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The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons from America from a Small School in Harlem by Deborah Meier
cocoonofbooks's review
4.0
Even though this book is more than 20 years old now, Meier's vision for what public schools can be is no less needed today than when it was published. From her experience launching several new schools within New York City's public school system, she lays out a new way that education can happen, where schools are small, class periods are long, and boundaries are blurred between subjects and between classrooms. She pushes back on the critics who claim it can't be done for various reasons — building sizes, funding, demographics — with evidence from her own experience. In between laying out this vision, she inserts her own reflections from her personal journal and occasionally from the school newsletter, where she transparently shows that nothing is easy about forging a new way forward and that she continues to have uncertainty every day about what they're doing.
Besides laying out the overarching vision of how a public school can function, she dives into several controversial topics, including why she's a proponent of choice but not of vouchers (and what the difference is) and why she thinks we need to question everything we've accepted as the canon of what students should learn because so much of "academics" is self-serving. She also directly confronts the myth of "the old days" of public education, pointing out how few people even had access to education once upon a time, and how even fewer were expected — by their family or society — to make it past a few years of schooling. In forging a new way forward, we cannot rely on myths about the past.
I wish that Meier had spent a bit more time talking about teaching itself and the qualities of a good teacher — there was a lot about the organization of schools and about what content to cover, but little about how, and few stories of specific students. I was confused by the breakdown of the grade levels in CPESS, which seemed to graduate students after 10th grade, and when she talked about graduation requirements being met by portfolio I thought the school didn't give out grades until she mentioned later that they had a dual system that used both methods, and the potential problems with that. This murkiness was part of some general disorganization in how the book was put together — for example, she includes a newsletter article making reference to a "sixth habit" the chapter before she introduces the school's five habits — but overall that didn't affect the power of her larger ideas.
It's hard to say how the last two decades, particularly with the changes in technology and governmental regulations, would affect the ability to put Meier's ideas into practice. However, I think the questions she asks, about what and how students are taught, are valuable for every generation, and certainly still relevant to today.
Besides laying out the overarching vision of how a public school can function, she dives into several controversial topics, including why she's a proponent of choice but not of vouchers (and what the difference is) and why she thinks we need to question everything we've accepted as the canon of what students should learn because so much of "academics" is self-serving. She also directly confronts the myth of "the old days" of public education, pointing out how few people even had access to education once upon a time, and how even fewer were expected — by their family or society — to make it past a few years of schooling. In forging a new way forward, we cannot rely on myths about the past.
I wish that Meier had spent a bit more time talking about teaching itself and the qualities of a good teacher — there was a lot about the organization of schools and about what content to cover, but little about how, and few stories of specific students. I was confused by the breakdown of the grade levels in CPESS, which seemed to graduate students after 10th grade, and when she talked about graduation requirements being met by portfolio I thought the school didn't give out grades until she mentioned later that they had a dual system that used both methods, and the potential problems with that. This murkiness was part of some general disorganization in how the book was put together — for example, she includes a newsletter article making reference to a "sixth habit" the chapter before she introduces the school's five habits — but overall that didn't affect the power of her larger ideas.
It's hard to say how the last two decades, particularly with the changes in technology and governmental regulations, would affect the ability to put Meier's ideas into practice. However, I think the questions she asks, about what and how students are taught, are valuable for every generation, and certainly still relevant to today.
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