As Assistant Secretary, she led the federal effort to promote the creation of vo- luntary state and national academic standards. From 1997 to 2004, she was a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the feder- al testing program. She was appointed by the Clinton administration's Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1997 and reappointed by him in 2001. From 1995 until 2005, she held the Brown Chair in Education Studies at the Brookings Institution and edited Brooking Papers on Education Policy. Before entering government service, she was an Adjunct Professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. During the 1980s and 1990s and into the early years of the twenty-first cen- tury - as a writer, professor, assistant secretary of education under George H.W. Bush, and member of prestigious conservative think tanks, such as the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Koret task force at the hoover institution - Diane Ravitch was a leading advocate of conservative ideas for fixing America's education system.