Kimberly J. Robinson
Kimberly Jenkins Robinson is a national expert who speaks domestically and internationally about educational equity, equal educational opportunity, civil rights and the federal role in education. Her scholarship has been published widely in leading journals and proposes innovative legal and policy solutions for ensuring that all children receive equal access to an excellent education. In 2019, New York University Press published her second edited book, “A Federal Right to Education: Fundamental Questions for Our Democracy,” which gathers leading constitutional and education law scholars to consider the challenging questions raised by recognizing a federal right to education in the United States. In 2015, Harvard Education Press published her book that was co-edited with Professor Charles Ogletree Jr. of Harvard Law School, titled “The Enduring Legacy of Rodriguez: Creating New Pathways to Equal Educational Opportunity.” Robinson’s article, “Disrupting Education Federalism” and published in the Washington University Law Review, won the 2016 Steven S. Goldberg Award for distinguished scholarship in education law from the Education Law Association. This article argues that the United States should reconstruct its understanding of education federalism to support a national effort to ensure equal access to an excellent education. Robinson published “Fisher’s Cautionary Tale and the Urgent Need for Equal Access to an Excellent Education” in the November 2016 issue of the Harvard Law Review, which analyzes the legal and policy issues regarding the challenge to the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin. In 2016, she published an article in the Stanford Law and Policy Review, titled “No Quick Fix for Equity and Excellence: The Virtues of Incremental Shifts in Education Federalism,” that proposes how the federal government could incrementally increase its influence over education in ways that would promote equity and excellence in school funding. Her scholarship has appeared in the University of Chicago Law Review, Boston College Law Review, William and Mary Law Review and UC Davis Law Review, among other venues. Robinson was a visiting professor at the George Washington University Law School in spring 2017, where she taught Race, Racism and the Law. She is a senior fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, a leading think tank on education policy, where she is working with Linda Darling-Hammond on issues related to educational access and equality.