Ever since self-appointed watchdogs from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency began slashing jobs and contracts at the U.S. Department of Education in February, Mark Schneider has served as a valuable touchstone, helping put the radical budget and programmatic changes in context as well as reimagining education research.

But while some of the cuts are, in his words, “dumb,” and show a lack of experience among the cost-cutters, Schneider has also pushed against many critics’ assertions that the Trump administration will effectively destroy the agency. In his view, the cuts offer an opportunity “to clean out the attic” of old, dusty policies and revitalize essential research functions, reimagining education research. Those include the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which he maintains has lost its way and grown prohibitively expensive while in some cases duplicating the work of independent researchers.

A conservative who has held top roles in both of the last two Republican administrations, as well as the most recent Democratic one, he’s the ultimate education insider — Schneider’s conversations often invoke an alphabet soup of government agencies, contractors and think tanks. Yet he’s unusually candid about his time in government, especially now that he is no longer there.

A political scientist by training, Schneider has spent nearly two decades in education research. He served three years as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics under President George W. Bush, then spent a decade as a vice president at the non-profit American Institutes for Research. He returned to government in 2018, appointed by President Trump to lead the Institute of Education Sciences, and stayed on until 2024 under President Biden.

Through it all, he has remained an independent voice even while in office, telling The 74 in 2023, for instance, that the reason Biden hadn’t fired him along with other Trump appointees was that education research wasn’t considered important enough for the president to bother.

Read the full article about reimagining education research by Greg Toppo at The 74.