David Coleman, widely acknowledged as the “architect” of the Common Core standards, was selected last year as CEO of the College Board. He announced recently that the SAT will be redesigned to reflect the Common Core.

Get to know David Coleman.

He is now the de facto controller of American education. He decided what your child in kindergarten should know and do. He decided what children in every grade should know and do. He has decided how they should be tested. Now he will decide what students need to know if they want to go to college. He had some help. But make no mistake: he is the driving force that is changing what and how your children and your students learn.

Coleman, whose mother is president of Bennington College, graduated from Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He then worked for McKinsey.

He created the Grow Network, an assessment program that he sold to McGraw-Hill in 2005, reportedly for $14 million.

He left McGraw-Hill in 2007 and founded Student Achievement Partners, funded by the Gates Foundation and others, which led the writing of the Common Core standards.

He was chosen to lead the College Board in 2012. The NewSchools Venture Fund, a leading corporate reform group that supports the expansion of charter schools, named Coleman as one of its “Change Agents of the Year” in 2012.

He was a founding board member and treasurer of Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, along with Jason Zimba, who led the writing of the Common Core math standards. The only other member of Rhee’s board was also a member of Coleman’s staff.

In the history of American education, there has never been anyone like David Coleman. He has fashioned the nation’s standards and curriculum. Others have tried and failed. Will his vision change the schools for the better? We will know more later.

A reader posted a comment yesterday wondering why so many who read this blog are opposed to reading non-fiction, or in the jargon of the day, “informational text.”

This is a reference to the debate about the Common Core standards, which mandate a 50-50 split between literary/informational text in lower grades, and a 70-30 split in high school grades.

Let me clarify my own view, as well as what I have derived from hundreds of comments by parents and teachers. No one opposes reading non-fiction. You are reading an informational text right now! Teachers of science, history, and mathematics have always assigned informational texts. Few such classes read fiction. So the question comes down to what the English teacher assigns. Probably, if the English teacher assigned 100% fiction, the student would still be reading far more informational text in the course of a week than literature, because of the texts assigned in every other class.

The part that puzzles me is why a quasi-official body, the group that wrote the standards, whose edicts now have the power of the state to enforce them, thought it necessary or wise to create a numerical formula for English teachers. No one else teaches literature. The math teachers don’t. Neither do the civics teachers. (Frankly, it would be great if history teachers introduced fiction–like “Grapes of Wrath”– into their classes to help students get a sense of the lives that people led in other times.)

But sorry, I just don’t get the metrics. Whose wisdom decided on 50-50 and 70-30? Who will police the classrooms? Where is the evidence that these ratios are better than some other ratio or none at all?

I just posted an article written by David Coleman and Susan Pimentel, explaining that the Common Core standards are not antagonistic to literature and fiction, and that they promote a higher quality of both fiction and nonfiction.

Within minutes, I received a post from Sandra Stotsky, expressing her vehement opposition to the Common Core standards. Stotsky was in charge of the development of the highly praised Massachusetts standards. The English standards in that state were especially strong on literature. Stotsky is still upset that Massachusetts replaced them with the Common Core.

Read them both. Then read the standards.

The problem is that, no matter what Coleman may say, publishers and districts believe the standards call for more informational text and less literature and fiction.

That is why the only way the sniping will end is if he makes a speech at a major conference or writes an opinion piece for the New York Times–or literally revises the standards–to remove those absurd and arbitrary percentage allocations and makes clear that the point is high-quality reading of both fiction and information. And explains why both are important for the development of educated people.

An article appeared in a British newspaper claiming that such books as “Catcher in the Rye” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be dropped from the curriculum because of the Common Core standards.

Says the Daily Telegraph: “Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California’s Invasive Plant Council.”

I don’t think any of this is true, but there is only one person who can stop the nonsense, and that is David Coleman. Coleman was in charge of the development of the standards. He is now president of the College Board.

It was Coleman who decided that our students are not reading enough “informational text,” and too much fiction.

I don’t know of any national standards that set an arbitrary ratio of 50-50 or 70-30.

No standards are written in stone. They must evolve to reflect reality and wisdom.

Please, David, make a strong and unequivocal statement.

Abolish those arbitrary quotas for nonfiction and fiction.

They make no sense and they are becoming a national–and yes–an international embarrassment.