The New School Graduate Program in International Affairs

Alec Gershberg was born and raised in New York and delighted to be teaching in his home town. He is a graduate of The Bank Street School for Children and Horace Mann High School. He received his B.A. from Brown University in 1986, double majoring in American Civilization and Literature and Society. After college, he worked in the Roxbury section of Boston for the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and then taught English in Korea.

Prof. Gershberg received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania's Regional Science Department. He wrote his dissertation on education finance and intergovernmental fiscal relations in Mexico. More generally, Prof. Gershberg is a specialist on school governance, education finance, and decentralization both in the developing world and the U.S. He has conducted extensive research on Latin America—particularly Mexico, Nicaragua, and Ecuador—focusing on the decentralization of power to schools, communities and governments. More recently, he has worked on similar themes in Egypt, Romania, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has been a frequent consultant to the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Urban Institute. Other current research interests include immigrant students in public schools in New York and California. He is lead author of the recent book Beyond 'Bilingual' Education: New Immigrants and Public School Policies in California (Urban Institute Press, 2004). Prof. Gershberg was a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California in the Spring and Summer of 2001 and a Visiting Professor at the Stanford University School of Education and El Colegio de Mexico. He is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where his research has focused on health care capital finance agencies and their impact on the cost of capital. Prof. Gershberg spent the 2004-2005 academic year on leave as Senior Education Economist at the World Bank.

Since coming to Milano in 1993, Prof. Gershberg has been active in several areas. He teaches the Urban Program's core course in Public Finance and Fiscal Management, the Laboratory in Issue Analysis, and electives in Public Education Policy, Education and International Development, and Government-NGO Relations in Mexico. He has directed the community development finance lab and developed a certificate program in capital markets and development finance. He has also promoted the use of technology in the classroom and received a grant to develop a budget simulation exercise for use in his public finance course.