Meier, Deborah (1931–)

One of the leading practitioners of progressive reform within the U.S. public school systems, Deborah Meier has—since the 1960s—been an enthusiastic advocate for education that promotes democracy and diversity. An Antioch College and University of Chicago graduate, Meier's early teaching career was as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. As the founder and director of the highly regarded Central Park East (CPE) primary school network, based in the East Harlem section of New York City, Meier became known as an innovator of small schools that forged creative collaborations between educators and the communities in which the classrooms were based. Serving predominately low-income neighborhoods with majority African American and Latino students, the CPE schools became among the city's highest performers in academic achievement. [Page 936]With no entrance requirements, and including a student population taken from a wide range of skills including those with special needs, the schools are competitive with the most successful elementary schools in the nation.

In 1985, Meier broadened the work of the CPE model by creating the Central Park East Secondary School, a public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students go on to mostly 4-year colleges. At the same time, she worked with author Ted Sizer to create the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of small alternative public schools. Helping to network more than 50 similar efforts in New York City alone, the Coalition quickly received widespread attention from the mass media as well as from philanthropists interested in how to replicate their positive model. Despite the reticence of federal and several city governments to provide schools greater autonomy, the essential and alternative schools movements saw substantial growth. In 1992, Meier served as codirector of the Coalition Campus Project, which successfully redesigned two large, failing high schools, creating in their stead a dozen new Coalition schools. She became an adviser to New York City's Annenberg Challenge, a funding source for educational reform, and was appointed senior fellow at Brown University's Annenberg Institute. In 1997, she pioneered the Mission Hill School, a pilot project along the lines of the Coalition schools, in Boston's Roxbury community.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Meier shifted much of her emphasis to writing, chronicling her experiences in The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America From a Small School in Harlem. A regular contributor to and editorial board member of The Nation, Dissent, and the Harvard Education Letter, Meier has been outspoken about the problems of high-stakes standardized testing and a vocal critique of President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind policies. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987, she has also received honorary degrees from Bank Street, Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Yale, and a great many other colleges and universities. In 2005, Meier joined the faculty of New York University's Steinhardt School of Education. She also founded the Forum for Democracy and Education, a resource center promoting strong public schools through equity of educational resources and the support of, in the words of the Forum, an involved citizenry. In an April 2006 Forum column, Meier asked what modern-day American education was being designed for, concluding that real achievement could not be made without closing society's health and income gaps. Standardized tests, she argued, were based on politics, not on statistical data about the potential success of a given child.

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