" City Kids, City Teachers has the potential to create genuine change in the learning, teaching, and administration of urban public schools." — Library JournalIn more than twenty-five provocative selections, an all-star cast of educators and writers explores the surprising realities of city classrooms from kindergarten through high school. Contributors including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, June Jordan, Lewis H. Lapham, Audre Lorde, and De...

A comprehensive assessment system for working with underperforming studentsThis book describes a comprehensive assessment system especially appropriate for multilingual and "differentiated" classrooms with large numbers of underperforming students. Drawing from Multiple Intelligences theory, the approach is specifically aimed at helping teachers understand how each student learns and how best to tailor instruction to serve individual students' needs. Although the p...

Teaching the lessons of New York's most famous public school, Deborah Meier provides a widely acclaimed vision for the future of public education. With a new preface reflecting on the school's continuing success.

Signed into law in 2002, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) promised to revolutionize American public education. Originally supported by a bipartisan coalition, it purports to improve public schools by enforcing a system of standards and accountability through high-stakes testing. Many people supported it originally, despite doubts, because of its promise especially to improve the way schools serve poor children. By making federal funding contingent on accepting a system of tests ...

The authors of this timely book argue that a fundamentally complex problem—how to assess the knowledge of a child—cannot be reduced to a simple test score. Beyond Testing describes seven forms of assessment that are more effective than standardized test results: (1) student self-assessments, (2) direct teacher observations of students and their work, (3) descriptive reviews of the child, (4) reading and math interviews with children, (5) portfolios and public defense o...

How do teachers and schools create meaningful learning experiences for students with diverse skills, abilities, and cultures? How can teachers authentically assess the learning of their students and build on their strengths and interests in ways that enrich the larger community? How can schools be turned into places where everyone is learning from each other? These are the big questions that guide the work of teachers at the well-known Mission Hill School in Boston and that are addressed i...

A challenge to narrow, profit-driven conceptions of school success and an argument for protecting public education to ensure that all students become competent citizens in a vibrant democracyIn These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur award–winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her fifty-plus years of experience to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an “apprenticeship for citizenship i...

On these pages is a call to action for teachers who have been shackled by the self-serving motives of agenda driven politicians. Here we present a new innovative process designed to prepare children to be productive members of their community. Students are empowered to take charge of their educational lives where thinking is valued above obedience, and their parents are respected as full partners in the process.The greatest challenge to educators in this decade is to prepare childr...

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 r...

The late Theodore Sizer's vision for a truly democratic public high school systemOur current high schools are ill-designed and inefficient. We have inherited a program of studies that in its overall structure has not changed in over a century. The question is What's next? Theodore Sizer, the founder of The Coalition of Essential Schools, was a passionate advocate for the American school system. In this, his last book, he offers a vision of what a future se...

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.Deborah Meier argues that at the heart of civic life are responsible relationships; we learn by the company we keep. She goes on to contend that our system of large schools tends to discourage responsible interactions by their very scale. Not content to just criticize, she outlines the steps she and her colleagues have taken to shape s...

A challenge to narrow, profit-driven conceptions of school success and an argument for protecting public education to ensure that all students become competent citizens in a vibrant democracyIn These Schools Belong to You and Me, MacArthur award–winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier draws on her fifty-plus years of experience to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an “apprenticeship for citizenship i...