Deborah Meier\u27s Work on Progressive Education : Focusing on the Period Before and During the Founding of Central Park East Elementary School

This paper focuses on Deborah Meier, a progressive U.S. educator. It aims at clarifying how her work and philosophy evolved, focusing on the period before and during the founding of Central Park East Elementary School. The three findings of this research are as follows. First, Meier developed a socialist perspective as she grew up in a politically active family, and from early on she had an analytical perspective on racial and class inequality within U.S. society. As she began teaching as a public school teacher in the inner city, her socialist perspective enabled her to see the intellectual capacity of minority children. Meier was convinced that it was public schools, not minority children, that needed transformation. Second, Meier is a unionist, and she considers unionism an essential basis for teachers to pursue their professional rights. It is essential that the teachers be permitted to exercise their professional judgments if they are to improve their teaching practices and better support their students ’ learning. Even though there had been serious conflict between teachers and minority parents, collaboration seemed possible around the purpose of supporting their children\u27s learning. Third, Meier founded Central Park East Elementary School, and despite its first two difficult years, the school was developing and education for democracy was being pursued. Meier states that through being with the adults who are involved in collaborative and intellectual decision making, children acquire the habit of democracy. Through her years of work on school reform, Meier came to think that in order to save public education, there should be various experiments with new forms of public education systems. These three findings show that, for Meier, democracy implies that every person is endowed with the right to exercise one\u27s intellectual capacity