A Call For The College Board To Oust David Coleman
When David Coleman joined the College Board as CEO and president in 2012, it must have seemed like a natural step forward; he had overseen the redesign of K-12 education via the Common Core standards, and now he could use the leverage of College Board’s flagship programs—AP courses and the SAT—to extend his vision to college.
It has not worked out well.
Coleman’s tenure has been marked by a number of unforced errors, from a clunky too-fast-to-market SAT redesign right up through the recent fiasco of take-it-from-home AP tests, which has led to a lawsuit. In 2018, Coleman issued a response in the wake of the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High shootings that seemed to treat the tragedy as a marketing opportunity; more recently, the College Board issued some information on SAT sign-ups that included a perfunctory response to the current headlines about racial unrest. In 2018, the tone-deaf statement was followed by calls for Coleman’s ouster, and early in 2019 Coleman handed the President position off to Jeremy Singer, staying on as CEO. Now, calls for his removal are once again surfacing.
Some calls have been in the quiet back country of social media, but in a May 29 open letter to College Board trustees, Jon Boeckenstedt, Vice Provost of Enrollment Management at Oregon State University, called for “a change at the top” for the company. Boeckenstedt includes a “partial list of the embarrassing or educationally unsound things that have happened on his watch.”CONTINUE READING: A Call For The College Board To Oust David Coleman
