These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools

Please join Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) in welcoming Dr. Deborah Meier for a special talk about her years of work in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, and advocate since the early 1960s.  Immediately following the talk, Dr. Meier will be available to sign her new book, These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools.

In 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 in a democracy.” Through an inter-generational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors analyze the last several decades of education reform, challenging narrow profit-driven conceptions of school success. Reflecting on the trajectory of education and social policies that are leading our country further from rule “of, for, and by the people,” the authors apply their extensive knowledge and years of research to address the question of how public education must change in order to counter the erosion of democratic spirit and practice in schools and in the nation as a whole. To purchase Dr. Meier's book >>

Deborah Meier has been working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, advocate since the early 1960s, and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the U.S. She started her work as an early childhood teacher in Chicago after graduating from the U of Chicago. Her family moved to NYC in the late 1960s where she worked as a kindergarten teacher in Central Harlem. For the next 20 years, Meier helped revitalize public schools in New York City. In 1987 she received a MacArthur “genius”