David Coleman (education)

David Coleman (born 1969) is the ninth president of the College Board, a not-for-profit corporation that is best known for designing the SAT exam and the Advanced Placement (AP) test. He is frequently described in the media as "the architect" of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Coleman was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family. David Coleman's father is a psychiatrist; his mother, Elizabeth Coleman, was from 1987 to 2013 the president of Bennington College in Vermont. At the time Coleman was growing up, his mother was Dean of The New School in downtown Manhattan. The family moved to Vermont when David was in college.

Coleman attended PS 41, a public elementary school in New York City's Greenwich Village; the O. Henry Intermediate School (IS 70) on West 17th Street; and the selective Stuyvesant High School. He participated in the Stuyvesant debate team, and, along with his debating partner and fellow-student Hanna Rosin, now a journalist and author, won numerous debates. As an undergraduate at Yale University, Coleman participated in the Ulysses S. Grant tutoring program in reading for inner-city New Haven high school students, in conjunction with which he started Branch, a community service program for inner city students. While tutoring predominantly lower-income black and Latino high school students in English poetry, Coleman professed himself surprised that "thirty years after the civil-rights movement, none of these students were close—not even close—to being ready for Yale. They'd had so little practice with commanding difficult text [sic]."

Coleman graduated in 1991 [?] with a B.A. in philosophy from Yale. Partly on the strength of his undergraduate volunteer activism, Coleman was the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship (1991) to take courses in English literature at University College, Oxford. He also studied classical philosophy at Cambridge University. During his stay in England Coleman met Jason Zimba, a graduate of Williams College and a fellow Rhodes Scholar, who was studying mathematics and physics. The two became good friends and future business partners. Zimba, who would receive his doctorate in Mathematical Physics from Berkeley in 2001, went on to become a professor at Bennington College, of which Coleman's mother was president. Coleman returned to New York City intending to work as a high school English teacher, but, according to Todd Balf of the New York Times Magazine, when he realised he wouldn't find a job in the field, he became a consultant at McKinsey & Company. While there, he did some pro-bono work for school districts trying to improve performance.

...
Wikipedia