David Milton Steiner (born 1958) is executive director of the new Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and professor of education at Johns Hopkins University. His previous appointments include New York State Commissioner of Education in the New York State Education Department, director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts, and most recently, the founding director of the City University of New York Institute for Education Policy at Roosevelt House and the Klara and Larry Silverstein Dean at the Hunter College School of Education.
He was born in Princeton, New Jersey, to academic George Steiner, a French-born American Holocaust survivor of Austrian-Jewish descent who emigrated to New York to escape Nazism, and was raised in Cambridge, England. He attended The Perse School in Cambridge and earned degrees from Balliol College, Oxford University (B.A. and M.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.).
From 1999 to 2004 he was a professor of education in Boston University's School of Education in its department of administration. He then served as the Director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts from 2004-2005 where among his accomplishments he designed and inaugurated the first national program to fund intensive teacher-preparation to present major, complex works of art in classrooms. He strengthened assessment and accountability systems to evaluate learning outcomes in the NEA’s arts grants programs. Finally, he worked with Jazz at Lincoln Center to co-develop the Endowment’s first on-line jazz curriculum. He left his position at the NEA in 2005 to serve as the Klara and Larry Silverstein Dean at the Hunter College-CUNY's School of Education, where he remained until 2009.