Contributor

David L. Kirp, Professor, Univesity of California (Berkeley)

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. A former newspaper editor as well as an academic, his interests range widely across policy and politics. His 15 books and scores of articles in the popular press and scholarly journals tackle some the biggest social problems confronting our country. His work with government agencies and foundations, as well as his teaching and his community activism, address these issues at ground level.

For the past several years early learning has been his passion. His most recent book, The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (Harvard 2007) emerged from his having spent several years crisscrossing the country, crouching in pre-k classrooms and nurseries across the country and talking with experts in the field-a MacArthur "genius award" teacher and a Nobel Prize-winning economist, cutting-edge neuroscientists and progressive politicians. Excerpts appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the New York Times Sunday Magazine and the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine; opinion pieces ran in the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. The book, chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle 2007 "best book," also received the Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence.

Since The Sandbox Investment was published, he has appeared on numerous TV and radio and shows, including ABC "World News Tonight," NPR "Weekend Edition" and CNN "American Morning." From North Carolina to California, Arizona to Mississippi, he given keynote talks to "children's summits" attended by politicians, advocates, practitioners and business leaders. He spoke at the 2008 National Conference of State Legislatures, the Education Writers of America, the California Head Start Association, the national conference of Smart Start and the international conference of High/Scope. He has lectured at leading universities in the U.S. and abroad, including Harvard, Princeton and Chicago, and addressed the Google Forum (that event is posted on YouTube), donating a portion of his royalties to underwrite early learning scholarships for poor children. In 2008 he served on the education policy Presidential Transition Team, where his work focused on early learning and community schools.

Over the span of several decades he has worked on an array of topic including k-12 education, race and gender discrimination, higher education, affordable housing, AIDS and civil liberties. His books have been translated into many languages including Chinese (modern and classic), Japanese, Korean and Ukranian. He writes for such publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect and The Nation. He is a coauthor, with Berkeley Law dean Christopher Edley and others, of "The Dirty Dozen: Twelve Campaigns in which Race Becomes the Issue, 1983-2007," a report that anticipated the racializing of the 2008 presidential campaign.

As acting dean of the Goldman School in the late 1990s, and earlier as a trustee of Amherst College, he came to appreciate first-hand how colleges and universities are being managed. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Harvard 2005) offers an engrossing account of the power of market forces to shape American universities, molding the research agenda and increasing the barriers to access for students from poor families. The book received the 2005 best book award from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education.

Long committed to developing a new generation of public leaders, he received Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award. On two occasions he was honored with the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Award. He has lectured at universities across the globe, among them Yale, Brown, NYU, Rutgers, Glasgow, Ben Gurion, Wellington, Melbourne, Trento and McGill.

He is a graduate of Amherst College and Harvard Law School. Before coming to Berkeley, he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and was the founding director of the Harvard Center on Law and Education, a national law reform center. There, he participated in landmark litigation that expanded the rights of poor and minority students, English language learners and special needs children to an equal educational opportunity. From 1983 to 1985 he was an associate editor of the Sacramento Bee, and later wrote a syndicated newspaper column. He has consulted with public agencies at all levels of government, as well as with foundations and nonprofit organizations, among them the U.S. Department of Education, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the California Department of Education, the Victoria (Australia) Premier's Department, the California Public Utilities Commission, the Hewlett and Packard foundations, and the ACLU Gay and Lesbian Rights Project. In 2009 he was selected as a Fulbright Specialist, a program that supports experts to work abroad.

His interest in social justice is reflected in his longstanding involvement in grassroots work. He has served on the board of directors of the Northern California chapter of the ACLU, the Shanti AIDS Project and the San Francisco Community Boards, which mediates neighborhood conflicts. Currently he is a member of the board of the Coro Leadership Center, which trains future policy leaders. At Amherst College, his alma mater, he endowed a prize for outstanding intellectual or artistic achievement on a gay or lesbian-related theme, as well as a summer public policy internship and a thesis research program. At the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, he launched the New Community Fund at the Goldman School of Public Policy and has also underwritten a named scholarship.