NEW YORK -- Growing up in downtown Manhattan as the son of a psychiatrist and a college president, David Coleman never wanted for stimulation. At the dinner table, his parents repeatedly told him that it wasn't his exam scores that mattered, but rather the quality of his ideas and inquiry.
"They cared more about the quality of what I did and the engagement with ideas than they did about other measures of success," he said, speaking in his brightly-lit Columbus Circle office, where a black-and-white Martin Luther King Jr. photograph hangs on the wall.
When Coleman heard stories of other parents who paid their kids to get high exam scores, he said, "I just thought how lucky I was."
Now, Coleman is in charge of the most important test score a student can receive. As president of the College Board, a national education company, he is redesigning the SAT, the standardized test taken by many high school seniors as a part of the college application process. He is also expanding the Advanced Placement program, which offers college-level classes and tests for high school students.
Coleman, a playful 43-year-old man who speaks at an urgent clip, is the most influential education figure you've never heard of.
He is perhaps best known as the architect of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, meant to bring divergent state learning goals into alignment. Public schools