TECHNOS

July 20, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1996 Vol. 5 No. 2

Interview with Deborah W. Meier

Adapted By Rhonda L. Rieseberg

Deborah Meier has spent several decades working in public education as a teacher, writer, and public advocate. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of public elementary schools in East Harlem; the co-director and principal of Central Park East Secondary School; and the director of a new initiative to redesign several large failing high schools. She is also currently a Senior Annenberg Fellow for the New York Networks for School Renewal, a project to redesign the systemic supports that might encourage all New York City schools to be “Break the Mold” schools on the cutting edge of reform. This interview is adapted from Meier's remarks during a 1995 conversation with Phillip Harris, then director of the Center for Professional Development for Phi Delta Kappa (PDK), as part of Education Under Fire, a professional development video series produced jointly by the Agency for Instructional Technology and PDK.

What caused you to start Central Park East Elementary School?

A number of the founders were parents, and we consciously brought that dual perspective to the school. I know most teachers are parents, but it's often true that they forget to think about the parent part of themselves when they're in school. I had stopped going to parent-family conferences because I found that if my kid was doing well in school I went because it was nice to hear flattering remarks. I had one kid who was not doing well in school, and I left the parent-teacher conference in frustrated tears because the school was not helping me think about how I could help make that school experience a better one for my son. I was intimidated by school people. I was afraid to complain because I was afraid they would decide I was a troublemaker.

I've spent time thinking about all the ways in which well-intentioned teachers who feel powerless put parents down. Instead of the two forces coming together in affection around the child, we come together in battle around the child. This is especially true for the children who need it most. They get caught between two antagonistic forces. Instead, both sides should be saying, “Listen, it's not easy raising kids. Let's think this over together.”

Which approach did you use in creating Central Park East?

Everything is talked about in Central Park East. Race, class, Shakespeare, the meaning of life, how we write, how we live, how we talk, how we dress. It's a place that takes seriously the ideas of kids, the ideas of their parents, and the ideas of the larger world around them. It's an intellectually exciting community, and that's what kids need: a learning environment created by adults who are living the kind of intellectual life we want kids to live. We want to introduce kids to the complexity and excitement of ideas.

What are the characteristics of the Central Park way?

The assumption of mutual respect for the youngest child, for the parents, and for my fellow colleagues. The most striking thing to me about bad schools is how disrespectful they are to people in them. In many schools, teachers are not consulted about important things. It's assumed they don't have a voice, aren't able to make decisions. Teachers aren't given time for planning, organization, and structure. The way we treat the grown-ups in school immediately says we don't respect them. We don't respect most principals. In fact, in New York City principals are not assumed to be thinkers or people who are making important decisions. They are assumed to be people who are mindlessly carrying out decisions made elsewhere.

How have you been able to sustain that program?

It's an interesting place—adults like to be there. We also have relationships with adults throughout the country who invigorate us with new ideas. Someone says, “Listen, I have another way I've thought about doing that.” These are just good communities to be in—communities that provoke you, communities in which you always think, “Tomorrow I'm going to find the answer to that problem.” Someone comes in with another book to read, and someone else has a suggestion.

It's a place full of enthusiasm, full of music, full of art. When I'm feeling discouraged, I go downstairs and listen to the kids sing. We have a marvelous violin program and a marvelous choral program. I walk into a classroom and I'm reconnected with the possibilities of what all children could have if we had the will to do it.

We haven't prescreened our kids, and the teachers are not extraordinary human beings. I think they are extraordinary, but there's nothing in their history that tells us they should be. The school has helped make us all extraordinary. It's an extraordinary place, and every place can be extraordinary. We should not be satisfied with any school that we would call ordinary. We wouldn't want our kids to attend schools that are only ordinary. Now, the question is how can we create schools in which all its participants say, “This place is not ordinary. This is something we created, we designed. And if it has a fault, we can change it tomorrow”?

A school where grown-ups are thinking that way teaches kids something about how they can change things. If we want kids to become thoughtful citizens, we have to immerse them in an environment of thoughtful citizens.

What do you see as the purpose of public education?

I think it's to help kids grow up to be the kind of citizens and human beings we want them to be—to create the kind of America that we want. From my viewpoint, that means a strong democratic society filled with citizens who know how to think, who aren't easily conned, who care about each other, who know how to act upon their convictions, and who know how to sift evidence. I think that makes them not only strong citizens, but good and productive employees as well. But it doesn't matter to me whether they're good and productive employees if we haven't maintained a strong, vibrant democratic culture.

What are the consequences of failing to support public education to its fullest?

I hate to sound alarmist, because we've survived other alarms. But I think democratic culture and the notion of democracy is in grave peril in America today. I think in some weird way, the triumph of democracy over communism and fascism in my lifetime has led us to treasure it less. It's an inexplicable phenomenon to me—why we don't feel more strongly about democratic life.

Democratic life requires a well-educated citizenry. I think the original purpose of public education was to create an informed citizenry. The difficult decisions we have to make in society require intellectual sophistication, skepticism, and the ability to ask questions and to really consider a wide range of evidence. We're not equipped to do this, and we don't think our fellow citizens are equipped to do this either. That puts us at the mercy of whoever can initiate the latest advertising fad and whoever has the most money. That's scary.

In a recent article in the Phi Delta Kappan, you said that you see educators poised between two alternative visions of the schools of tomorrow. What are these visions?

One is giving up on the idea that we can create schools we believe in, that we have to turn to somebody else to do it. We just carry the mantle. The other vision is reclaiming the schools and public education and saying, “We have to figure out what they're for and then we have to make the school the center of serious intellectual and moral life for a community.” That means that all of us have to participate because schools are where we make decisions about the future of America.

What do you say to parents who bring their children to your school and ask that you determine what their children need to know?

I want to talk to parents about what kind of persons they want their kids to grow up to be. What did they value about their own education? What didn't they value? We often sit with parents and kids and talk about the parents' education because that's a way of thinking about what we might do differently for their children.

The school has an impact on the life of parents because they join us in this discussion of what's important. It's not a narrow discussion about what they want their kids to know—a discussion that tends to divide us more than the discussion about what we would like our kids to become.

You suggest that schools should be membership organizations of membership communities and not service organizations.

When you come to an institution as a consumer you ask, “What are you going to do for me?” When you join it as a member you say, “What are we going to do for each other, and what are my responsibilities to this community?”

I don't want kids to come to school as consumers, buy something called education, and then sit back and say, “Well, it's your job to educate me, and it's my job to judge whether you succeeded. So start educating me.” They're joining a membership community.

Now kids and families don't belong to as many membership communities as they once did, which is one reason why it's even more important for schools to be such communities. Lots of kids have no idea what we mean by being a member of a community and having a responsibility to each other. But you can't be responsible for an anonymous institution that you can't influence and that doesn't involve your family. We have to have schools that are small enough and accessible enough to kids, families, and teachers so we can imagine that we all belong to the same community and that we're going to explore it together. It's a quality of mutual respect that you can feel in a good school and that you can't feel in what I'd call a bad school.

How do you get parents and students to begin to think about being members of the organization rather than consumers?

Well, you treat them that way. We make the school open. There are acts that tell parents whether the school is a community. Do they have to get permission to come in? When I first started teaching in Chicago, one of the early messages to parents and kids was sent by the school's front door, the dividing line at which the kid goes in but the parent doesn't follow. Rather than assuming that we're raising kids together, school personnel viewed parents in the school as spies. The feeling that this is a shared task is most absent in schools where disadvantaged, poor, and alienated families send their children. It's less likely to be true of middle class schools.

Of the elementary and secondary schools, has one been more effective than the other?

I'm more amazed at how effective a secondary school can be. I would have said earlier that if you don't catch them young, you can't do anything. The elementary school has been extraordinarily effective. The success rate of the kids who left our elementary school was staggering, even when we didn't have a high school to follow it. Ninety-six percent of them graduated from high school, and two-thirds of them went on to college.

But we took a lot of kids into our secondary schools who didn't come from the elementary school, and we've now started many other high schools all over the city. I'm impressed with what a good experience can do for kids no matter what their age. We have kids coming to secondary schools who've had eight, nine years of really bad education, who have developed a lot of bad habits. Being in a strong and powerful environment where adults, families, teachers, and kids work closely together has a transformative impact.

Schools can make a difference in kids' lives even in a short period of time. After all, kids only spend five or six hours a day in school half the year. But a school can be a very powerful community for kids partly because it's sometimes the only community they belong to. We all long to be members, to be someplace where we are respected and where we count. And when a school meets that need it taps into reserves of potential that kids have that amaze even me. So in that sense, the high school is more amazing to me.

What were some of the factors that helped create those successful school settings?

Well, it was a simple message in the high school. By the time we started at that level, we knew a lot about what worked with young children and it turned out that what works with young children works with older children, and what works with older children works with grown-ups.

The same things that help make teachers feel respected in school are the same things that help make kids feel respected in school. First, you create communities small enough so that we can all know each other well. You don't spend all your time trying to negotiate a system. The system we set up is simple, easy to manage, and then you can focus on what is complicated: the ideas that you're trying to get kids and teachers to think about. If you want to allow those ideas to remain complicated and exciting, you've got to simplify the business part of schooling.

A small school can do that better than a big school. Everybody needs to know each other. In a good school, the staff should be able to sit around a table not much bigger than this and talk things out in a way that allows everyone a chance to speak. Half the people shouldn't be marking homework while a few do all the talking.

The same thing needs to be true inside the classroom. A class needs to be small enough so that you can talk things through and get to know what's behind someone's ideas. So when a kid gives you a stupid answer, you can catch yourself before you label it stupid and think, “I wonder what lies behind that. What is that kid's picture of the world that makes him say something that seems on the surface so wrong?” That's a sign of respect. Labeling other people's ideas as stupid is a sign of disrespect. And schools are filled, normally, with people who feel that they're being judged stupid.

You've said that the approach you use looks at children in a way that is reminiscent of a good kindergarten program.

If you came into our elementary school, you'd think that most of the classrooms were kindergarten classrooms until the kids walked in. Even after the kids walked in, you'd be struck by the fact that they're treated with the kind of respect we give kindergarten kids and rarely give kids again until they get to postgraduate school.

In kindergarten we assume that rooms should be filled with things that genuinely are interesting to human beings. We assume that kids have different interests. We assume that they need to share their interests with others as they go along—they need to talk things over, to build things together. We assume that learning is not all talk, but that it also involves creating. We assume that the kids are doing most of the talking and most of the work. Then they hit first grade, and we just forget that that is the natural way that human beings learn and always have learned.

The kindergarten way of learning is, in fact, the natural, most efficient way for kids to learn. It's the way we learn everything else—to play baseball, play violin, drive a car, walk, and talk, and it's the way people usually raise their children. They immerse them in genuine activity and then talk to them, discuss things with them, correct them, and give them feedback.

You've said in The Power of Their Ideas [Beacon Press, 1995] that a culture of anonymity permeates children's lives. What do you mean by this?

A student is only a number in too many of our schools. The average teacher in a high school sees 150 kids every semester and frequently sees a different 150 the next semester. There's a small number of kids in a school who are well-known—the troublemakers and the academically talented—but the rest are unknown. By the time they graduate from high school, if they do, no one knows them well enough to write a letter of reference for them.

There aren't many places kids can go after school where they're known. They hang around the street where they're largely anonymous. Sometimes they join a gang so they belong somewhere. It's not the kind of belonging that I'm longing for for them. Their lives are divorced from adult influences; they belong to no communities. The vast majority of American kids grow up today belonging to no adult community outside of their families that knows them by name, that cares about them, that is attending to them. That can't be good for any kind of America, much less a democratic one.

What can teachers and administrators do?

They can begin by answering the simplest questions: Is this a place where people can know and respect each other? What are the signs that we know and respect each other in this place? What signals do we send out? Would we want our kids here? Would we feel respected as parents here? Those are the first-line questions.

Then we need to ask other questions: Do we respect people? Do we assume that they have ideas, and do we take them seriously? If a kid says, “I don't know,” do we say, “Isn't that magnificent that this kid is capable of knowing what he doesn't know?” When someone comes up with an idea, do we stop and say, “Wait a minute. Let me listen to that”? Do we treat each other as though we're possessors of wonderful ideas? Do we acknowledge each other as talented people whose ideas we want to understand?

What advice would you give to teachers and administrators who are interested in creating that kind of school?

You can't get kids excited and passionate about ideas with adults who are not themselves passionate about ideas. It's the heart of what we talk about in school: the intellectual life of that school sustains it year after year. It can be done. You can take any school and ask, “What would we do if we were starting all over again?” Then start all over again. You may have to do it gradually, but we're capable of reinventing schools. There's nothing that prevents us from doing it other than our will to do it and the political environment that allows us to do it.

Are you hopeful?

Some days more so than others. If parents and teachers don't see themselves as allies around change, as the experts, then other experts who don't know our kids well and who don't understand schools well will try to solve this problem for us.

Above all, teachers have to find their voice and use it. The most important thing is that they begin to think through issues, read, and use their voice. Someone once said that teaching is a nonreading profession. Teachers don't even read in their own field because there never seemed to be any point in reading it when somebody else was going to make the decisions. Well, we have to start reading it, we have to start talking about it, and we have to insist that our voice is part of the discussion about the future of American education.

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