2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Meier is wrong, but the debate is very significant, December 2, 2009
This review is from: Will Standards Save Public Education (Paperback)
I surely respect Meier's "putting her money where her mouth is" for decades now. She started a school in East Harlem, Central Park East, and stayed there for twenty-five years, opening three more schools on that model, before going to Boston and starting the Mission Hill School, where she remains the principal. But I feel Meier drastically understates the worth of two things: (1) "academics" and (2) "standards" that apply at the district, state, and even national levels.
As nimbly as Meier criticizes the "academic," there remains to me great value in presenting children healthy doses of materials that intelligent, far-sighted adults have made the cornerstones of thinking, acting, and speaking that pervade the entire civilization. Kids may well like the warm fuzziness of a Debbie Meier school, but the kids at traditional schools will come out better educated: Whatever they want to study next and whatever work and whatever citizenship roles they wish to pursue, they will have the intellectual underpinning to be able to do that. Well, many will; the incompetent and uninterested will not, and here I part company with Meier: we simply cannot keep lowering and lowering expectations and bending over backward so that more kids stay in school and pass.
Part and parcel of her hostility to high standards, Meier way-overstates the virtues of localism. She's against privatization but for a radical localism that is still "public" education only in the sense that we all pay for the onsite administrators, teachers, and parents to design a school as they please.
Now, here's where I see provincialism in Meier: She's in New York and then Boston--how exactly will her plan play out in the parts of Kansas where the "locals" want evolution to be treated as heretical, the parts of East LA where the "locals" don't want English used, and the parts of Alabama where the "locals" want to refer to a great national hero as "Martin Luther Coon"? No, I like the supra-local; I like national standards. And besides, people move around these days, from Maine to San Diego: do we want their kids exposed to entirely different educational practices and materials each time?
So I found it super-interesting in this book that a key supporter of Meier's who wrote a (very good) confirmation of Meier's thinking was William Ayers, who became a key figure in the last Presidential election as one of the "radicals" that Obama was accused of "palling around with" (in Sarah Palin's memorable phrase). The connection for me is again at the level of provincialism. Billy Ayers was a Weatherman who fell in with Cinque and the Symbionese Liberation Army. They did some of the stupidest things ever in the name of "the people's revolutionary justice," always carrying themselves as if they had millions of followers. They lived in Berkeley, where in one particular three-block area it seemed that the whole world was going the SLA way. But at their highest membership the SLA actually numbered 19.
To me, that's Debbie Meier. A few schools in NYC and Boston work because she's there: a visionary, impassioned, totally committed, articulate and energizing. The schools on their own terms work: kids enjoy being there; they design and carry out "real" (as against "academic") projects; some of them go on to college and thrive. So Meier gets on the platform and suggests that all U.S. education be designed after these schools' image. We get away from standards imposed from above, from outside; we make it all up as we go along, making each little school unique, each school responsible only to its own constituents.
Good luck running the whole country's schools that way. What we got is hardly great; the Meier plan would make things exponentially worse. The essay here by Thernstrom suggests why. It's all worth reading and thinking about.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
doctorate of education, September 25, 2011
This review is from: Will Standards Save Public Education (Paperback)
The book came quickly and in perfect condition. I really love this book, and its content is relative to the current educational reforms and state of education. It was a necessary textbook for my class; however, Deborah Meier is a contemporary thinker, and political advocate, that readng this book will help you connect the urgency for education reform and enter into a conversation about the appropriateness of the government's efforts to implement their educational solution.
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5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Standards Debate, February 25, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: Will Standards Save Public Education (Paperback)
This is one of the few books that relly looks at various sides of the debate about standards and standardization. Meier begins with a well resoned reivew of what the arguments for standardization are, and then why she believes that these actually get in the way of achieving high standards. Her article is then followed up with 5 other viewpoints on this debate.
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