EdSight

Deborah Meier is an American educator, author, and school founder who has been a leading voice in U.S. educational reform for more than fifty years and the first K–12 teacher to receive the MacArthur Fellowship. Born on April 6, 1931, in New York City to Joseph and Pearl Willen — both politically active, with Joseph running the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies and Pearl volunteering widely and running once for City Council — Meier was raised in a household committed to racial and economic justice. She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an independent progressive school whose atmosphere would later shape her vision of public education, and at the age of nine heard Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Third Inaugural Address on the radio, taking from it a lifelong conviction that “freedom from fear” belongs at the center of schooling. Meier studied at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, one of the few colleges that in 1950 treated women the same as men, and earned a master's degree in history from the University of Chicago. She volunteered with CORE and the NAACP, marched across the bridge at Selma with John Lewis and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, and with her close friend Michael Harrington helped to found the Democratic Socialists of America. With her husband Fred Meier she raised three children; once they were in school she became a substitute teacher in Chicago in the early 1960s, then a kindergarten and Head Start teacher, a founding principal of four schools, an elected school board member, a university scholar, and a founder of national nonprofits. Under District 4 Superintendent Anthony Alvarado in East Harlem she opened Central Park East I in 1974, Central Park East II in 1981, and the Central Park East Secondary School in 1984; after retirement she opened the Mission Hill School in Boston in 1997. She was awarded the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 1987 and has received honorary degrees from many universities; her papers are collected at the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

Meier's governing educational idea is that public schools exist first to prepare young people for democratic life, and every teaching decision should be tested against that purpose. At the Central Park East schools and the Mission Hill School, teachers asked of every curriculum unit and classroom practice: does this approach give students voice; does it build community and understanding of people different from oneself; does it have real-world applications; does it encourage deliberation, public speaking, or playfulness with ideas? Meier's schools were meant to be, in her phrase, “hothouses of democracy” — preparation for a life of free, rich community and democratic participation. She has argued consistently that low-income students of color deserve schools as respectful, thoughtful, and well-resourced as the elite private schools of upper-class white students, and that the failures attributed to poor children and their families are in fact the signature of structural inequality and disrespectful institutional relationships.

• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2002). In schools we trust: Creating communities of learning in an era of testing and standardization. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Gasoi, E. (2017). These schools belong to you and me: Why we can't afford to abandon our public schools. Beacon Press.
• Knoester, M. (2012). Democratic education in practice: Inside the Mission Hill School. Teachers College Press.

One of Meier's most widely adopted innovations is the “Five Habits of Mind,” a dispositional curriculum that she and her Central Park East colleagues developed by reviving an idea proposed by John Dewey. Rather than measuring learning by the coverage of content standards — which teachers, pressed by volume, tend to race through in thin, forgettable units — the Habits ask students and teachers to return again and again to five questions that can be applied to any topic in any subject. They define critical thinking as a set of practices rather than as a body of information to be memorized, and they reframe teaching as the cultivation of dispositions rather than as the transmission of knowledge from a full teacher to an empty student.

1. Evidence: How do I know that? What is the evidence?

2. Connections: How is this connected to something else that I know?

3. Viewpoint: From whose perspective am I hearing this information?

4. Conjecture: How can I imagine how things could have turned out differently?

5. Relevance: Why is this matter important? Out of everything we could be thinking about, why this?

• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., Sizer, T., & Sizer, N. F. (2004). Keeping school: Letters to families from principals of two small schools. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., Knoester, M., & D'Andrea, K. (Eds.). (2015). Teaching in themes: An approach to schoolwide learning, creating community, and differentiating instruction. Teachers College Press.

Meier has insisted that the progressive educational tradition — from Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago through the open-classroom movement of Lillian Weber, who became a mentor to her in New York — is not the private preserve of elite independent schools but belongs inside the public system. Her schools were deliberately designed to look and feel like “living rooms and art studios” rather than rows of bolted-down desks: comfortable chairs and couches, plants, pets, reading lamps, hands-on projects ranging from cooking and woodworking to taking apart a computer or flying a homemade airplane, and teachers addressed by their first names. Following Dewey, Meier has argued that critical thinking should not be reserved for economic opportunity but is the very substance of citizenship, and that Roosevelt's “freedom from fear” must extend to classrooms — displacing the draconian regimes of public shaming, dunce caps, test-prep drill, and corporal punishment that have too often characterized urban schooling.

• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2002). In schools we trust. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Gasoi, E. (2017). These schools belong to you and me. Beacon Press.
• Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities. Crown.
• Kozol, J. (2005). Shame of the nation: The restoration of apartheid schooling in America. Crown.

Meier has been a critic of standardized testing for nearly her entire career, publishing the pamphlet *Reading Failure and the Tests* as early as 1973 and editing (with George Wood) *Many Children Left Behind* in the wake of No Child Left Behind. Watching her own son Nicky reason through test items — and noticing how often he was penalized for thinking too carefully — convinced her that standardized items measure knowledge poorly and reward or punish students by arbitrary means that are, in the aggregate, strongly correlated with race and class. As an alternative, the Central Park East Secondary School developed a “graduation by portfolio” process, carefully described by Linda Darling-Hammond and Jacqueline Ancess, in which students assembled their best work in each subject and defended it before a panel of teachers, parents, and community members, much as a doctoral candidate defends a dissertation. David Bensman's follow-up studies found that roughly 90% of CPESS students graduated and roughly 90% of graduates went on to college and did well there, at a moment when the New York City dropout rate hovered near 50%. Meier has argued that high-stakes tests undermine the relational trust on which inclusive, high-quality public schools depend by taking decisions about curriculum, promotion, and graduation away from the families and educators closest to the child.

• Meier, D. (1973). Reading failure and the tests. Workshop Center for Open Education.
• Meier, D. (Ed.). (2000). Will standards save public education? Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Wood, G. (Eds.). (2004). Many children left behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is damaging our children and our schools. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Knoester, M. (2017). Beyond testing: Seven assessments of students and schools more effective than standardized tests. Teachers College Press.
• Darling-Hammond, L., Ancess, J., & Falk, B. (1995). Graduation by portfolio in Central Park East Secondary School. In Authentic assessment in action (pp. 21–82). Teachers College Press.
• Bensman, D. (2000). Central Park East and its graduates: Learning by heart. Teachers College Press.
• Au, W. (2009). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality. Routledge.
• Nichols, S. C., & Berliner, D. C. (2007). Collateral damage: How high-stakes testing corrupts America's schools. Harvard Education Press.

Drawing on her early experience as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher, Meier has argued persistently that play is the way young children learn — and that older children and adults need it too. In *Playing for Keeps*, co-authored with Brenda Engel and Beth Taylor, she documented how accountability pressures have pushed imaginative play out of kindergartens and early elementary classrooms, replacing it with sit-still-at-your-desk worksheet routines and test-prep drills that short-circuit the “conjecture” habit of mind at precisely the age when it is most alive. “Let's play with that idea” became one of her signature phrases in staff meetings, and she has insisted that innovation and creativity are far more likely to arise from a playful attitude toward even the most difficult problems than from a culture of compliance.

• Meier, D., Engel, B. S., & Taylor, B. (2010). Playing for keeps: Life and learning on a public school playground. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2002). In schools we trust. Beacon Press.

Across her career Meier has treated schools themselves as democratic associations, designing governance structures that distribute authority rather than concentrate it. At Mission Hill School, teachers made most day-to-day decisions as the adults closest to the action; larger decisions — hiring and evaluating the principal, approving the budget — were made by a governance board composed equally of teachers, parents and families (elected by a Family Council of which every family was a member), community members, and middle-school students, with any one constituency holding an effective veto. Teachers then organized the curriculum around three schoolwide themes per year, broad enough to permit varied units and lessons but specific enough to pull the school into shared study, shared resources, and shared guest speakers. Meier has also modeled public deliberation at a national scale, editing *Will Standards Save Public Education?* as a multi-voice debate and conducting a decade-long blog exchange with Diane Ravitch on *Education Week* (ca. 2007–2017) during which Ravitch publicly reconsidered her earlier support for No Child Left Behind, high-stakes testing, and privatization. She was co-director of the Coalition Campus Schools Project, vice president of Ted Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools, a founder of the Center for Collaborative Education, and a founding board member of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.

• Knoester, M. (2011). Is the outcry for more pilot schools warranted? Democracy, collective bargaining, deregulation, and the politics of school reform in Boston. Educational Policy, 25(3), 387–423.
• Knoester, M. (2012). Democratic education in practice: Inside the Mission Hill School. Teachers College Press.
• Meier, D. (Ed.). (2000). Will standards save public education? Beacon Press.
• Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. Basic Books.
• Meier, D., Knoester, M., & D'Andrea, K. (Eds.). (2015). Teaching in themes. Teachers College Press.

Meier's work has made her a founder and leader of institutions as much as a thought leader: her four schools, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Coalition of Essential Schools, and the Center for Collaborative Education all bear her imprint. Yet one of the more sobering aspects of her history is that several of the institutions she founded — the Central Park East Secondary School, the Mission Hill School, and the Coalition of Essential Schools — did not long outlive her leadership in the forms she had built. Each saw changes of leadership and constituency and eventually faced obstacles its successors could not surmount. Whether those institutions would have lasted had Meier remained at the helm is an open question; what is clear is that during her tenure she defended their missions with unusual force, attracted resources, and surmounted obstacles that many educators find disqualifying. Her schools have also been the subject of a substantial documentary record — Frederick Wiseman's *High School II* (1994) at Central Park East Secondary School, and Tom and Amy Valens's ten short films and feature-length PBS documentary at the Mission Hill School — which together constitute an unusual public archive of progressive practice in action.

• Bensman, D. (2000). Central Park East and its graduates: Learning by heart. Teachers College Press.
• Darling-Hammond, L., & Ancess, J. (1993). The development of authentic assessment at Central Park East Secondary School. In L. Darling-Hammond (Ed.), Creating learner-centered accountability (pp. 49–59). National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching.
• Wiseman, F. (Director). (1994). High school II [Film]. Zipporah Films.
• Knoester, M. (2012). Democratic education in practice: Inside the Mission Hill School. Teachers College Press.

• Meier, D. (1973). Reading failure and the tests. Workshop Center for Open Education.
• Meier, D. (1995). The power of their ideas: Lessons for America from a small school in Harlem. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (Ed.). (2000). Will standards save public education? Beacon Press.
• Meier, D. (2002). In schools we trust: Creating communities of learning in an era of testing and standardization. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., Sizer, T., & Sizer, N. F. (2004). Keeping school: Letters to families from principals of two small schools. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Wood, G. (Eds.). (2004). Many children left behind: How the No Child Left Behind Act is damaging our children and our schools. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., Engel, B. S., & Taylor, B. (2010). Playing for keeps: Life and learning on a public school playground. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., Knoester, M., & D'Andrea, K. (Eds.). (2015). Teaching in themes: An approach to schoolwide learning, creating community, and differentiating instruction. Teachers College Press.
• Meier, D., & Gasoi, E. (2017). These schools belong to you and me: Why we can't afford to abandon our public schools. Beacon Press.
• Meier, D., & Knoester, M. (2017). Beyond testing: Seven assessments of students and schools more effective than standardized tests. Teachers College Press.
• Bensman, D. (1987). Quality education in the inner city: The story of the Central Park East schools. Center for Collaborative Education.
• Bensman, D. (1994). Lives of the graduates of Central Park East Elementary School: Where have they gone? What did they really learn? National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching.
• Bensman, D. (1995). Learning to think well: Central Park East Secondary School graduates reflect on their high school and college experiences. National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching.
• Bensman, D. (2000). Central Park East and its graduates: Learning by heart. Teachers College Press.
• Darling-Hammond, L., & Ancess, J. (1993). The development of authentic assessment at Central Park East Secondary School. In L. Darling-Hammond (Ed.), Creating learner-centered accountability (pp. 49–59). National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching.
• Darling-Hammond, L., Ancess, J., & Falk, B. (1995). Graduation by portfolio in Central Park East Secondary School. In Authentic assessment in action (pp. 21–82). Teachers College Press.
• Knoester, M. (2011). Is the outcry for more pilot schools warranted? Democracy, collective bargaining, deregulation, and the politics of school reform in Boston. Educational Policy, 25(3), 387–423.
• Knoester, M. (2012). Democratic education in practice: Inside the Mission Hill School. Teachers College Press.
• Knoester, M., & Au, W. (2015). Standardized testing and school segregation: Like tinder for fire? Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(1), 1–14.
• Ravitch, D. (2010). The death and life of the great American school system: How testing and choice are undermining education. Basic Books.
• Wiseman, F. (Director). (1994). High school II [Film]. Zipporah Films.