As an aspiring [and failed] open classroom teacher, I followed Deb Meier's career as a teacher who did amazing things from the 70's.
Below are excerpts of a response from Deb Meier to Diane Ravitch on the Edweek blog regarding Broad.
Meier was one of the first national figures out of the box to criticize the idea of mayoral control and I published excerpts from an interview she did with the NY Times in Sept 2002, hoping someone at the UFT, so avidly jumping on the bandwagon would would get the message. I guess not!
Deborah Meier on mayoral control [Education Notes, Sept. 2002]
Deborah Meier has been a hero to those who wanted to see change in the NYC public school system. Meier seemed to have rational solutions to complex problems. As a teacher she ran open classrooms, started the small schools movement in NYC, and set up a progressive system at the Park East complex in Dist. 4. She finally gave up on the system and moved to Boston to set up a school. Now 71 she was the first public school teacher to win the “genius” MacArthur Foundation grant.
Excerpted from NY Times, 9/3/02, Jane Gross, author
"I can't imagine anything they can do that would make a substantial difference," she said, except bucking a nationwide trend of more and more standardized testing. "If the only thing you want is better test scores, it poisons the game."
Ms. Meier said that the current "mania for accountability," with rewards and punishments for students, teachers and administrators, was borrowed from the corporate world. "It's like Enron," she said, pointing to all the ways that educators can cook the books to make attendance, graduation rates and test scores appear better than they are. "When the goal is the numbers," she added, "it leads to distortion of the data. The connection to reality gets problematic."
What would she do? She would start with a small schools movement:
“Clustered in networks of half a dozen schools, teachers and principals could observe and critique each others' work, design accountability systems to suit their individual needs and systematically study what worked and what did not. It would take five years to arrive at effective measurements,” Ms. Meier said, “and probably a generation to make the small-school model and its less rigid accountability methods the norm.”
Her critics, she said, wanted "a faster, more guaranteed route," like the order to lift test scores annually. Her counter argument is that "being in too much of a hurry leads us to do things that are a waste of time" or to jump on the latest fads. Among them, in Ms. Meier's opinion, are putting city school systems under mayoral control, appointing chancellors who are not educators and moving district superintendents to a central location. ��
Deb Meier to Diane Ravitch
Excepts
Full post at: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
I am freer to criticize than my colleagues inside, and shouldn't lose that advantage. As you know, since you hear from these beleaguered insiders, too. Especially since these insiders are the very "educationists" that the new business owners of our schools are eager to get rid of. Their complaints are viewed as the mere "whining" of a defeated species.
So I am afraid. Truly. I think the mayor of NYC, and Eli Broad, are perfectly happy about a future in which most teachers come and go every five or so years. Temps. Easier to manage and harder to organize. A few will rise to leadership positions after a few years of teaching—after getting MBAs?—and the rest of the leaders will come from other fields like law, business, and the military.
I'm not so worried about what this will do to math scores, Diane. What worries me is what it does to the mission of K-12 schooling, plus college in fact, that matters most to us. Building and sustaining a democratic culture is mysterious, and as far as I can tell sometimes it seems to happen by just good luck. It may not be antithetical to getting good test scores, but it's not the same thing. We're not born democrats. It's even possibly an "unnatural" human invention. So where is it—if not in schools—that we imagine the habits of intellect to sustain democracy might develop, not to mention the habits of heart and the social experience that makes it seem do-able, as well as sensible?
....
Teachers from other schools used to tell me—in the bad old days—that they weren't "allowed" to do x and y, "had to" teach x and y songs, read certain books, follow the script. I reminded them that until someone threatened to fire them for insubordination they had a choice, and even then….. It's one of the reasons, but not the only one, that we need teacher's unions so badly.
.....
The biggest distortion of truth that promoters of the current NYC utter is the claim that principals now have more autonomy. As a former K-6 and 7-12 principal I say, "bah humbug". (More later.)
They have the freedom to shuffle the deck chairs, but the Titanic is heading for an iceberg and they can't do anything about that, except try to see that there are lots of lifeboats around and lots of kids who can swim until help arrives. And that's a worthy task!
Deb Meier to Diane Ravitch
Excepts
Full post at: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/
I am freer to criticize than my colleagues inside, and shouldn't lose that advantage. As you know, since you hear from these beleaguered insiders, too. Especially since these insiders are the very "educationists" that the new business owners of our schools are eager to get rid of. Their complaints are viewed as the mere "whining" of a defeated species.
So I am afraid. Truly. I think the mayor of NYC, and Eli Broad, are perfectly happy about a future in which most teachers come and go every five or so years. Temps. Easier to manage and harder to organize. A few will rise to leadership positions after a few years of teaching—after getting MBAs?—and the rest of the leaders will come from other fields like law, business, and the military.
I'm not so worried about what this will do to math scores, Diane. What worries me is what it does to the mission of K-12 schooling, plus college in fact, that matters most to us. Building and sustaining a democratic culture is mysterious, and as far as I can tell sometimes it seems to happen by just good luck. It may not be antithetical to getting good test scores, but it's not the same thing. We're not born democrats. It's even possibly an "unnatural" human invention. So where is it—if not in schools—that we imagine the habits of intellect to sustain democracy might develop, not to mention the habits of heart and the social experience that makes it seem do-able, as well as sensible?
....
Teachers from other schools used to tell me—in the bad old days—that they weren't "allowed" to do x and y, "had to" teach x and y songs, read certain books, follow the script. I reminded them that until someone threatened to fire them for insubordination they had a choice, and even then….. It's one of the reasons, but not the only one, that we need teacher's unions so badly.
.....
The biggest distortion of truth that promoters of the current NYC utter is the claim that principals now have more autonomy. As a former K-6 and 7-12 principal I say, "bah humbug". (More later.)
They have the freedom to shuffle the deck chairs, but the Titanic is heading for an iceberg and they can't do anything about that, except try to see that there are lots of lifeboats around and lots of kids who can swim until help arrives. And that's a worthy task!
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