timely and impactful, and I look forward to applying these lessons at the federal level.”