Kim Farris-Berg
Education|Evolving is a Minnesota- based group of thought leaders in education reform. E|E leaders have been instrumental in innovations such as open enrollment and school choice, the nation's first charter school law, and teachers as owners of professional partnerships, which are responsible and accountable for managing schools.
E|E works to convince those who make and influence policy that America's success depends on creating radically different and better ways for young people to learn and for teachers to work.
Associate
Kim Farris-Berg operates her own consulting practice, where she specializes in policy, program, and process analysis and engineering. As coordinator of E|E's Student Voices Initiative, Kim has written a number of publications that integrate diverse student voices with adult-level discussions that influence decision-making on school and education-policy design. She also provides ongoing development of the Student Voices on Video project, the Clearinghouse, and other student voices projects.
Kim also works with E|E to author white papers on the role of unconventional schools in improving K-12 public education and to document the demand for new and fundamentally different schools and schooling. She contributes to E|E's ongoing observation and advancement of the teacher-professional partnerships concept and to the initiative's thinking about how technology will influence public education.
Kim brings to E|E a broad range of experience advancing new ideas and approaches for addressing policy problems, emphasizing system-level change. Her clients have included the National Center on Substance Abuse and Child Welfare, The McKnight Foundation, Collins Investment Group of RBC Dain Rauscher, and the Mayors Regional Housing Task Force of the Metropolitan Council. As former executive director of the Center for Economic Progress, Minnesota Women's Press named Kim a "Changemaker of the Year 2003". Kim's thought-provoking ideas on the causes of the gender wage gap appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune's Business Forum.
Kim earned a master's degree in public policy from the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her master's paper received the Lloyd B. Short Award for the Institute's best paper of the year and the joint Carlson School (M.B.A.) -- Humphrey Institute award for best paper analyzing labor policy. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of San Diego, where she was most outstanding student in her international relations major and University Woman of the Year. She resides in Orange County, California.