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Bill Evers was confirmed as assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development by the U.S. Senate on Oct. 16, 2007. In this position, he serves as an adviser to Secretary Margaret Spellings on K-12 and postsecondary education policy.

Evers runs the Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development (OPEPD), which coordinates policy and budget activities with the Department's principal offices as well as with the Office of Management and Budget, the House and Senate education committees, and state education agencies. OPEPD is home to the Department's Budget Service, the Performance Information Management Service, the Policy and Program Studies Service, the Office of Educational Technology and the Family Policy Compliance Office, which works to protect student privacy.

A specialist in research on education policy-especially policy pertaining to curriculum, testing, accountability and school finance-Evers joined the Department in February 2007, as a senior adviser to the secretary. Since that time, he has worked on new rules for the privacy of student records and on "Doing What Works," a new ED.GOV Web site for teachers, which assists them in using proven methods in classrooms.

Born in California, Evers attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in political science in 1972, his master's in 1978, and his Ph.D. in 1987. During 1987-88, he taught political science at Emory University in Atlanta.

Evers became a visiting scholar at Stanford's Hoover Institution in 1989 and, in 1995, was named a research fellow there-a post from which he is currently on leave. At Hoover, he has also been a member of its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education.

From 1995 to 1998, Evers taught as an adjunct associate professor at Santa Clara University, and, for seven years starting in 1997, he also served on the board of the East Palo Alto, Calif., Charter School.

In 2003, Evers was a senior adviser to Ambassador Paul Bremer in Baghdad, helping to restart the Iraqi school system, which has nearly 6 million students and 145,000 employees.

In November 2004, Evers was elected to the Santa Clara County Board of Education, on which he served until his nomination as assistant secretary by President Bush in February 2007.

Throughout his career, Evers has served on advisory, policymaking and grant-reviewing boards and commissions at the local, state and federal levels. From 1996 to 1998, he served on the California State Academic Standards Commission, which drafted grade-level content standards for the state's public schools. Evers served on the subcommittees for mathematics and science standards.

Hoover Institution Press has published a number of books that Evers has edited or co-edited: National Service (1990); What's Gone Wrong in America's Classrooms (1998); School Reform (2001); School Accountability (2002); Teacher Quality (2002); and Testing Student Learning, Evaluating Teaching Effectiveness (2004).

The author of many articles on education reform and other topics, Evers' work has appeared in such periodicals as Education Week, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor. From 2000 to 2007, he served on the editorial board of Education Next, which is jointly published by Hoover and a program at Harvard University.

Evers is married to Anna Bryson Evers, who serves on a local school board in California. He has two children who graduated from California public schools-a son who recently graduated from the University of California at San Diego with a degree in political science and a daughter majoring in history at Yale. He lives in Washington, D.C.