David Steiner (academic)

David Milton Steiner (born 1958)^[1] was the New York State Commissioner of Education in the New York State Education Department from 2009 to 2011.

Biography

He was born in Princeton, New Jersey to academic George Steiner, a French-born American Holocaust survivor of Austrian-Jewish descent who emigrated to New York to escape Nazism,^[2] and was raised in Cambridge, England. He attended The Perse School in Cambridge ^[3] and earned degrees from Balliol College, Oxford University (B.A. and M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.).^[4]

From 1999 to 2004 he was a professor of education in Boston University's School of Education in its department of administration. From 2005 to 2009 he served as dean of Hunter College-CUNY's School of Education. The Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, chose Steiner to replace the out-going Richard Paul Mills, who had served as commissioner of education since 1995.^[5][6] In 2010 he approved a controversial waiver of job requirement standards for publisher Cathie Black, for chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. New York state requires that superintendents of municipal school systems have backgrounds in education. However, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's choice lacked a background.^[7][8] On April 7, 2011, scarcely hours after Cathie Black resigned as Chancellor, Steiner announced that he was to resign his own position.

Selected bibliography

• "The Politics of Liberal Education," Journal of Higher Education, November 1, 1993
• "Urban Hero: Wrong Role for School Teachers," Education Next, September 22, 2007

• "Rethinking Democratic Education: The Politics of Reform," The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994

Notes