In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization [Hardcover]

Deborah Meier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2002

We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust.

Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want.

In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment.

Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While policy makers agree that big city public schools are failing to meet children's needs, their solutions usually involve shifting responsibility to distant figures chancellors, mayors and relying on abstract performance evaluation tools, like standardized tests. From her own experience designing and operating various alternative public schools, progressive educator Meier (The Power of Their Ideas) has a different assessment: schools must be smaller, more self-governed and places of choice, so kids and their families feel they are truly part of these communities of learning. Students need to spend more time around adults who are doing adult work, which builds familiarity, trust and respect, as well as exposure to new skills. Families also need to be brought into the mix, so they're comfortable with the school, the teachers and the educational agenda. Teachers need time and space to develop collegial relations with each other, both to improve educational practices and to model responsible critical behavior for students. According to Meier, the currently fashionable educational panacea increased standardized testing is either irrelevant to academic excellence or an actual deterrent, as teachers teach to the test and ignore everything that's not on it. Likewise, teaching children test-taking techniques trains them to distrust their own intuition about what's right or wrong. Reliance on test results (which are largely meaningless, Meier says) denies parents' and teachers' ability to assess learning. This is a passionate, jargon-free plea for a rerouting of educational reform, sure to energize committed parents, progressive educators and maybe even a politician or two.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

There is a thoughtful double entendre in the title of this latest work by the award-winning author of The Power of Their Ideas. First, as a society, we trust our schools to educate children and to transmit to them a set of democratic ideals. Second, if these goals are to be met, we must foster an environment of trust within our schools both among educators and between educators and the children they serve. Calling the school a "crucible of democratic life," Meier (The Power of Their Ideas) draws on her years of experience at "break-the-mold" schools like New York's Central Park East and Boston's Mission Hill School to describe the importance of promoting trust among all participants in the educational venture, to question the value of standardized testing and reform models devoted to high-stakes assessment, and to describe the institutional factors that can undermine reform efforts that focus on the development of small schools within the public school system. Although the narrative tying these strands of argument together is not as easy to follow as it might be, Meier effectively draws on earlier works in all these areas, e.g., Theodore R. Sizer's Horace's Compromise and Eliot Levine's One Kid at a Time, to create a passionate account of what schooling could be. For all collections. Scott Walter, Washington State Univ Lib., Pullman
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Beacon Press (August 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807031429
• ISBN-13: 978-0807031421
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #748,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Deborah Meier is the MacArthur Award-winning founder of the Central Park East School in East Harlem and the Mission Hill School in Boston. The author of The Power of Their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education? (Beacon / 0441-3 / $12.00 pb), she lives in Hillsdale, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must read for all teachers, parents, and voting citizens!, August 26, 2002

By 

M. Knoester (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (Hardcover)

As a veteran Boston public school teacher, I found Deborah Meier's new book refreshing and especially timely given the grave threats thoughtful schools and schoolteachers face in this era of testing. The absurd importance we give to testing puts intense pressure on teachers and schools to standardize the curriculum. But Meier, with her decades of innovative school-building experience, accompanied by considerable research, gives us what the media and politicians refuse--a peak into the making of tests and their history in schools. Meier also takes us into small schools that have a much higher standard of achievement. They're personalized schools organized around how we know kids learn, and they allow teachers to have a larger role in schools and kids' academic lives---in making decisions and frequently rethinking their practice, in its details, in community, in public. This is a challenging and fascinating book. Afraid I might miss a nugget of wisdom, I couldn't wait to read the book again!

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Common sense, common sense, common sense, September 8, 2002

By 

Ron Miller (Natick, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (Hardcover)

As an educator (high school guidance counselor), union activist and progressive skeptic, I strongly urge folks far and wide to read Meier's book "In Schools We Trust." Not only is she easy to read but she makes sense out of difficult material.

Meier uses examples from her own experiences and links them to the weighty issues we face in public education. She uses humor as well as lofty research to back up her claims. In an early passage she challenges us to bring adults and children closer together ( a theme she returns to at the end), so that children can learn what it means to be an adult. In doing so she has us ponder our own adult culture. For instance, why don't we let children copy? since that's exactly what we urge adults to do (i.e. through best practices) and what would that mean if we did allow it?

All in all a good read, a refreshing look at schooling.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Praise for "IN SCHOOLS WE TRUST", August 23, 2002

By 

Bonnie J. Brown (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization (Hardcover)

Progressive educator, Deborah Meier, a legendary school founder and reformer addresses the issue of mistrust in her book "IN SCHOOLS WE TRUST". Policy makers and communities across America feel that public schools are failing to meet our student's academic needs. The educational policy makers promote the notion that standarized tests are an effective tool to measure academic achievement in the nation's youth. Meier challenges this theory making the comparison between schools that rely upon standardized tests versus small, self-governed schools. Meier focuses on her theory that schools flourish when classes are smaller,intimate and when parents take an active role in their child's educational experience. Both parents and teachers can better assess learning in this educational setting as opposed to one that merely trains students to improve their test taking techniques. This plea for educational reform asks that parents and educators re-evaluate the complete learning process in our schools with the use of standardized tests.

Deborah Meier simply addresses the downfalls of standardized testing and its effects on student learning.