GSPP Faculty
David L. Kirp
In The News:
- 3/8/11: Interview with Michael Krasny, "Forum", KQED
- "The Kids-First Agenda," in Big Ideas for Children, September 2008
- 09/05/08: Think: On the significance of good preschool instruction
- Investing in Early Childhood Education: How you can make a difference Keynote Presentation: 2008 Community Early Education Summit Link to Audio
- 02/12/08: Authors@Google Forum
- 10/08/07: Interview with NBC11 News: The Bay Area Today
- 10/06/07: Interview with Channel 5 Eyewitness News At 7 AM
- 10/05/07: Expert Adamant That Preschool is Wise Investment
- 9/07: David Kirp Discusses Pre-K Movement with Richard Whitmire
- 6/14/0/07: Interview with ABC Radio National regarding his most recent book (html page) || Download Audio
- Professor Kirp's presentation for the 6th Annual Monan Lecture on Higher Education
- Interview with Professor Kirp regarding his book, Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
Areas of Expertise/Interest:
- Early childhood
- Higher education
- Community
- Race and Ethnicity
- Ethics
- Law and Politics
Biographical Statement:
David L. Kirp, professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is a former newspaper editor and policy consultant as well as an academic. His interests range widely across policy and politics. In his fifteen books and scores of articles in both the popular press and scholarly journals he has tackled some of Americas biggest social problems. His involvement with government agencies and foundations, as well as his teaching and his community activism, address these issues at ground level. Between the 2008 election and the Inauguration, he served on President Obamas Transition Team. His new book, Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming the Lives of Children (Public Affairs 2011) examines promising policy innovations that span the first generation of childrens lives. Excerpts and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect and The Nation.
From the beginning of his career, as a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, childrens issues have been his passion. The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (Harvard 2007) emerged from his spending several years crisscrossing the country, crouching in pre-k classrooms and nurseries across the country and talking with experts in the field 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 was chosen as a San Francisco Chronicle 2007 best book and received the Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence.
Long committed to developing a new generation of public leaders, he is a recipient of Berkeleys Distinguished Teaching Award. Twice he was honored with the Gustavus Meyers Human Rights Award, for Learning by Heart: AIDS and Americas Communities and Our Town: Race, Housing and the Soul of Suburbia. He has written or edited 13 other books, including Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, Almost Home America's Love-Hate Relationship with Community, Our Town: Race, Housing and the Soul of Suburbia and Education Policy and Law. He has lectured at universities across the globe, among them Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, NYU, Princeton, Chicago, UC-San Diego, Rutgers, Glasgow, Ben Gurion, Wellington, Melbourne, Trento, ITAM and McGill.
He is a graduate of Amherst College, and a former trustee of his alma mater, and Harvard Law School. He currently serves as a member of the board of Experience Corps and Friends of the Children. At the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, he launched the New Community Fund in order to promote greater student diversity, and has also underwritten a named scholarship.
