P. David Pearson Named New Dean

P. David Pearson has been selected as the new dean of the Graduate School of Education after an intensive, nationwide search. "We are fortunate to attract such a distinguished scholar and educational leader with vast administrative experience," said Eugene Garcia, the out-going dean.

Before coming to Berkeley, David Pearson served as dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and as the John A. Hannah Distinguished Professor of Education at Michigan State University. Dean Pearson's areas of expertise include early reading and literacy evaluation, and he has made major contributions in this area. At Illinois he was the co-director of the Center for the Study of Reading, the counterpart to Berkeley's Center for the Study of Writing, which conducted research from 1985-96. At Michigan he co-directed the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA), also a nationally prominent and funded research institute.

The International Reading Association has accorded him one of its highest honors, the William S. Gray Citation of Merit, in 1990, and in 1989 he received the prestigious Oscar Causey Award for Contributions to Reading Research from the National Reading Conference.

Dean Pearson's voluminous list of publications includes books that are considered pivotal works in their fields, among them The Handbook of Reading Research, now in its third volume; and Reading Difficulties: Instruction and Assessment, in its second edition.

Moving to Berkeley is something of a homecoming for Dean Pearson. He completed his bachelor's degree at Cal in 1963, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. "It is good to be coming back to what is arguably America's most intellectually and culturally diverse and interesting public university," said Pearson. He also began his career in education in California as a fifth grade teacher at West Putnam Elementary School in the Central San Joaquin Valley town of Porterville in the mid-1960s.

P. David Pearson