Deborah Meier is a visionary teacher, author, and founder of successful small schools in New York City and Boston. Harry Boyte, senior scholar at Augsburg College, is founder of the youth civic empowerment initiative Public Achievement and a leader in the movement to democratize higher education. This blog is no longer being updated.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
Schools Should Teach Students to Lead, Not Follow
Meier: Schooling for democracy must essentially be schooling for teaching the arts and crafts of ruling: to students, their teachers, and their families and neighbors.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
The 'Public' Character of Public Schools
Casey: The imposition of a business model and "market discipline" on public education, with the use of high-stakes standardized exams as a "bottom line," has done serious damage.
Teaching
Opinion
Wanted: A Campaign to Preserve 'Public' Schools
Meier: Did you know that teachers in the United States are at the very top when it comes to the number of hours they spend directly working with children? By top, of course, I mean bottom. They teach far, far more hours a week and weeks a year than teachers elsewhere.
Standards & Accountability
Opinion
In Defense of Educational Change
Casey: Shouldn't we take on directly "test and punish" accountability, rather than be diverted into a crusade against the common core?
Budget & Finance
Opinion
The Dangers of the Common Core
Meier: As long as we see standards as 'The Standards' we will face this danger—and especially if who is right/wrong is based on impact on test scores designed by the same people who have mandated the standards.
Teaching
Opinion
Civic Literacy and the Power of 'Close Reading'
Casey: Could it be that if we focused on the actual standards, the extravagant claims that are made against the common core would be impossible to sustain?
Curriculum
Opinion
We Need Standards Without Standardizing
Meier: Teaching "to" a prefabricated curriculum ... and thus also to the test that comes along with it cannot lead to the kind of feistiness that a good school should be an exemplar of.
Teaching
Opinion
Getting Past Surreal Arguments on the Common Core
Casey: In my judgment, the [common-core] standards have the potential to do some real good.
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Living Democracy Every School Day
Meier: I think some of the practices of even the AFT (and the UAW) have been deleterious to the important sense of membership.
Teaching
Opinion
We Need the Large, Representative Democracies of Unions
Casey: Isn't this our vision of democracy in our schools, Deb, that it should be focused on the good of the entire school community?
Teaching Profession
Opinion
If Schools Were Democracies, What Would Change?
Meier: If schools were to operate as democracies, what are some examples of how that might work?
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Of Teachers' Unions, Democracy, & 'Civic Mondays'
Casey: We are a nation in need of a "Civic Monday" movement. And education needs such a movement as much as any part of American society.
Teaching
Opinion
Teachers' Unions, Democracy, & Risk-Taking
What, Leo, could we do to make the unions we most respect become places that teach democracy on a daily basis?
Teaching Profession
Opinion
Why Teachers' Unions & Due Process Matter
Due process is essential if we are to secure a teacher's ability to speak up for her students, to advocate for a different educational approach or a different school policy, to report administrative wrongdoing ...