About the Participants
Williamson S. Evers has been a fellow at the Hoover Institution since 1988 and a member there
of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education. He took a leave of absence from the Hoover
Institute to serve as United States Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy from 2007 to 2009,
and served as a Senior Adviser to United States Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in
2007. Evers worked on content standards on two California commissions (in 1996 and 2010,
when he served with Ze’ev Wurman) and has served on several boards of education. Evers
received his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in political science from Stanford
University.
R. James Milgram, along with Sandra Stotsky, was one of twenty-five members of the
Common Core’s validation committee, and the only mathematics content expert among the
group. Milgram declined to endorse the new standards because of their poor structure and slow
pace, which would leave students years behind their international peers and in some cases
unprepared for college. Milgram is professor emeritus of algebraic topology at Stanford
University, where he has taught since 1970. He has authored more than 100 published
mathematics papers and four books. Milgram simultaneously received his bachelor’s and
master’s degrees in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and three years later completed
his Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Minnesota.
Sandra Stotsky is professor emerita of the University of Arkansas Department of Education
Reform. Unlike many of the testing experts who drafted the Common Core, she had significant
prior experience writing content standards, having helped to develop Massachusetts’ highly
regarded English content standards during her time as Senior Associate Commissioner at the
Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999 to 2003. Stotsky has taught elementary
school, French and German at the high school level, and undergraduate and graduate courses in
reading, children’s literature, and writing pedagogy. She has written numerous books, including
The Death and Resurrection of a Coherent Literature Curriculum and Losing our Language. She
earned an Ed.D. from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Peter W. Wood is president of the National Association of Scholars and former provost of The
King’s College in New York City. Wood is the author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America
Now (Encounter Books, 2007) and of Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (Encounter Books,
2003) which won the Caldwell Award for Leadership in Higher Education from the John Locke
Foundation. In addition to his scholarly work, Wood has published several hundred articles in
print and online journals, such as Partisan Review and National Review Online, and the
Chronicle of Higher Education. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of
Rochester.
Ze’ev Wurman is a Silicon Valley engineer and executive who spent two years in the United
States Department of Education under George W. Bush as a senior policy adviser in the Office of
Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development. He also served on the 2010 California State
Academic Content Standards Commission, which evaluated the Common Core against
California’s current standards. Wurman holds over 20 patents, has 30 years’ experience
developing algorithms, CAD software, and hardware and software architectures, and has
published many technical papers in trade and professional journals. He has a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in
electrical engineering from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.