February 2, 2004
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417
AMHERST, Mass.- Richard D. Kahlenberg, one of the nation's leading writers on education, equal opportunity and civil rights, and author of All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice (2001), a call for socioeconomic desegregation of U.S. public schools, will speak on that topic on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 4 p.m. in Porter Lounge in Converse Hall at Amherst College. The talk, sponsored by the Office of the President at Amherst, is free and open to the public.
Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, has been a fellow at the Center for National Policy, a visiting associate professor of constitutional law at George Washington University and a legislative assistant to Senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). His earlier books are The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (1996) and Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School (1992).
Writing in The New York Times, William Julius Wilson praised The Remedy as "by far the most comprehensive and thoughtful argument thus far for...affirmative action based on class." The Los Angeles Times called Broken Contract, a story of idealistic law students turned into corporate lawyers, "a forceful cri de coeur."
Kahlenberg has edited four Century Foundation books: America's Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education (2004), Public School Choice vs. Private School Vouchers (2003), Divided We Fail: Coming Together Through Public School Choice (2002) and A Notion at Risk: Preserving Public Education as an Engine for Social Mobility (2000). He is currently working on a biography of educator Albert Shanker.
Kahlenberg also writes on education and affirmative action for The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New Republic, and speaks frequently in broadcast media. After his undergraduate work at Harvard College and before Harvard Law School, Kahlenberg spent a year at the University of Nairobi School of Journalism as a Rotary Scholar.
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