Deborah Meier

Deborah Meier is on the faculty of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, as senior scholar and adjunct professor. She is a board member and director of New Ventures at Mission Hill, director and advisor to the Forum for Democracy and Education, and on the Board of the Coalition of Essential Schools. Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in New York City’s East Harlem, and in 1985, she founded Central Park East Secondary School. During this period she founded a local CES center, which networked approximately fifty small Coalition-style K-12 schools in the city. She also served as co-director of the Coalition Campus Project that successfully redesigned the reform of two large failing New York City high schools and created a dozen new small Essential schools. She was an advisor to New York City’s Annenberg Challenge and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University from 1995-1997. From 1997 to 2005 she was the founder and principal of the Mission Hill School a K-8 Boston Public Pilot school serving 180 children in the Roxbury community. Meier is also a noted author of The Power of Their Ideas and several other books.