Deborah Meier on Education

Dear Colleagues and friends,

On the Central Park East front. The interim appointed without consulting the school community is a good guy whose sympathies seem progressive. However, the “system” undermines even him by rushing the process of permanently appointing someone before the next school year. The process, called the C-30, was meant originally to ensure that parents and staff had a major voice in the selection of “their” principal. But the process is so flawed that no one believes that is what it does. Thus, the interim may well be appointed soon without being chosen freely from all the applicants (or even knowing who they were). The fight conducted years ago, for a more democratic schooling, has mostly gone backwards. New York city, first of all, has limited control given the powers of New York State and the Federal government. Plus, the Chancellor is chosen by the Mayor.  Explain that to those defending public education as public. Like me! But it is easier to have a voice in a system that has some semblance of public accountability than in privately controlled chains with their corporate style management structure and far less accountability. If we continue to dismantle public education it will be far harder to get our voice back than passing good legislation to make urban schools “belong to you and me”.

Which is incidentally, the title of the book my colleague Emily Gasoi and I have just finished: These Schools Belong to You and Me. Publisher: Beacon.  It will be available in September but can be ordered now. It is one of two books I have just co-authored. The other is Beyond Testing, with Matthew Knoester coming out in July by Teachers College (with a chapter by Ann Cook.).

*{Full disclosure). Given my medical problems (heart and eyes) this past two years, the burden for finishing these books has fallen on my co authors.  And today I am doing fine and, thanks to them, both books are now in their publishers hands.

Going back briefly to CPE and the C-30 process. We teach 5 year olds that in a democracy a majority wins. Meanwhile we live at time when our system (with its many strengths “compared to…”) is perhaps best described as an oligarchy with democratic features rather than vice versa. If we counted the votes the Democrats got n 2016 for the House or Senate, not to mention the President, I’ll bet the Republicans lost decisively in all three.  And no one argues that the Supreme Court is chosen in a democratic fashion—expressing “the will of the people”. We spend very little time in school or life trying to understand the complexity of the “democratic” idea —which probably cannot have a “pure” form once numbers go beyond…three? But it would be nice if we thought more about how schools could introduce the idea by being themselves an experiment in democracy.

Enough for now.

Deborah

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