The Park City Center for Public Policy

Theodore Hershberg

Theodore Hershberg is professor of public policy and history and director of the Center for Greater Phil­a­del­phia at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­sylvania, where he has taught since 1967. He served as assist­ant to the Mayor (Phila­delphia) for Stra­tegic Plan­ning and Policy De­vel­op­ment dur­ing a leave from Penn (1984-85). He was act­ing dean of Penn’s School of Pub­lic and Ur­ban Policy and holds MA and PhD de­­grees in American his­tory from Stan­ford Uni­ver­­sity and stud­ied sociology at Colum­bia Uni­­versity as a Social Science Research Council Fel­low.

In his long career at Penn, Hershberg has had three major research interests: education reform, regional cooperation and urban-industrial transformation. Hershberg founded Oper­a­tion Pub­lic Edu­ca­tion in 2000 to develop a new set of rules and incentives to govern K-12. OPE is now in­troducing its model for com­pre­hen­­sive school re­form to education stakeholders across the nation.  From 1981 to 1995, Hershberg pur­sued applied public policy with a focus on regions. After re­turn­ing to Penn from his leave in 1985, he founded the Cen­ter for Greater Phil­a­del­phia (CGP) to pro­mote re­gional co­opera­tion in met­ropolitan Phil­a­del­phia. As a neutral third-party con­vener, the CGP pro­vides ob­jective anal­y­sis and jar­gon-free re­ports on key pub­lic policy is­sues. From 1969 to 1981, Hershberg founded and directed the Phila­­del­phia Social His­tory Project, a cross-disci­pli­nary research effort sup­­­ported by 11 federal research grants that re­sul­­ted in the pub­lica­tion of several books, over one hundred arti­cles and papers, and six­teen doc­toral dis­ser­ta­tions in five dis­ci­plines.