Marc Tucker

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Marc Tucker is President and Chief Executive Officer of NCEE. He created NCEE in 1988. Tucker is one of the leaders of the standards movement in American education. In 1989, he created the first Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce in 1989, and co-authored its report, America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!, released in 1990. America's Choice made the case for standards-driven reform in American education, based on the research done for the Commission in high-performing countries in Asia and Europe. The recommendations played an important role in the framing of the Goals 2000 legislation, the National Skills Standards Act, the School to Work Act and the Workforce Investment Act, as well as legislation in over a dozen states. Tucker was appointed by President Clinton to the National Skills Standards Board and served as the chair of its research and policy committee. In 1991, Tucker asked Lauren Resnick to join him in creating New Standards, a coalition of 23 states, NCEE and the University of Pittsburgh designed to develop model student academic standards and assessments, which many states drew on heavily as they created student academic standards in the 1990s. In 1998, Tucker, with Judy Codding, created America's Choice, a comprehensive school reform program designed to help schools and school districts apply the principles of standards-based reform locally. In 2005, Tucker created the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, to analyze the changes in the global economy since the first Commission's report, and to propose needed changes in the American education and training systems. He authored the Commission's report, Tough Choices or tough Times, which was released in December 2006.

Prior to founding NCEE, Tucker was a senior staff member at Carnegie Corporation of New York, where he created and then served as executive director of the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy. While directing the Carnegie Forum. Tucker created and served as staff director of the Task Force on Teaching as a Profession, and wrote the report of the Task Force, A Nation Prepared: Teacher for the 21st Century. A Nation Prepared, in addition to making the case for standards-based reform in education, proposed creation of a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. Following release of the Task Force report, Tucker served as director of the staff that created the National Board, and briefly as the Board's first President.

Before joining Carnegie Corporation, Tucker was a Carnegie grantee, studying the application of modern computing and telecommunications technologies to education at all levels.

Prior to research on educational technology, Tucker served first as Assistant Director and then as Associate Director of the National Institute of Education, then the United States Government's agency for the conduct of education research. As Associate Director of NIE, Tucker was in charge of the nation's research on education policy issues at all levels of the system.

In the early 1990s, Tucker was Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester

Tucker is the author of many articles on education for scholarly journals, professional journals. His by-line has appeared in major daily newspapers. Tucker has frequently provided expert testimony on education issues before the United States Congress and state legislatures. He is the author, with Ray Marshall, of Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations, which was chosen as one of the ten best business books of the year by Business Week in 1992 and won the Sidney Hillman Prize for the same year. He co-authored, with Judy Codding, Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them and Reach Them, and co-edited, with Codding, The Principal Challenge.

In Standards for Our Schools he proposed as examples of reasonable standards that a pair of fourth graders would design drawings and build a bicycle trailer with a parts list complete with cotter pins and a countersink drill bit, with the minor assistance of a professional carpenter. A high school student allegedly engineered and built a complete operating electric automobile with an automotive motor donated by the power company, with some assistance in welding the chassis and suspension system from the high school shop teacher. More recently, he still leads a movement to end high school after age 16. Tucker is a controversial figure often cited by those who were opposed to the original Outcome Based Education and later Standards Based Education Reform movements.

The New Standards movement eventually failed in its effort to institute the Certificate of Initial Mastery. However, many of states which originally participated in the process created their own standards-based assessments, and are planning to require passing a controversial 10th grade level graduation exam which would deprive students who would otherwise receive diplomas upon completing a sufficient number of credits. New Standards also promoted reform mathematics^[1], a movement that critics believe leaves students unprepared for rigorous study of mathematics for college and careers.