Professional Biography
Dr. Gershberg is a specialist in social & education policy, public finance, economic analysis, political economy, education accountability & governance, and systems thinking. He is particularly interested in how governments design, adopt and implement policies and reform processes to improve education quality. He has worked in Latin America, East and South Asia, Eastern & Western Europe, North Africa & the Middle East, North America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. He has been a frequent consultant to the World Bank, the U.K. Department for International Development, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, UNESCO, and The Urban Institute. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and Visiting Professor at the Stanford University School of Education, the Open University of Catalunya (UOC), and El Colégio de Mexico. He has been Senior Education Economist at the World Bank and Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a Research Associate in e-learning at the UOC’s Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) in Barcelona, and a founding member of the University of the Future Network.
Most recently, Dr. Gershberg was chosen to lead a five-year research project on the political economy of education reform for the program Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) working with country research teams in Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Tanzania, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. Prior to returning to Penn, he spent 25 years as a faculty member in the Public and Urban Policy Program at The New School, which appointed him Professor Emeritus. He received the lifetime University Distinguished Teaching Award.
