deb meier

Deborah Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and headstart teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. In 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students went on to college, mostly to 4-year schools. During this period she founded a local Coalition center, which networked approximately fifty small Coalition-style K-12 schools in the city.

Between 1992-96 she also served as co-director of a project (Coalition Campus Project) that successfully redesigned two large failing city high schools, and created a dozen new small Coalition schools.  She was an advisor to New York City’s Annenberg Challenge and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University from 1995-1997.

From 1997 to 2005 she was the founder and principal of the Mission Hill School a K-8 Boston Public Pilot school serving 180 children in the Roxbury community.

The schools she has helped create serve predominantly low-income African-American and Latino students, and include a typical range of students in terms of academic skills, special needs, etc. There are no entrance requirements. These schools are considered exemplars of reform nationally and affiliates of the national Coalition of Essential Schools founded by Dr. Ted Sizer.

A learning theorist, she encourages new approaches that enhance democracy and equity in public education. Meier is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, The Nation and the Harvard Education Letter. She is a Board member of the Association of Union Democracy, Educators for Social Responsibility, the Panasonic Foundation, and a founding member of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation and the Forum for Democracy and Education, among others.

Meier was born April 6, 1931 in New York City; she attended Antioch College (1949-51) and received an MA in History from the University of Chicago (1955). She has received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Brown, Bard, Clark, Teachers College of Columbia University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Hebrew Union College, Hofstra, The New School, Lesley College, SUNY Albany, UMASS Lowell, and Yale. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987.

Her books, The Power of Their Ideas, Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem (1995), Will Standards Save Public Education (2000), In Schools We Trust (2002), Keeping School, with Ted and Nancy Sizer  (2004) and Many Children Left Behind (2004) are all published by Beacon Press, as well as her latest, Playing for Keeps, with Breda Engel and Beth Taylor published by Teachers College Press.

kids learn so much from adults... and so often what adults say don't match what they do.

the odds are that when people do things that annoy you they are just entertaining different assumptions
you have to listen differently

dedicated passionate individuals that want to make a diff for students

a lot follow a system because at least then they can't be blamed..

makes sense in the beginning to be a bit compliant- learn a bit from the experts

Claude Steele.  by mike rose

relationship between trust and testing
the only reason we test today is because we don't trust
we try to find some objective way to codify what the school has taught them
we want to make it objective and standardize because we don't trust.. we get further and further away from finding out what kids have learned

dlaufenberg: @julia try to empower the student to talk about their learning with all the people that are in their lives... its really quite lovely

there are always trade offs - decide why are you doing this? before trading off
1) the only way you should go into any profession - there is no point doing anything where you compromise yourself
2) find others you can talk about your ideas with
3) write, reflect
4) there's always cracks - and there are ways to enlarge those cracks so kids can get listened to
5) there are ways to carve out time  lynn streib - parent involvement

if you are alert to it and if you listen carefully, there are ways to change any situation..

i'm trying to figure out what the language is and where i connect
ie: kipp - very opposite of what i'm proposing, but run into some teachers/principals and wondering if those people that stick with it.. if their ideas begin to change

intrigued with cases where anger was turned into a dialogue/conversation

i love big picture learning - but i don't think i could do it - i'm much more of an academic
keep your eye on dennis littky

came in teaching in her 30's after having a political life

after the macarthur grant - she spoke out more.. she says - more from - after she got the grant - she listened more

we've never been quite fully a deomocracy
we're now on the other side of the line that is very frightening
the decline of labor, etc, how to see how the money interests can be stopped

______________________________________________