David has worked in alternative education, out-of-school youth education, adult literacy and nonformal education, all of which he says were themes of his studies at UMass. In the early 1980s, following his work as founder and first director of a publicly-funded alternative high school in Waltham, Massachusetts, he was the Director of Education at Boston's Jobs for Youth, now JFY Networks. He was for 15 years, until 2003, the Director of the Adult Literacy Resource Institute at UMass Boston.