In 2013 Kitty Kelly Epstein was honored with the Activist Scholar Award at the national conference of the Urban Affairs Association.  This was based on her work in Oakland, California where she led an innovation in democracy that consisted of 41 groups comprised of 800 people whose recommendations helped to change public policy on land use; the hiring of local residents on city-funded construction projects; the diversification of the teaching force; reduction of mass incarceration; community-controlled public safety initiatives; and other issues.  Her book, Organizing to Change a City (2012) contains a conceptual and practical discussion of this work.Her most recent work focuses on the institutional racism embedded in the lack of diversity within the U.S. teaching force. A Different View of Urban Schools:  Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory and Unexplored Realities is intended to assist activists and academics in understanding and acting on the institutional, corporate and racial factors, which underlie the weaknesses of U.S. education.   She earned a Ph.D. in 1988 at University of California, Berkeley where she received the Outstanding Dissertation Award and served as a visiting professor.  She has since prepared hundreds of urban teachers and graduate students, including many who have since become transformative leaders in Oakland, CA.
Kitty hosts a radio program on education which airs on KPFA FM 94.1. She tweets from @educate2day941