Deborah Meier on Education

Dear friends, colleagues and family,

A wonderful evening August 17 at Savannah Rae on 123rd and Adam Clayton Powell  Blvd has led me to be tougher on myself!  There is work to be done and it is time to ignore my symptoms and get back to the keyboard! Task one: back to a blog entry every week…or every other?

The event—the last Saturday brought me into the city (thanks to Jane Andrias’ husband who drove us in and out!)! Probably over a hundred graduates of Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS) got together again.  It is the third or fourth formal reunion the graduates have had. It has been 27 years since the first five Central Park East Secondary School classes graduated.

After the first dozen or so years, and the first five or so graduations there were dramatic changes that gradually created a very different school. It hurt but the pain of the loss of the original vision of CPESS disappears when I see these wonderful men and women who came from its heyday. All the women are strong, all the men handsome and all way above average! (to paraphrase the Lakewoebegone slogan). Best of all they remember us—staff and peers—with love and for the last almost three decades have been there for each other.

No one can take that away!

I hope you all have bought the book Emily Gasoi and I wrote last fall, These Schools Belong to You and Me.  In many ways Woody Guthrie’s lyrics, which inspired our book title, sums up how we felt about CPESS and what Woody Guthrie’s song had in mind for this land of ours. Those words remind me again that the heart of a good school—and nation—comes down to the quality of the relationships forged between the real-life people who make it go day after day. As we witness the fraying of a very precarious struggle for a true democracy his words help, just as did this reunion.

I also just finished reading a recently published British book entitled Miseducation – Inequality, Education and the Working Class. Author Diane Reay tackles issues close to my heart and reminds me of concerns we share but also of our different contexts. It is useful to read and think of whether and how it would read if racism and racial inequality were its theme. I think it helps me understand the rise of Trumpism. I believe, like Reay, that schools have played a role in creating the divide that has made enemies out of potential allies.

Which in turn led me to Aretha Franklin and the concept of mutual respect which is too often absent from our schools and politics.

Which brings me back to that roomful of friends last Saturday night, most in their forties but also a few of us in our late 70s on up. And mostly Black and Brown. All of us full of fond memories of each other (and a few probably tinged with regrets). But there was a love in that room that keeps me hopeful. And determined to stay in the long-term battle as long as I can

No more excuses.

Deborah

P.S. The event last week reminded me also that one person’s determination to make a difference is not to be forgotten.  Thank you Erran Matthews For making it happen.

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