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David Kirp

David L. Kirp, James D. Marver Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools, from which this article is adapted.

Recent Articles

College For the Few

Social scientist Charles Murray aims to provoke. This time, it's with four broad-brush, simplistic claims about higher education.

David KirpNov 21, 2008

Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality by Charles Murray, Crown Forum, 219 pages, $24.95

A quarter-century ago, a then-obscure social scientist named Charles Murray hit upon a surefire formula for creating a best-seller: 1) Pick a controversial topic like welfare (Losing Ground) or IQ (The Bell Curve). 2) Make an outrageous claim, adopting a tone of sweet reason and using (often misusing) elaborate social-science tools to impress the statistically unschooled. 3) Give those at the top of the heap license to believe they got there because of merit. 4) Await the brouhaha. 5) Watch the book climb to the top of the best-seller list.

Audacity in Harlem

Geoffrey Canada founded the Harlem Children's Zone as a "conveyor belt" to transport poor kids from birth to college, by dealing with every need. Can its successes be replicated?

David KirpSep 19, 2008

Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest To Change Harlem and America,
by Paul Tough
Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $26.00

It's vintage news that poor kids, especially poor black kids, fare badly in America. Whether the measure is high school graduation, teen pregnancy, or running afoul of the law, wide gaps persist. The impact is life-long -- worse jobs and more unemployment, more years in prison, poorer health, and a shorter life expectancy.

Nature, Nurture, and Destiny

The Bell Curve revisited: What science teaches us about heredity and environment.

David KirpNov 19, 2007

In making the case for better early education programs, advocates rely heavily on bench science. Neuroscientists are summoned to demonstrate the palpable impact of severe deprivation in the first years of life -- recall the horrific accounts of the Romanian orphans -- and to show, with vivid MRI images, how early experience builds the scaffolding for everything that follows, as the brain incorporates early experience into its biological structure.

You're Doing Fine, Oklahoma!

David KirpOct 17, 2004

Thirty years ago, the national movement for universal preschool came heart-breakingly close to success. But Richard Nixon's 1971 veto of such a measure -- it "would commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach" -- proved to be Washington's last word. As this window of opportunity slammed shut, the debate shifted away from securing preschool for all, focusing instead on expanding opportunities for children from poor families.

Scandalous Schools

David KirpSep 12, 2003

"The Condition of California School Facilities and Policies Related to Those Conditions," a 2002 report by nationally recognized facilities expert Robert Corley, is written in stilted bureaucratese, but the conditions it describes are the stuff of exposés. Corley describes peeling lead paint on classroom walls; leaky roofs; deathly hot classrooms, their windows blacked out against the heat; bathrooms "reminiscent of third world slums," or else padlocked; vermin-infested buildings.

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