David Kirp

Professor of the Graduate School, University of California at Berkeley, Emeritus Professor of Public Policy

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

Email David Kirp

Twitter

Office 2607 Hearst, room 307

Office Hours

By appointment via email

About

Areas of Expertise

Children, Youth and Families
Education
Race & Ethnicity
Law
Politics
Democracy Policy
Ethics
Early Childhood Education
Higher Education
Community

Curriculum Vitae

Download a PDF (144KB, updated 09-11-2019)

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.

Download a PDF (141KB)

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.