September/October 2000

Deborah Meier: Will Standards Save Public Education?

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers,community activists, and policymakers, from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on May 15, 2000. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Introduction by Dottie Engler, Director of the Askwith Education Forums
Deborah Meier's Talk
Questions from the Audience
HGSE Forums Home Page
Transcripts of Past HGSE Forums

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Deborah Meier, Will Standards Save Public Education?, 5/15/00

Dottie Engler's Introduction

Dottie Engler: Debbie Meier has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, writer, and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem, and the founder-principal of Central Park East secondary school, a New York City public high school.

Debbie also founded the Center For Collaborative Education, a network of more than 40 like-minded New York City public schools that worked together to support school reform. She is currently vice chair of the coalition of central schools, where she exerts her influence along with her buddy Ted Sizer, who is the chair. She is also the principal of the Mission Hill pilot school -- a relatively new elementary school in Boston's Roxbury community that opened in 1997 and will eventually serve children in grades K-8. As a learning theorist, she encourages new approaches that enhance democracy and equity in public education. She is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, The Nation, and the Harvard Education Letter. She is a board member of the Educational Alliance, the Association of Union Democracy, Educators for Social Responsibility, a founding member of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the North Dakota study group on evaluation, and a member of the National Academy of Education, among many other things.

In acknowledgement of her work she's received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Brown, Bard College, Teacher's College, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Hebrew College. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987.

To quote the New Yorker magazine, "[Debbie Meier] is the sort of utopian pedagogue who pledges her faith in the extraordinary untapped capacities of all our children, but unlike so many radical reformers she's also firmly rooted in the reality of the classroom. Another quote, from Ted Sizer: "She is wonderful dealing with the immediate -- the particular youngster, the particular teacher -- but at the same time she is a first-class intellectual." Educational Leadership writes, "[Debbie is] a down to earth, unrepentant intellectual." In her own mind, Debbie Meier is a teacher still intrigued with learning, with ideas, with change -- still in love with education. Vito Perrone said she is one of the truly powerful spokespersons for democratic schools in a democratic society.

In these past few weeks, every time I turn on the radio or pick up the paper, Debbie Meier is there. This is a woman who is on a mission, and she has given much of her time to try to help us all make sense out of what's going on with MCAS and with standards in this state.

Her new book, Will Standards Save Public Education, is extraordinarily timely. Her previous book, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem, attracted a lot of attention, and I'm sure her new one will as well. I always find it a particular privilege to hear Debbie Meier speak. She has a great intellectual framework that makes her credible with a wide variety of people. She's a woman, as I said earlier, who is still in love with education, with the very principles of education, with serving children, and with the great profession of teaching. So I want you to join with me in welcoming Debbie Meier.

Debbie Meier: When I listen to somebody describe all those things, I realize that what I actually like about teaching maybe even more are those irritating but impossibly intriguing discussions I have with children who get sent to the office. It's interesting to unravel what they have in mind. Like the young man who came in today who kicked some girl and then hit another girl and then said, "I don't understand why anybody sent me here." Then you try to figure out, does he really mean that, what's really going on in his head?

So I don't know if I'm in love with education with a big "E," but I'm in love with those minute conversations that I can't figure out right away -- and what lies behind them. That has kept me mostly fascinated for 35 years. I came into teaching by accident because I wanted to do something that would make me about $50 a week that would be easy to do and that would leave me with plenty of energy for my real political interest of transforming the world. I thought subbing two days a week in Chicago schools would do it. And it did. Subbing turned out to be the hardest job I ever imagined, and it intrigued me.

I discovered something about Chicago schools. My children were just starting school at that time and I learned some things just by being there. I went to different schools each time. Sometimes if it was a tolerable substitute job I stayed for two or three days. Most of the time they were intolerable. In a few cases, I walked out of the school midday announcing to the principal that the kids would be safer without me in the room.

I also began to be intrigued by another level, which was not political inequities but why kids came back every day. That was interesting to me because it seemed to me their experiences were so educationally limiting. How teachers came back every day also intrigued me. And I got a glimpse of teaching. Even though I saw a lot of bad teaching, I developed enormous respect for the people who stuck with it. I want to come back to in this talk today because I don't think we acknowledge how much damage we're doing right now to our colleagues out there in the field by the way we talk about teaching and learning and teachers and schools.

I developed a kind of respect for my colleagues for coming back every day, and for clearly wanting to do a good job no matter how inadequately I thought they were doing it. But the other part was that I began to have more questions about how you would do a good job, what it meant to do a good job, and how you could change schools and school systems. Since I was also largely involved in wanting to change the world, the question was, "How do the two fit together?" What was there about the way we raised kids in our schools that made our dreams about changing the world harder to accomplish? What were the lessons that we taught kids in schools that needed to be untaught if you wanted these kids to play a powerful role in transforming their world and being responsible citizens of it?

So it seemed to me that even my most radical friends, who often had very odd ideas, thought there was nothing terribly wrong with the schools. That what was really wrong was outside. And that they could make a revolution in the world without thinking that maybe you also needed a revolution in our schools. So I got intrigued by schools and I remain intrigued.

Somebody asked me last summer whether I'd write an article for the Boston Review that would include replies by Abigail Thernstrom and others, some of whom would agree with me, some who disagreed. They didn't tell me I'd get a chance to reply to them. But at some point they were going to put that out into a paperback. So it wasn't a book I thought I was writing, it was just an essay. But somebody called me in January and said, "I see you have a book coming out." And I said, "Really?" It is nice, and I urge you to read it on behalf of my publishers, because I'm not making a penny on this.

This afternoon I was on Talk of the Nation [on National Public Radio]. It was very frustrating. I've been thinking about all the things I should have said, so I'll tell you all the things I didn't say on that program. If any of you have ever been on this kind of radio show you know what I feel. You walk out of there just filled with all the perfect replies that you didn't think of at the perfect moment. Fortunately, there was a young woman who was interviewed in the middle of the program who coolly and quietly and pleasantly gave all the replies that I had meant to give.

In any case, I'll tell you all the things I should have said on that show as we go along. At the very beginning of my career I was fascinated with tests, and 35 years later I still am. Five years ago I would have said I don't ever have to talk about testing again, because I was under the illusion that we had turned the corner and were beyond that kind of nonsense any more, and that we might replace standardized testing with something worse. That was always a possibility, but I felt certain that we would never go back to the kind of craziness that I had experienced in my early years of teaching.

So, it was a shock to me when I discovered that we were not only going back to that, but with a vengeance, and with almost no improvements over what I thought we had intellectually, morally, and every other way smashed to smithereens. I should have known better, because there's practically nothing that I have fought for in the 69 years of my life that turns out was ever secure. I think of all the conversations in which people have said, "There's one thing they will never do again." Think of all the things in our lifetimes we thought we had finally changed forever.

So, it's both discouraging and encouraging. The discouraging thing is that progress unfortunately doesn't go straight upward. The encouraging thing is that bad things don't increasingly go like that either. So our time will come again. Somebody will discover again somewhere down the way, and maybe sooner rather than later, that this way of viewing children is wrong.

There are many reasons behind testing, and I want to try to talk a little about why I think some people, whose general agenda is the same as mine, disagree with me on this question. Because I also want to suggest that a large part of the support for the idea that standardization will save public education is coming from people who have an entirely different agenda and whose agenda is not the improvement of American education. I would like to suggest that the word reform is used these days in such a way that I want to distance myself from school reform. I want to reconstruct American education, but in a direction that is the opposite from the one that's now using the word reform.

They have just as much right to it, I suppose, as I do, except that their idea of reforming the schools will lead us in exactly the wrong direction. And I think some of their motives are not hypocritical, but that they stand in direct conflict with what I believe in. The guy I spoke with today on the radio, I suspect, is one of those. I don't know this organization he spoke for. But because his primary attack was that public education is no good and that what the tests finally force us to face is the failure of public education, I suspect that he is among that group of people who for both ideological and practical reasons would like to replace public education with a privatized system.

I think there are two groups of people who are supporting standardization who are not interested in the reform of public education but in ending public education, who would argue either ideologically or practically that privatization, marketplace competition, will provide a better system of education. And they believe that in part because they genuinely believe that free enterprise and privatization are good for everything, that almost all competitive institutions are better than public institutions.

There are others who are for privatization for other reasons, particulary ideological or parochial reasons, and then there are those who are making money off of the idea of private education. When I think about the thin resources that those of us who support public education have at our disposal and the incredible resources that those who don't have at their disposal, that scares me. The testing companies as well as a variety of corporations in America who intend to take advantage of the privatization and the access to public funds for profit-making institutions in education is enormous. And that is really new.

I think those of you who are my age would have said you thought that that was an accepted idea. When we used to argue for public medicine, for socialized medicine, that we used to say, after all, we all accept the idea that public education is a good idea. If it's good for education, why isn't it good for health? I think it never occurred to us ten, 15 years ago that somebody might really raise the question that maybe education should be a profit-making enterprise. But there are a lot of people on that side.

Then there are others who genuinely believe that the best way to make change is through highly centralized standardized mandated coercion. And this issue is what the book is an attempt to raise. This is a viewpoint that is not particularly right or left. It has existed historically both on the right and on the left. When I was growing up there used to be an argument about this. The expression that was used by those who said that you had to have centralized coercion was that it takes breaking some eggs to make an omelet.

I mention that because Abigail Thernstrom was, in fact, once a left-winger. When I mentioned that quote in a hearing she attended recently, she got furious. She said, "Are you accusing me of being a communist?" And I thought to myself, it's interesting, she's probably one of the only ones in the room who knows that that quote was a quote that communists used to make to socialists. And I said, "No, I don't think I was accusing you of being a communist." And she said, "Because if I was you wouldn't be able to come here today to object to standardized tests." And I said, "Well, thank you very much for allowing me to."

But it is the viewpoint that if we only had the power, we could use our power to make everybody else fall in line. And there are times when it's reasonable to do. I do it sometimes in my position as principal, more often to kids than to teachers. And it usually doesn't work. But sometimes for temporary purposes it does work. It has certainly been a century in which we ought to have learned something about the limitations of a viewpoint, that the people who are the real experts, the vanguard, can impose a transformation of heart and mind on the majority of the people through their coercive power.

And I think one of the arguments for the standardization of education through the use of testing is that if we get the stakes high enough, we can successfully impose our idea of what is a good education. If the stakes are high enough, and if people realize there's no escape. If we can make it thorough and sustained enough and if we don't give an inch we can eventually force the majority of people in this country into the right framework. And I think that's probably in part what scares me the most. It's not even the particulars but the frame of mind that sees our citizens and our fellow human beings as something that can, should, and we would want to coerce into accepting our viewpoint.

So, I want to start off saying that I have spent 35 wonderful years helping to design schools, seeing them carried out, developing standards for those schools, and developing ways of thinking about those standards. Often when I'm asked, "Don't you think all schools should be like yours?" and I want to start off by saying to you "No," actually it's not just a sentimental view on my part. I actually do not want all schools to be like mine. In fact, I've been involved in starting many schools and no two of them were alike. So, not only do I not want everybody else to adopt my solution, but I've actually never been able to carry out my solution. Because there are always other adults in the school who join with me. And it turns out that my solution can't be imposed even on them. So in the end, it's never quite the school I had in mind.

The second thing is that when I get a chance to do it again, some new ideas come in my head and I don't actually want to do exactly that school. Does that mean the last one was a mistake? No, it just means that that's the nature of human beings. That's what makes it so attractive to be an educator, so attractive to work with kids, so attractive to be a human being -- that we are essentially very messy animals. Not easy to transform, not easy to put in the right shape, not easy to make into what we have in mind. I can't even make myself be everything I want myself to be. So what chutzpa to imagine I can make other people to be what I want them to be.

I think of all the simple habits that I have tried to get rid of and all the simple habits I've tried to learn to adopt. Like remembering where to put my keys. I mean, that's not a very big one, right? The punishments for not putting my keys in the right place are enormous and the rewards for doing it right are incredible. But the number of times I say, You're never going to do that again, remember to put your keys back..." Nevertheless, in 69 years, I have never been able to solve that problem. That might be discouraging to some of you, but I find it encouraging. I find it encouraging that we're such an ornery species.

Teachers are resisters. That's because they're human. And when teachers stop being resistant, that is a scary idea. Kids are resistant, too. Not because they're bad, not because they're annoying, but because they're human beings, and their way of seeing the world is never quite our way. And their capacity to cope with the world depends upon their holding onto that capacity to resist. Sometimes the resistance takes bad forms, and sometimes that's because we have eliminated all the healthy and strong ways in which they are capable of resisting us. But the purpose of schooling is not to get them into line. And if that's not the purpose of schooling, then we have to ask ourself what is.

And that's what I hope we all try to find out, how to get into that discussion with our colleagues and with our neighbors and with our fellow citizens. What's this all about? What is the purpose of schools? I want to tell you, I have my idea that the purpose of schools is to give us the capacity to use our own judgment well. To exercise our own judgment well on many, many things. That sounds like a small thing, but to me somehow it sums it up.

I was at a meeting last Friday with the commissioner of education in New York State. They have standards in New York State that are being carried out in the same ruthless way as the MCAS is. We were going there to try to get a waiver. There are 40 high schools in New York City that have a remarkable rate of success with kids who most New York City high schools fail with. And they have done it on the basis of a very different approach to teaching, learning, and assessing. They've had a waiver for the last five years and they were asking for a renewal of the waiver. And I think the commissioner of education was meeting with them preparatory to conducting a study to destroy them.

He was explaining the study he wanted to conduct, done by seven psychometricians. You all know who they are. And they were going to find out whether our assessment systems in these 40 schools met psychometric "industry standards." That was his phrase, industry standards. So we said, "Let's assume for a moment they don't meet such standards. Are you questioning whether these schools have a rate of success with kids in the real world that is greater than you would predict based on the demographic knowledge of these kids?" That is, that these are 40 schools that serve some of the most at-risk students in New York and that have an extraordinarily high rate of high school graduation, college attendance, and all of the other things we can find out statistically about kids.

So suppose these schools don't do it your way but you know that they're succeeding with kids. Which has to change? And he said the schools will have to change. He had absolutely no hesitation about that. I pressed him more and said, You're really saying that if we don't meet these psychometric standards but we meet all the other standards, that that alone would sink these schools?" And he said, "In the end I have a right to exercise judgment. I will look at all the evidence and if you want to present me with some other evidence I'll look at that, too, and in the end I will exercise judgment."

The question is, is he the only one in the state of New York who ought to be still exercising judgment? We have to fight against the notion that there is a single place, a single authority, a divine right of kings, whatever it comes from. Because Democratic life depends upon the notion that we are all in the daily act of exercising judgment. And that that, in fact, is what we are training children to do. They need information, they need skills, they need effective communications. But they have to keep alive the notion that the purpose of all of that stuff is so they can exercise judgment.

At the interview today, in trying to put down my argument, my opponent said that doctors take temperatures, they have tests, they do all these things, they measure. Would you want to go to a doctor who looks at your measurements, doesn't know anything else about you, asks no questions but makes decisions on the basis of single tests? Of course not. You want a doctor who exercises judgment, who looks at this test and this test and says, "These are incompatible, I don't think this is true, this test is probably not accurate on the basis of your symptoms you describe, we ought to do this one over, and we should ignore this one." If you do enough tests, as they've discovered, you're always going to find something wrong. So we have to exercise judgment.

Wouldn't you rather be with a doctor who's known you over the years? Because that doctor is in a better position to exercise judgment. He knows what else has happened in your history. So while I often don't like the medical model for thinking about education, in fact, it fits very well here. There is no instrument by itself that speaks for us. That's the principal underlying the idea of democracy. That there is no final way of being sure that we're making the right decision. What we have to do is have trained judgment, and the purpose of schools is to do that. You can't learn to exercise judgment in a school in which no grownups are doing the same thing.

If I could boil the whole argument down, it's that kids need to be surrounded by grownups who are accustomed to exercising judgment in public and open ways and sharing how they come about doing that with kids. Grownups who are presenting kids with an image, a model of what it's like for grownups to argue with each other, disagree with each other, ponder things, weigh evidence, answer questions, reexamine over and over again in the interest of coming closer to truth. [Applause] Somebody else agrees with me. So that's the proposition I'm making to you.

And I have in front of me all kinds of marvelous examples of items and tests that in no way would help us know whether this is a student who is in a position to exercise judgment. I want you to raise your hand here. How many people are certain that they know the difference between a rational and an irrational number? In the ordinary course of your living you have never felt inadequate for not knowing the difference between a rational and irrational number? Too bad. I mention that to you only because we're always being told by the people who are for standardized testing that what we need is to have a citizenry that has basic skills. That they get out of high school, they have a high school diploma, and they can't even add or subtract.

But, there isn't an addition or subtraction problem in either the eighth- or tenth-grade test, and there aren't many of them in the fourth-grade test either. That's not what the kids are being failed for. In the New York State Regents test, there is a test that makes people think students don't know how to read. All these kids graduate high school and they don't know how to read. So, they've been asked to first read a page from Jack London on the San Francisco earthquake and then another page by a 15th century essayist who writes in non-standard archaic English, and then to read these two essays in the middle of the test and write an essay comparing them. You wouldn't want to hire somebody, would you, who couldn't do that? You can understand how employers are frustrated. They get kids with high-school diplomas and they give them work like this to do and they can't even do it. And they ask them about irrational numbers. I have trouble sometimes reading them. This figure here shows a map of the points of interest on the Liberty Path. Point S represents the starting and ending point for all tours on the path between the seven points of interest labeled A through G. I'm already lost. I know this is not my strong point, but I'm trying to think when have I ever in real life run into anything like this. This is called real math. Name one tour in which each point of interest is visited exactly once without retracing any path. That's interesting. We're going to deprive 80% of the kids in this fair city of ours, Boston, of high school diplomas because they have trouble with such mathematics. There's something scary about a country and a state that could even consider doing that.

So, if the argument is simply that we ought to be having high dreams and great expectations for our children, wouldn't we see the way of getting there as being to frighten them and punish them? To scare their teachers and belittle their schools and belittle them because they can't do the kind of work or come to the kind of answers that are being called for in these tests? I reiterate this only because I am scared of what it means that so many of our fellow citizens, our newspapers, our politicians cannot possibly do this work. But they are not villains. And certainly most of our neighbors are not villains. But ask your neighbors and you'll find out that a large number of them think that the present standardization movement is reasonable.

We have a huge job to do to try to turn that around in some way, to try to find the places where people on our side, our fellow citizens, are opened to our arguments and to understanding something about what it is that's driving so many people to want to be tough on kids. Because, in part, I suspect this has almost nothing to do with education. It's a general climate of thinking that kids need to work harder, a kind of anti-permissiveness that is attracted to almost anything that seems like it's more punitive. And we need to understand that drive, too, and try to think how we can redirect that so that we're tougher on something different and something more important. Because it wouldn't be a bad thing to be a little tougher. But we have to ask what it is we have to be tough about, what our children need tough standards for and when and where they need it. And also where we're destroying a powerful capacity to make human judgments.

Since I've said you can't entirely succeed at that, the other part of me says we won't win that anyway. Kids and teachers are going to find a way to resist. I'm not sure how they'll do it and where it will be as we get closer to seeing the impact of this reform movement on American society. Massachusetts is only one place. No two states have the same kind of test. No two even correlate well. But nevertheless, there are something like 40 states in the country that are going to deny large numbers of kids diplomas on the basis of knowledge that nobody else in society respects or takes seriously.

So that's what this argument is about and that's what the book is about. So let's just open it up to arguments.

Questions from the Audience

[Inaudible question]

Meier: I think there's a long argument and I would like to figure out a short one. My long argument is that everything we know about what you can do to improve the odds for the kids who start off the farthest behind is going to be hurt by this kind of movement. And all the reforms we need to take, that we know succeed, require the opposite direction. We're starting here and I'm not in the least bit satisfied with what we do for the kids who are most at risk in our society. For poor kids, for kids of color, we do a terrible job. There are 20% of the kids in this country who in every measure possible are like the ones I used to substitute teach in Chicago. The only difference is they used to leave school in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade.

They stay in school now and we don't do an awful lot better. Given the amount of time kids spend in school, some of the negative impacts of school may be greater than some of the positive ones. Powerful adult relationships are important for kids who are most vulnerable. But some reforms remove from them the possibility of powerful adults. We know that for such kids, for that matter, the connection between what they're doing in school and powerful things that are happening around the school, they're seeing relevance. In other words, connections and relevance matter more to them. But these kinds of standardized reforms make that more difficult. All the things that those 40 schools in New York that have this remarkable rate of success are built around a kind of schooling that is crushed by these kinds of reforms.

It isn't true that something is better than nothing here, because what these reforms do, it seems to me, is crush the few good experiences such kids do have in schools and replace them with banal teaching. The argument sometimes is, "You have a lot of bad teachers, so won't they be better if they have a script to read?" It's like if you had a babysitter you don't trust and you think is stupid. And not only that, she probably has bad judgment in relationship to children. Would you want to go out tonight? By giving her a script will you be safer? You either have to stay in that evening or you have to help make that babysitter trustworthy. I remember trying to do this once with my husband. His intentions were very good but this was before men were involved in raising children. I had to go away for a weekend, so I left him a script of all the things, literally moment by moment, of what he should give them for breakfast, everything.

However, I was also wise enough to ask a friend of mine to come over occasionally and see how he's doing. And she reported that she came over and he was fast asleep on the floor exhausted and the kids were running all around. So, she stayed the rest of the weekend. There isn't a script that you can give. Even with a bad babysitter you're better off saying, "Use your best judgment. Here are some suggestions, here is some advice, here are places you can make phone calls to, here is where I keep this medicine, this is what he likes to eat." But in the end, you have got to say to that babysitter, "Use your best judgment." There isn't anything better than your best judgment.

Kids in the hands of teachers who have been told not to exercise their judgment are in danger -- more dangerous than in the hands of a teacher whose judgment I may not respect. This may be less true of kids who have a lot of other advantages going for them. The other argument is that we happen to know that standardized testing is, by its nature, most likely to reward kids who are closest to the center of power. It's in the nature of the instrument. All tests depend upon a particular language of interpretation.

I can tell you a story. We won't all hear it the same way, but the test depends upon your hearing it in a particular way. Depends upon a particular language, a particular style, and a particular frame of reference. So for example, in an IQ test, if you ask kids, "What should you do if you borrow your friend's ball and you lose it?" If asked this by a teacher or some authority figure, lower-class kids will say, almost without exception, that you should tell the teacher or you should tell your mother, you should tell the person in authority. Upper-class kids will almost all say you should use your best judgment, you should buy him another ball. All kinds of intellectually astute answers.

In fact, they do the exact opposite. In my experience of teaching in Harlem, the more middle-class kids always told the teacher and the lower-class kids always figured out their own solution to the problem. But when asked that question in the IQ test, they gave reverse answers. Their assumption about what they were supposed to say was class related. How are we supposed to know that on this particular test, unlike what their teacher said every day, that they were supposed to answer the other one to get a high IQ score? If you want secret information that comes with class, and to some degree also with race, who we tune into, where we're tuned into, where we pick up the ideas about what we're supposed to be saying and supposed to do depends upon the environment that we are in.

We also happen to be picking the one tool to measure kids with that we know has the greatest class and race bias. Not intentionally. Central Park East school sent 90% of its kids on to college. Graduated over 90% of the kids who started the high school. Over 90% of them went on to college and most of them did very well there. Their scores on SAT tests and standardized test scores never were much different than the rest of the city's, whose success rate was half of theirs. We picked the hardest indicator to change. All of the other indicators for those kids changed, but that one didn't change dramatically. And that's the one we've decided to elevate to being the one and only way in which we're going to measure kids from now on.

I think there's nothing wrong with standardized tests if we do it on a sampled basis, for example. If we just simply look upon it as interesting information If what you mean by standardized simply means you use the same thing for everybody.

Standardized-test information is always interesting. And, if I don't waste too much time on it, it's an additional piece of information that I think school teachers and parents can make some use of. And there are some standardized tests that are a lot better than others. We have a standardized test in our school. We tape-record children every fall and every spring in a standardized format. We have an interview we give and some standardized passages that they can read. And we record what they do and we have a standardized scoring system. That's a standardized test.

You can do a written one, you can do an open response one. You can do it in a variety of ways as long as you understand that you're getting one slice at one time and at one moment and you accept those limitations.

Whether you could do a standardized test for high stakes, I don't think so. I mean, maybe I can tell by the end of tenth grade whether I could devise a standardized written, mass-delivered test. I think I could devise a standardized test of whether kids could read. But whether it could be one that you could hand out to 40 people and fill it out and reply, that's why I'm saying.

I think you and I could have a standardized instrument that we could tell us whether our high school kids know how to read. If we don't have too sophisticated an idea of what reading means.

Question: There are a lot of correlations between the kind of education that you describe, a relationship between teachers and students and parents and individual to community and private schools. Where is the bridge between private schools. Private schools would not take the MCAS. They would not agree to the kind of standardized impositions of teaching matter that's going on in the public schools. But I'm surprised that there's no coalition between the kinds of things that you're asking for and educators who are involved in private education. Because the things you're talking about are the things that they hold dearly.

Meier: I went to a private school in New York. I got a letter recently from the head of the independent schools in New York on why they're opposed to standardized tests, high-stakes tests. Our viewpoints were very close together. With one exception. And that is that, as is true of a lot of good independent private schools, it was couched in the language of leadership. The people who are going to lead our society have to be people who have the capacity to set their own standards, to internalize standards, to argue with standards.

So, I think to some extent the reason there isn't a stronger coalition between independent school people and public school people is that the independent school people accept the idea that they should be set aside because they're dealing with kids who are better than the public school kids. And they buy the argument that public schools require this kind of education because most Americans need something called basic skills, but the leadership needs more creative innovative skills. And that there is a certain elitism in their saying this isn't right for us. And in New York State, for example, they have not bought into the argument of standardized testing at all. They won't take the Regents. But I'm not sure they're prepared to fight for the idea that all kids deserve the same kind of education that their kids deserve.

And after all, private schools often don't even think all their kids deserve that kind of education. A lot of private schools keep kids through sixth grade, K-12 grades private school, and then kick kids out after sixth or eighth grade because they don't think they're up to par. So I think there is a certain amount of elitism. But I have some hopes that we could help them see that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Question: I teach at an independent secondary school in Braintree, Massachusetts. And I think you're absolutely right about the leadership issue and about the elitism issue. I also think, though, there's another element that has to do with the notion of family or community. We don't apply these rigid arbitrary standards in family situations. I think a lot of independent schools, from my experience, really value these notions of family and community. And they tend, from what I see, to give their students a little bit more room to be themselves and to develop their quirkiness and eccentricities. And we try to figure out ways for all of that to fit in a good independent school community. And I think that's another factor.

But I also find it troubling that there's not more of a coalition forming between independent schools and public schools on this particular scary matter.

Meier: I agree. It is amazing to me. Sometimes I listen to people who are arguing for this and wonder, "Do they not have at least one child in their own family who wasn't a good tester." Or one child in their family who had a quirky way of thinking about life? I think possibly I wouldn't have felt as strongly about this if it wasn't for the fact that one of my kids had terrible test-score results when he was in second or third grade. And it wasn't until I began to sit down with him that it occurred to me that this test was not measuring what I happened to know, that he was a terrific reader, a fluent reader. A reading nerd. But he scored very poorly on the reading test.

And I had up until that time -- I myself was a very good tester -- a general viewpoint that if you were smart you tested well and if you were dumb you tested poorly. So, in some ways it was my own personal experience. And sometimes you wonder, "Do we need a lot more people to be exposed, to have to remember how they were as testers?" Neil Rudenstine told me that he didn't get into officer's candidate school, although he was a graduate, I think, of Harvard and Oxford, because his test scores were very poor. That was what he said to us.

I think that was an important experience for him. So sometimes when I talk to reporters, I try to find out first from them what their own children are like, what they were like as testers. Because I think sometimes even people who themselves have been badly hurt by testing have forgotten. And we need to resurrect those experiences.

[Inaudible question]

Meier: I think you have a good point. That the question of what kind of response we can have to this that both has a sense of urgency to it, because those 40 schools in New York may be destroyed in the next year, but also a sense of hopefulness. That we're not going to win this battle if all we appear to be doing is defending the status quo. If we appear to say there are some good solutions to this, we do know some things and we do know some of the things that are really hard for young people. For example, the hardest thing, and I think we have an awful lot of evidence for it, is the number of young people today who grow up largely devoid of any serious relationship with grownups outside of their own families.

That has to impede their intellectual, social, and moral growth. And the kinds of reforms that work on all three of those realms are reforms that place more authority in the hands of adults. And the kinds of reforms being driven by standardization are reforms that increasingly depower the grownups in children's lives. That may be a stronger argument than to get into the technicalities of testing. That we need schools where children are surrounded by grownups who have authority. Maybe that cuts across some political divisions. Will it always lead to good education? I would say in its absence we can't have good education. You can't educate kids in the absence of grownups who are themselves thoughtful people. And they may not always act perfectly. So we need both accountability, exposure, but in the end we have to leave enough authority in the hands of the grownups who surround kids.

[Inaudible question]

Meier: If I say no single instrument can stand the test they're asking it to do, of making a high-stake decision on the basis of any single instrument, why is that an argument for private schools? Why because it's public do we have to have one single standard imposed on all schools? It's not a rhetorical question. I'm honestly asking you. What leads you to assume that that's an argument for privatization?

[Inaudible comment]

Meier: Because your assumption is if it's public, it has to be the same for everybody. That's the meaning of the word public. And I'm saying I don't think it has to be the meaning of the word public. Why does it have to be? All the little schools in my community 100 years ago were all quite diiferent. None of them had standardized tests. For good or bad. So why are we assuming that because it's public it has to be uniform and standardized?

[Inaudible comment]

Meier: The reason I don't discuss the other side of the balance is that it is so far weighed here that I sometimes think I rhetorically forget that I'm not for removing all public standards. It's just that there is so much in that direction now. Between SAT tests and college board tests and the NAEP exams and standardized non-reference test data, the high-stakes quality of the current reform seems to me to totally end any possibility of balance. That what we are in danger of is losing precisely the balance that you're describing, in which there is enough different evidence from which to judge. Because the state is taking away our power to make judgments between those different pieces of evidence. And placing this one test as the be all and end all.

That's why it seems to me in some ways a new ball game. Not because I'm opposed to all public standards. But because I'm for leaving some standards of importance close to the children and the people who know them well and the people who love them for who they are right now. Because it's that particular love we have for our children, that particular relationship that we have with our children, that it seems to me has been weighted more heavily in important decisions we make about our children. And that we have to protect that judgment.