Date sent: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 01:01:18 -0600 (CST)
From: LindaP (Texas)
Subject: "the Mikhail Gorbachev of American education"

Dear loop members [on bcc]:

http://www.irsociety.com/meier2.html

The Teacher Who Threw Away the Book

The Washington Post, September 12, 1994

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If the New York City schools had not been such a collection of cracked window disasters in the late 1960s when Deborah Willen Meier wandered in, she would have been fired a long time ago. Today Debbie Meier is one of the best-known and most celebrated educators in the country.

She has won a $335,000 Mac Arthur Foundation award, sometimes called the "genius grant" She has helped revitalize the public schools in New York's East Harlem district and has been hired by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University to spread her gospel touting education as a life-long conversation.

But two decades of battles with frustrated administrators, suspicious parents and jealous teachers has left this wry 63-year old woman intensely aware of how often she has faced catastrophe, and how little patience there would have been for her impolitic ideas and experiments at the beginning of her success if her supervisors had been less desperate and her critics more powerful. Meier is, in a way, the Mikhail Gorbachev of American education, a social democrat who grew up with the values of the progressive left but concluded later that some ideas with a rightist taint-- like choice of schools for parents and students-- were necessary to kill off a bureaucratic monster strangling the profession she loved.

As Gorbachev helped fracture the old Soviet Union, so Meier has led the movement to chop America's big high schools into vibrant little educational enclaves, many schools within a school. Last week she was at the Vanguard School, a new mini-campus on the second floor of IS 22 near the Williamsburg Bridge, helping teachers prepare for 150 students sent them as part of the dismemberment and eventual reconstruction of Julia Richman High School. Outside, graffiti decorated several buildings and glass covered the sidewalk where a car's rear window had been shattered, but inside new computers were being set up and teachers briefed on how to change a culture.

Meier, distinguished by a crown of thick, curly hair, tells visiting parents that good education should be "what a good life is like, finding people to have interesting and important and powerful conversation with and then seeing what else you can do to extend that conversation...with more facts, more information and in a more powerful position to think through those issues."

She notes with a smile, however, her recent encounter with a seventh-grade girl exposed for years to the Meier philosophy. The child loved the school, and yet dallied in her classes and did not show the slightest inclination to turn her young life into a never-ending seminar.

She relishes the clash between practice and theory. "She is wonderful dealing with the immediate, the particular youngster, the particular teacher." said Brown University Prof. Theodore Sizer, "but at the some time she is a first-class intellectual."

It is Meier's view enthusiastically promoted by Sizer, chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and their admirers across the country, that students and teachers should deal with each other in smaller schools as human beings, rather than as lines on an organizational chart. Such intimate environments allow experimentation with the reality-based lessons--mapping Manhattan, testing East River water, searching for remains of Dutch settlements--that are at the core of Sizer and Meier's method.

Not that her approach has not caused her, and many others, a great deal of pain, as usually happens when weary old empires break up. Sy Fliegel, once one of her bosses here, remembers receiving a delegation of black and Hispanic parents determined not to have their children molded by a "white Jewish lady" and demanding her head.

Meier recalls the moment some of the teachers who had worked with her to create her first school turned on her when she decided she could no longer leave everything up to consensus, that she had to begin making some decisions.

Her schools remain largely staff-run, however, with teachers often outvoting Meier. At Central Park High School she accepted the judgment of younger staff members that students ought to call them by their first names, even though Meier was uncomfortable at first hearing ninth-graders call her Debbie. "She regarded kids as individuals, an approach that my own teaching experience had convinced me was essential," said Fleigel, explaining in his book "Miracle in East Harlem" why he backed her during the initial parental rebellion. "She cared about youngsters, about learning, and had assembled a staff excited about education. There aren't enough people like that in the world."