Deborah Meier

As a community college professor, I see the products of today's public education system. It doesn't take a lot of poking around to realize that the system is broken, but not for the reasons that conservative, neoliberal, anti-government folks would have you believe. It's broken because of the emphasis on taking tests instead of learning, it's broken because it's being starved of money and resources, and it's broken because it's being purposefully dismantled by the free market.

These Schools show more Belong to You and Me helps to define the purpose of public schooling, explain how radical public schools were built in the mid-late 20th century, and explains how the conservative agenda has co-opted that agenda to take down public schools. It's a quick read, and an important one. show less

These Schools Belong to You and Me by Deborah Meier (and Emily Gasoi) did something that even few fictional works do to me: it brought me to tears. Deborah Meier, founder of the outstanding Central Park East school in 1974 (that I was privileged to visit when attending the Bank Street College of Education in New York City), presents a profoundly stirring case for the preservation of public education as a place both to practice and to sustain democracy.

Meier maintains an optimism that I show more struggle to emulate that education will not be co-opted by corporate greed. She holds to the hope that despite the current administration (including a Department of Education led by an outspoken opponent of public schools), people can still make a difference. She belives that the opportunity to turn things around, from a relentless pursuit of wealth acquired by a privileged few to a country addressing its demons of classism and racism and moving towards creating a true democratic education for all, is still possible.

The schools Meier describes in depth include her New York City experiment within the racially segregated and financially impoverished East Harlem and her Boston school, the Mission Hill School, are run with deep engagement by teachers, administrators, students, and families. Assessments were meaningful portfolios in which students created projects and explained them to a group of educators who provided feedback, including areas that needed to be redone. My own daughter went to a school that practiced this form of assessment. She worked harder than I ever did to pass a Regent's exam, and learned a variety of skills in addition to mastering content. She learned to present herself and her work to professionals, to deeply work through and convey the thinking that guided her work, to learn everything from how to use visual aids and technology to how to put into her own words the knowledge she had gained from projects that had been done independently but with the guidance and feedback along the way of professional educators who were respected by administrators.

Instead of dismantling public schools, Meier argues for an expansion of their function, making them centers of wrap around services supporting neighborhoods. Indeed, she argues for the value of neighborhoods as embodying templates of democracy.

Meier laments how many of the ideas she and the others who led progressive school movements have been taken over and distorted by the current reformers. Small schools are not necessarily good if they don't serve the community, if the educational process does not engage both students and teachers as learners and listeners.

Voices like Meier's keep me from plummeting into total despair. These are dark times, especially for education but that may be because there is no where that the battle for democracy is more clearly fought. Schools that often are created for private greed, no-excuses schools that put test results (which Meier analyzes brilliantly) above the growth of students as thinkers and members of a larger community and subject the poor, primarily children of color, to a prison-like environment stripped to the bare essentials of school offerings while negating the worth of their own traditions, the takeover of a public good by individual interests, all this is discouraging, to say the least.

The very survival of democracy as an ideal, even if imperfectly realized, seems to be on trial at this time and its future survival is far from assured. Meier's passion and intelligence keeps hope alive that there are people who care passionately about our country and the dream it embodies of governance by all. This book describes education at its best, articulately explains how it can best be achieved, and offers the hope that all children can participate in excellent schools.

Let's hope there are enough people who hold on to these dreams and are willing to speak out for them to preserve our schools and our democracy.

I want to thank LibraryThing, Beacon Hill Press, and above all Deborah Meier and her collaborator Emily Gasoi for the opportunity to read this important work. show less

These Schools Belong to You and Me, by Deborah Meier and Emily Gasoi, presents thoughtful, penetrating observations on the need to strengthen public education instead of abandoning it to charter schools and private academies. Their book, presented almost as a conversation between the two authors, emphasizes several key factors in education: the crucial role of democratic education in a democratic society; the need for an education that produces thinkers and decision makers; the need for show more education through collaboration and trust among students; the need to teach students thoughtful resistance to common assumptions, among others. Standardized tests have no role in their educational proposals. Hands-on inquiry takes priority over memorization of somebody else's list of facts. And so on.
Their discussion is based on thorough research into educational practices, along with (especially in Meier's case) decades of experience with alternative, community-based schools in New York and elsewhere. Speaking as a retired teacher in both college and alternative secondary school settings, I can say that their experiences and advice are very strong indeed. Learning happens through inquiry, not rote memory. Good teachers find out what students want to know and help them ask the questions that will satisfy that want. Collaborative learning beats solitary learning almost every time. Meier and Gasoi explore how to produce such learning. Everyone in a democracy needs participants who can learn and listen and collaborate and act. Read this book. show less

"In these cases, we taught them that they had the right to resist by withholding information about themselves that they thought might be used in a way that was not in their best interest. I regularly gave students the opportunity to practice this form of silent resistance to authority by explaining to them that they should not tell me (the authority in that case) anything that they didn't want me to share with their families or outside agencies because I had a responsibility as principal to show more exercise such judgment if I believed I could not legally or ethically keep what they told be to myself (p. 28 - 29, Meier and Gasoi)

I was horrified when I read this statement; the rest of the book became a blur because all I could think about was Deborah Meier's statement above. She is discussing how she addressed the possibility of one of her "black or brown" students interacting with police. Yet, her logic is so very flawed. A child learning how to deal with institutional racism does not mean they mistrust all authority, it means they must be educated on how to make judgment. A person can face abuse from possibly any member of society but this does not mean no one should be trusted because any member of society might also help them.

As a principal she is in a special position to be a person to help a children in need. By making this statement she basically cuts off this conversation by instilling fear of authority in her students. She forgets that police officers and government authority also help children. Children often lack the perspective to know when authorities should step in so it is imperative that they have many adults in their life that can make that decision for them. Children often fear the repercussion of telling because they don’t understand that not telling will be far worse than telling. Meier is putting the responsibility for handling situations that could run from simple fight between friends or a possible school shooting, on the child. This is far too much responsibility on a child’s shoulders. What she should have said and done is foster open communication with her students so that when they have a problem they feel comfortable talking with her and are secure in the knowledge that whatever she does in response is for their benefit.

I found this book to be a good example of the tyranny of democracy where minority’s voices are drowned out because the majority of the school feels differently. A good example of this is in Chapter 2 when Gasoi tells of a teacher, Angle, who felt compelled to leave because he didn’t follow Meier vision for the school. While Gasoi would say that the teachers made the decisions as a group, Meier’s influence is obvious. In fact I found Gasoi’s sections simple a worship session for how great she thought Meier is.

Also, I found their constant degradation of Trump and DeVoe off putting. If this book was written in 2016/2017 they have very little results in which to criticize. If they want to criticize anyone they should begin with Obama who had been President for the last eight years and then Bush who was President eight years before Obama.

Disappointing and disheartening are the two best ways to descript this book. show less