Marc S. Tucker is the founder, former CEO and president, and, currently, a senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy. A leader of the standards-driven education reform movement, Tucker has been studying the strategies used by the countries with the most successful education systems for three decades. He created New Standards, a precursor to the Common Core; the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards; and the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce and its successor, the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. He also created the National Institute for School Leadership and was instrumental in creating the National Skill Standards Board.

Tucker authored the 1986 Carnegie Report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, coauthored the report of the Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce, America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages, and was lead author of Tough Choices or Tough Times, the report of the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Tucker has coauthored or edited numerous books, including Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations (Basic Books, 1992); Standards for Our Schools: How to Set Them, Measure Them, and Reach Them (Jossey-Bass, 1998); The Principal Challenge: Leading and Managing Schools in an Era of Accountability (Jossey-Bass, 2002); and Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World's Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

In 1994 Tucker was commended by President Bill Clinton for his contributions to the design of the Clinton administration's education and job training proposals in the Rose Garden ceremony celebrating the passage of the legislation authorizing the program. In 2014 he was awarded the James Bryant Conant award by the Education Commission of the States for his outstanding individual contribution to American education.