David L. Kirp is a policy consultant and former newspaper editor as well as an academic. Throughout his career, his main focus has been on education and children’s policy, from cradle to college and career, and he was a member of the 2008 Presidential Transition Team, where he drafted a policy framework for early education. In his seventeen books and scores of articles, in both the popular press and scholarly journals, he has also tackled some of America’s biggest social problems, including affordable housing, access to health, gender discrimination and AIDS. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education.
In The College Dropout Scandal, published in August 2019, David Kirp takes colleges to task for the abysmal record on student success--40% of undergraduates at public universities don't earn a bachelor's degree in six years, 70% of students at two-year community colleges haven't graduated in three years. With richly detailed narratives of pioneering universities, he shows that the problem can be fixed--that it is possible to boost the graduation rate and eliminate the opportunity gap. The book has received bravura reviews in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.
davidkirp.com includes updates on College Dropout Scandal events as well as links to his books and articles.
His previous book, Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, was named outstanding book of 2013 by the American Education Research Association. The book chronicles how an urban school district has brought poor Latino immigrant children, many of them undocumented, into the education mainstream. His previous book, Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming the Lives of Children, makes a powerful argument for building systems of support that reach from cradle to college and career. It won the National School Board Journal award for the best education book of 2011. The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics analyzes why early education has emerged as a national priority. It received the Association of American Publishers Award for Excellence. His account of the market-oriented drift of higher education, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education garnered the Council for Advancement and Support of Higher Education’s research award.
Much of David Kirp’s writing is aimed at a broad audience. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, American Prospect, Nation, Slate, Daily Beast, San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee and Huffington Post. In 2015 he was invited to be a contributing writer to the Opinion section of the New York Times. In recent years, he has addressed the American Association of School Administrators, the National Science Foundation, the Center for American Progress, the National Institute for Early Education Research, the American Federation of Teachers, the Cleveland City Club and the Economic Policy Institute. He frequently speaks on college campuses in the United States and abroad, including Harvard, Columbia, UCLA, Stanford, the University of Virginia, Boston College, NYU, Amherst, Glasgow, Ben Gurion, Wellington, Melbourne, Trento and Oslo.
Long committed to developing a new generation of public leaders at the Goldman School of Public Policy at Berkeley, he launched the New Community Fund, to promote greater student diversity, an education and youth policy scholarship and an eponymously-named scholarship. David Kirp is a graduate of Amherst College—a former trustee of his alma mater—and Harvard Law School. He serves as a member of the board of Friends of the Children and on the international advisory committee of Escuela Nueva, a Colombia-based nonprofit that in the past quarter-century has educated millions of children in the developing world. Previously, he served on the boards of Experience Corps and the CORO Institute for Leadership.
Follow him on Twitter at @DavidKirp.
Watch the video Defies Measurement, a public education documentary with David Kirp.
Read his New York Times opinion columns.
Contact and Office Hours
Office 2607 Hearst, room 307
Office Hours
By appointment via email
About
Areas of Expertise
- Children, Youth and Families
- Education
- Race & Ethnicity
- Law
- Politics
- Ethics
- Early Childhood Education
- Higher Education
- Community
Curriculum Vitae
Research
Working Papers
Invisible Students Bridging the Widest Achievement Gap
Working Paper: GSPP10-003 (April 2010)
African-American boys have long fared worse in school. This paper documents this achievement gap, then assesses a number of evidence-based strategies that hold promise of bridging that gap. Those strategies range from high-quality early education and skill-building reading programs to mentoring initiatives and interventions that address stereotype vulnerability. Much of the existing research has not isolated the effects on black males, and the paper offers new data that demonstrates those impacts. A sequence of interventions, which begin before kindergarten and continue during college, is recommended.
Selected Publications
Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System a Strategy for America’s Schools
by David L. Kirp. 2013, Oxford University Press.
No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools.
The good news, as David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there's a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district--once one of the worst in the state--has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix.
The results demand that we take notice--from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period.
Improbable Scholars offers a playbook--not a prayer book--for reform that will dramatically change our approach to reviving public education.
Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children’s Lives and America’s Future
Kirp, David L. Kids First: Five Big Ideas for Transforming Children's Lives and America's Future. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.
The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-first Politics
Kirp, David L. The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-first Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007.
Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
Kirp, David L. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2003.
Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community
Kirp, David L. Almost Home: America's Love-hate Relationship with Community. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000.
In the News
Articles and Op-Eds
A New Way to Improve College Enrollment
The New York Times, November 14, 2015
Does Pre-K Make Any Difference?
The New York Times, October 3, 2015
How a School Network Helps Immigrant Kids Learn
The New York Times, May 30, 2015
Another Chance for Teens
The New York Times, May 2, 2015
Make School a Democracy
The New York Times, February 28, 2015
Closing the Math Gap for Boys
The New York Times, January 31, 2015
Rage Against the Common Core
The New York Times, December 27, 2014
California should give all kids the pre-K advantage
Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2014
Meditation transforms roughest San Francisco schools
SF Gate, January 11, 2014
How to Help College Students Graduate
The New York Times, January 7, 2014
Here Comes the Neighborhood
The New York Times, October 19, 2013
Superman Needs More Time
Slate, June 18, 2013
The Rebellion Against High-Stakes Testing
The Nation, May 7, 2013
Failing the Test
Slate, May 5, 2013
How Union City Is Shifting the Arc of Immigrant Kids' Lives
The Nation, April 30, 2013
The Basics of Better Schools
Los Angeles Tiimes, April 6, 2013
An Urban School District That Works - Without Miracles or Teach For America
Washington Post, April 3, 2013
Better to Fix the Schools We Have
San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 2013
Not All Preschools Are Created Equal
CNN's Schools of Thought Blog, February 20, 2013
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools
The New York Times, February 8, 2013
Shootings Mark an End of Innocence
San Francisco Chronicle, December 16, 2012
Profs and Preschool Teachers
Inside Higher Ed, December 2, 2012
Finances Bleeding Cal State System Dry
San Francisco Chronicle, October 18, 2012
Making Schools Work
The New York Times, May 19, 2012
The Kids Are All Right
The Nation, February 9, 2011
Needle Exchange Comes of Age
The Nation, December 7, 2010
Cradle to College
The Nation, May 26, 2010
Racists & Robber Barons
The Nation, July 11, 2007
Before School
The Nation, November 1, 2005
Life Way After Head Start
San Francisco Chronicle, October 31, 2004
Media Citations
AERA Announces 2014 Award Winners in Education Research
American Educational Research Association, March 23, 2014
Is Public Education Dead?
Harvard Graduate School of Education, March 9, 2014
Tech Mania Goes to College: Are MOOCs - massive open online courses - the utopia of affordable higher education, or just the latest fad?
The Nation, September 3, 2013
The Wrong Kind of Education Reform
Slate, September 3, 2013
Union City Blues
Washington Monthly, July 31, 2013
Webcasts
No More New Education Policy Ideas, Please!
David L. Kirp, Anthony S. Bryk, Janelle Scott, Mark G. Yudof,
Event: No More New Education Policy Ideas—Please!
Date: October 21, 2016 Duration: 89 minutes
The 2016 US Presidental Election Spectacle or Horror Show?
David L. Kirp,
Event: The 2016 US Presidential Election: Spectacle or Horror Show?
Date: September 7, 2016 Duration: 52 minutes
David Kirp Discusses “Improbable Scholars” at Stanford University
David Kirp,
Event: David Kirp on his 2014 AERA Outstanding Book Award - Improbable Scholars
Date: April 18, 2014 Duration: 85 minutes
David Kirp Discusses “Improbable Scholars” at the City Club of Cleveland
Professor David Kirp,
Date: April 4, 2014 Duration: 57 minutes
Last updated on 07/25/2023