Education Commission of the States (ECS)

History and Formation

ECS was established by legislation in 1966, based on ideas published by educational reformer, diplomat, and former Harvard University president James B. Conant in his book Shaping Educational Policy. ECS and other reform–minded policymakers pointed to the increasing national influence of political and social forces on educational policy as a major catalyst for The Compact for Education legislation, which called for a kind of counterbalance—a mechanism for improving and strengthening education policy and policymaking at the state level. Conant suggested that such a mechanism would permit the interests of the different states to be addressed and would enable them to cooperate and communicate with one another in productive ways.

Credit for the actual development of The Compact for Education and the blueprint for establishing ECS go to Terry Sanford, who had then recently ended his term as governor of North Carolina. Sanford worked with John W. Gardner, who at the time was serving as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York. All states and Congress endorsed The Compact for Education, and the ECS began operation in Denver, Colorado, in 1967. The Compact created ECS to do such things as collect and analyze data, encourage and foster research, identify models for financing education, and formulate policies for the improvement of public education.

ECS's original vision statement focused on helping states to do what they could not accomplish on their own. Its mission was to help state leaders implement meaningful public policy that would adequately address the rapidly changing needs of a globalized society. Former Cincinnati schools superintendent Wendell H. Pierce was the first executive director. He started his post charged with organizing a series of studies that focused on topics such as school taxes and vocational education. One of the largest ongoing projects that ECS oversaw was the administration of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), from 1967 to 1982, when the Reagan administration moved the NAEP program to the Educational Testing Service.

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