My dear friend of many years,
Deborah Meier, is coming to Los Angeles with the co-author of
her new book, veteran teacher and co-founder of Artful Education, Emily Gasoi. Readers
of this blog who are in education are familiar with Meier, but for those not in
education, Meier is a pioneer in the development of small, innovative, and
intellectually rich public schools, work for which she received a MacArthur
Foundation “Genius Award” in 1987. Deborah and Emily will be talking about
their new book These Schools Belong to You an Me (a riff on Woody
Guthrie) at the UCLA Community School, a wonderful K-12 partnership with the
Los Angeles Unified School District located in Central Los Angeles. The
school’s students are predominantly from Mexican, Central American, or Korean
immigrant families. The event is on Feb. 20, 4-7 p.m. (Click here if you would
like to attend.)
As is the case with all of Deborah
Meier’s books (see, for example, The Power of Their Ideas and In Schools We
Trust), this new one with Emily Gasoi contains analysis and advice useful
to teachers and administrators. There is, for example, a substantial treatment
of accountability—both a critique of accountability based primarily on
standardized tests as well as a discussion with examples of more authentic and
multi-dimensional approaches to accountability. The book also contains
on-the-ground accounts of working in schools that try to operate
democratically, thus providing the reader with practical suggestions and
hard-won wisdom about such work.
But what I most value about These
Schools Belong to You and Me—and I think is its greatest strength—is its
articulate and passionate affirmation of public schools as foundational
democratic institutions. One of the book’s chapters is titled “Falling for
Public Education,” and in some ways the book is a loving celebration of the
public school written by two people who together have spent over 70 years
working in them. Meier and Gasoi know in their bones what the public school can
mean to children who attend them, the teachers and administrators who work in
them, and the communities that hold them. Their writing is certainly informed
by scholarship—and they offer a valuable reading list at the end of the
book—but the writing also emerges from deep experience.
We need to check in on our defining
institutions, evaluate them, size them up and, at time, raise them up—remind
ourselves what they do for us, the kind of life they make possible. We surely
need such evaluation now. Meier and Gasoi write at a time when some schools,
public and private, urban and rural, predominantly low-income are not providing
good educations for their students; when the dominant remedies for these
schools (and for public schools in general) create awful problems of their own;
and when the election of 2016 brought with it an existential threat to public
education and other democratic institutions. Meier and Gasoi write from this
time, naming the multiple threats to public schools, but also trying to
articulate a way forward, a vision of the possible.
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