The Power of Their Ideas Deborah Meier

...Six factors emerge as keys to the development of these successful schools...

...In some contrast to Meier's emphasis upon expression and pedagogical innovation, however, the Bryk study found that it was an ethos of shared trust and taking responsibility for the community, supported by "an inspirational ideology"- usually a kind of personalist social Catholicism-which were the critical factors for success...

...Does "ideology" matter...

...Broadly similar conclusions about the requisites for effective school performance have recently emerged from the remarkable study of Catholic secondary schools by Anthony Bryk, Valerie Lee, and Peter Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Harvard...

...Are these important differences...

...Public education's mission has to expand as the social supports of children's lives contract, she argues...

...Meier underscores the supreme importance of establishing common norms and expectations, showing by example that this does not preclude but necessitates learning how to deliberate through conflict...

...The Central Park East schools have tried to structure the school day to provide longer periods and fewer discrete subjects to ensure more sustained contact between pupils and teachers, since trust turns out to be so critical to effective pedagogy...

...The fourth key idea was enhanced teacher autonomy, a notion that was a powerful personal motivator for Meier and all her collaborators...

...Next, Meier stresses how her schools required parents or guardians to come personally to register their children, starting a long-term effort to involve parents in school life...

...For Meier, these norms are explicitly those of American civic morality, with a tilt toward critical and expressive emphases...

...And Meier is a realist...

...School reform turns out to raise very fundamental questions about what Americans need and want for their children and their society...

...Deborah Meier writes not as an educational theorist but as a reflective practitioner...

...The Power of Their Ideas shows why schools are necessarily in the business of teaching morality as well as knowledge and "skills," and that they do this in their practice as well as their pronouncements...

...A GOOD PLACE FOR CHILDREN William M. Sullivan This book is a valuable addition to the developing literature on effective school reform...

...Official backing was obtained for her first experimental school in 1974...

...Perhaps the most radical departure from usual practice, however, lies in the sixth theme...

...Meier also writes as a committed educational democrat...

...As the sources of stable contact with the wider adult world beyond the neighborhood have declined, schools have become more significant in the lives of children, for good and ill...

...In a system in which barely half of all students graduate from high school, Central Park East High School has maintained graduation rates of 90 percent, with a like percentage going on to higher education...

...The Central Park East schools place strong emphasis upon a common school culture, shared and developed by the staff, in which "most decisions must be struggled over and made by those directly responsible for implementing them...

...Are there many routes to school effectiveness...

...It is precisely this skepticism about education, Meier argues, that makes the school as a community so important: children cannot develop their capacities unless they can sense that they belong somewhere, in a good, worthy, significant place...

...It is in school, even more than through television, that "youngsters learn their place in the social order and develop a system of responses to their placement that are hard to dislodge...

...Meier organizes her story around a series of topics, including pedagogy, school organization, and relations between teachers and children, school and neighborhood, school and central administration, and the issue of educational choice (Meier is committed to choice but within the public system...

...For two decades she has successfully pioneered staff-run, pupil- and parent-friendly elementary and secondary schools serving the children of mostly poor, racially mixed East Harlem...

...This led to the second theme, that education needs to focus not upon "discrete skills" but upon "strong subject matter," seeing this as the "powerful 'stuff that makes up our common world...

...This focus led to establishing a set of common "intellectual habits" which led teachers and pupils alike to ask for evidence, notice point of view, look for cause and effect, to hypothesize contrary to fact, and, finally, to ask the value questions: Who cares...

...The principal impediment to realizing the high aims of genuine education for the children and families Meier has served is a deep cynicism born out of wound-edness...

...At the same time, the schools have implemented a key idea from Ted Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools: the use of performance or portfolio-based evaluation of student progress, a major effort to focus learning on producing "exhibitions" of competence...

...Why does this matter...

...Lillian Weber, their common teacher, emphasized that education had to be "personalized" but "community-centered" as well...

...It is the basic mission of the school to provide that community and that place...

...Meier and her associates, initially all elementary teachers but for one para-professional, took exception to the individualistic drift of much "child-centered" progressive education, especially the pedagogical theories in vogue after the sixties...

...The pedagogical core of Meier's project is located in her fifth and sixth themes...

...Discussion of these issues is sprinkled with vivid anecdote, quotation, and excerpts from her journals and school bulletins...

...Deborah Meier, by word and action, is helping to focus this vital debate.tal debate...