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In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization, by Deborah Meier
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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.
- Sales Rank: #296214 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Beacon Press
- Published on: 2003-08-01
- Released on: 2003-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .61" w x 5.54" l, .50 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 208 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
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.
Review
'A rich, nuanced reflection on trust and schooling that examines trust's many layers. . . . A terrific, important book.' --Mike Rose, author of Possible Lives
'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.' --Publishers Weekly
'Listen carefully to Deborah Meier's In Schools We Trust: She speaks to the heart of a school-and of democracy itself.' --Theodore R. Sizer, author of Horace's Compromise and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Common sense, common sense, common sense
By Ron Miller
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.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Modeling Adulthood
By J. Blackburn
David Blackburn
Director of the Educational Reform Group
[...]
I just taught my daughter to ride her bike this week. I just taught my son to swim. Interesting lessons were gleaned from these familial experiences. Both events were preceded by literally years of work. The events happened in a minute, a fraction of the time invested. Yet, there was one crucial element that pervaded the entire process. That element was trust. Trust is the facet of education that is critical to set children free to explore the possibilities. The fascinating results from my children arrived after the event of learning. When my daughter finally learned to trust me to catch her then she was able to focus on balancing her moving bike. Within a minute she fully committed to her task, my hands came off the bike, and she was off. She learned; then she left me behind and figured out how to self-start, stop, and turn. My son finally trusted I would be there beside him and wouldn't let him drown. He then swam a pool length. He then left me behind and jumped off the diving board, then began to flip and to dive. If we are seeking an educational system that empowers and equips students to independently explore their possibilities, then we must pursue a school culture of trust.
Deborah Meier's book, In Schools We Trust, delves into this critical issue as paramount to doing what is best for kids. Her book is arranged in three sections. The first section tackles how trust must be nurtured between all stakeholders. The second section dismantles the idea that standardized tests can achieve what we hope they will. The third section returns to the larger picture of how we can and must develop a culture that allows the messiness of humanity within accountability and trust.
The middle section is crucial to reference for anyone researching standardized testing on learning. Yet, no school teacher needs convincing that such tests fail to help students achieve their best. So, we will not focus upon Meier's excellent historical analysis. Instead it is the larger picture of what real trust requires and what real accountability must account for that is worthy of frontline teachers' time.
If you have time to read only a portion of this book, then read what Meier describes as "Learning in the company of Adults." Meier correctly criticizes our failure as a society to raise democratic citizens by reducing their time with adults. "We are--in short--perhaps the only civilization in history that organizes its youth so that the nearer they get to being adults the less and less likely they are to know any adults" (p.23). She uses the analogy of learning to drive a car. "Think how efficiently virtually all young people learn to drive a car if they have lived for years in a family of drivers, have ridden in the front seat, have imitated (both in their head and in their bodies) the motions of a driver, have gotten a feel for where the sides of the car are and how close the outside world is. When my mother finally suggested I should move into the driver's seat, I like so many of my friends, already knew how to drive--except I was surprised when I tried to restart the car on a hill, plus there were the mysteries of parallel parking.... Keep in mind that despite the cost we almost never try to teach anyone how to drive except one-on-one." (p.17). Think about it. Would you trust new drivers if you knew they had passed a minimum competency pen and paper test? Would that build trust? Would that be sufficient accountability? Yet, what do we do? We place teachers in classes where they do not model the skills, they talk about them to large groups of kids and then give them a paper test and claim they will be excellent citizens. Is it working? No, and definitely not in the new world that has arrived.
We expect children to become adults and model adult democracy; but when have they actually seen it? When have they seen two adults sit down in front of them and have a difficult discussion around an issue that has no easy answer? When have they seen adults ask other adults for their source of information before accepting an idea? When have they seen adults disagree on a topic and still be civil? On TV? At their family dinner? They don't see it and their teachers are not modeling exploration, innovation, and creativity, the skills that experts agree are critical for children of the 21st century. As Meier explains, " There is no way to get around it; the willingness to take risks, ask questions, and make mistakes is a requirement for the development of expertise. We can learn secretly, but at a price" (p.14). How many front line teachers work within a system that encourages them to explore, allowing them to make public mistakes without punishment? I would suggest very few.
What I love about Meier's work is that is embraces the "messiness" of raising children. There is no silver bullet program or test that will eradicate the need for simple trust in other human beings. If we are going to raise a democratic society to step into our shoes when they come of age we must begin that work now. "For me the most important answer to the question "Why save public education?" is this: It is in schools that we learn the art of living together as citizens, and it is in public schools that we are obliged to defend the idea of a public, not only a private, interest" (p. 176). Meier's provides her priorities and recipies for how she did it at the Mission Hill School in Boston, but her recipe is general enough to be tweaked by any good cook, I mean educator. "What doesn't work are schools that think we can be made uniform, that the messy business of learning to deal with each other can be bypassed by rules imposed by people who don't know us in all our particularities" (p.40).
I end with this, "Like the learning of all important things, the learning of these democratic habits of mind happens only when children are in the real company of adults they trust and when adults have sufficient powers--and the leisure--to be good company. On the largest political scale, this is why I worry so much about--and work so hard to change--the way children are growing up without adult company, a community of elders. In some ways we accept our children's adulthood long before we once did, and in other ways we continue to treat them as children for far longer" (pp.177-178). It was interesting that the week before my daughter learned to ride her bike she watched her mom take a horrible bike wreck. A few weeks before my son swam he watched dad take pointers from mom on how to swim better. Maybe it was circumstances that had no bearing on their world; maybe it was the key to building their trust. "...never in the history of the species did one think of raising the young to become adults in the absence of the company of adults. And, above all, in the absence of adults whom children imagine becoming, or--and here was the key--whom children even knew well enough to imagine trusting" (p. 179).
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Praise for "IN SCHOOLS WE TRUST"
By Bonnie J. Brown
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.
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