Bios & Featured Individuals
Gaston Caperton
President, The College Board
Gaston Caperton is the eighth president of the College Board, a not–for–profit membership association founded in 1900 that consists of more than 5,600 of the nation's leading schools, colleges and universities, and other educational organizations. Each year the College Board serves more than seven million students and their parents, and hundreds of thousands of teachers, school counselors and administrators in more than 23,000 high schools and 3,800 colleges across America. A former two–term governor of West Virginia, Caperton was appointed to his current position in 1999.
Gaston Caperton is a lifetime advocate for the importance of excellence and equity in education. He transformed the College Board from an assessment company into a mission–driven, values–oriented organization that takes bold steps to connect greater numbers of students to college success and opportunity, while raising educational standards in schools across the nation.
Among the organization's best-known programs are the Advanced Placement Program® (AP®), the PSAT/NMSQT® and the SAT®. Caperton's most notable accomplishments include establishing the AP Program as a national standard for high school rigor and college readiness; more than tripling the number of students from low-income backgrounds taking AP courses; dramatically changing the SAT by adding a new writing section that elevated the importance of writing on the nation's education agenda; creating the College Readiness System™, a comprehensive, integrated set of programs, tools and resources to help build a college readiness culture in districts and schools across the nation; and developing the College Board Standards for College Success™ to drive rigor in American schools.
For the last decade, the College Board has accelerated its efforts to help more traditionally underserved students enter the college pipeline. Caperton believes that the "single most un-American aspect of our great society is the lack of truly equal educational opportunity." With a firm conviction that a quality education opens the door to greater opportunity and equality, Caperton led the organization to place a strong focus on helping more low-income, minority and first-generation college students gain access to higher education. Under Caperton’s leadership, College Board Schools were opened to prepare underserved middle and high school students for success in college. With the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates and the Michael & Susan Dell foundations, the first schools were introduced in New York City's public school system in 2004. There are currently 17 College Board Schools in New York City and in Yonkers, Rochester and Buffalo, N.Y.
Gaston Caperton's vision includes an appreciation of globalization's influence on education. He initiated a new series of AP world language and culture courses and embarked on a historic education exchange program with the Confucius Institute Headquarters (Hanban) in China. Known as the Chinese Language and Culture Initiative, the program is helping to support the growth of Chinese-language education in U.S. schools, and to build a solid foundation for the AP Chinese World Language and Culture course and exam. The initiative also brings teachers from China to teach in U.S. schools for one to three years, and sends delegations of U.S. educators to visit China to learn about its education and culture.
Throughout his career, education has remained a priority. In his two terms as governor from 1988 to 1996, Caperton brought West Virginia back from the brink of bankruptcy and made significant improvements to the education system. The state went from carrying more than $500 million in debt, to boasting a $100 million surplus; and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 percent to a low of 6.2 percent. He supported an aggressive school–building–and–renovation program directly benefiting two–thirds of West Virginia's public school students. Teachers' salaries in West Virginia were raised from 49th to 31st in the nation. He developed programs promoting the use of computers in the public schools, beginning with kindergarten. By 1996, West Virginia's advances in education technology were second to none.
While in office, Caperton served as chair of the Democratic Governors Association and on the National Governors Association Executive Committee. After leaving office, he taught at Harvard University and later taught at Columbia University, where he founded and managed the Institute on Education and Government.
Caperton began his career as a businessman in his home state of West Virginia. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he went to work for an insurance agency in Charleston and soon became the company’s principal owner. Through his leadership, the small local company became the 10th–largest privately owned insurance brokerage firm in the nation. Caperton currently serves on boards of major corporations, including Owens Corning and Prudential Financial Inc.
Gaston Caperton's leadership, public service and work on behalf of education have been recognized with numerous state and national awards, including 10 honorary doctoral degrees. In 2007, he received the prestigious James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States in recognition of his significant contributions to the quality of education in the United States.
Trevor Packer
Named vice president in 2007, Packer previously served as executive director of the AP Program, where for four years he managed its growth and national expansion and worked to strengthen the overall quality and reputation. Most notably, he enacted plans to increase services for small rural schools, double the number of AP courses in world languages and cultures, and align AP curricula and assessments with best practices at colleges and universities.
Before serving as executive director, he was manager of the AP Program's policy and processes, overseeing day–to–day management of the printing, shipping and scoring of the AP Exams and the administration of the AP Exams at 15,000 schools annually.
A former instructor in composition and literature at Brigham Young University and John Jay College, Packer has authored a manual on composition pedagogy, and published works on author Willa Cather and abolitionist Sojourner Truth.