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Home > Fall Forum > 2000
Debbie Meier's Closing Remarks
Fall Forum 2000
 Cornel West started us off on the theme of hope and optimism--why it was okay to have the former in the absence of the latter. For the last few days I've been pondering that. I've been playing with the difference between hope and optimism and I hope this afternoon to share with you where it leads me. But there are a few sidetracks on the way to that topic. So bear with me.
For example, going up the elevator last night, as I was trying to write this in my head, Tom Commeret from the Marblehead Charter School said that he got some very good advice once from Dennis Littky that he thought would make a nice title for a speech. Dennis' advice was "When you are feeling upset, just hang out with the people that you like." And I thought about this. In fact, I realized that actually, that is what I've been doing for the last 35 years--it's what sustains me as a school person.
We teachers hang out with kids and colleagues. We are fortunate to have some of the kids I hang out with in the audience today. I think they would agree with Dennis' advice too. The truth of the matter is that I come each year to the Fall Forum for two reasons. I come out of duty and to see the friends that I know all over the country and with whom I like to hang out. Of course there's a third reason, to learn,but quite frankly it's not foremost in my mind when I come to the Fall Forum each year. I suspect that is true for many of you here. I suspect also that is why kids actually come to school everyday. It is not first and foremost to learn things, but partly out of duty, and mostly to hang out with the people they like.
There is, I suspect a connection between this insight and the theme of Hope vs. Optimism. But let's wait and see. Because before I launch into the topic I have another distraction. It seemed an appropriate moment to imagine the speech we might wish the incoming President of the United States, should there ever be one, to say if he were here this afternoon. And this is how it goes, in my mind.
"It's good to be with you today with so many teachers of our children, teachers who have been struggling for so long to reform and reinvent schools worthy of our highest hopes. But as I look back, I see some odd ironies. In 1983, many of my most esteemed colleagues in the world of business and in the statehouses of our nation, got together to address our at-risk economy. And we concluded after deep thought and considerable research that the problem wasn't us. The problem was you. We wrote a rather weighty and influential report on this subject. And hardly had the ink dried that our economy took off. Never has America's economy looked more competitive over a longer time. So it occurred to me that no one has stopped to say to you, 'thank you.' So I want to take this occasion to do so.
I also want to say that we now confront a slightly different crisis; or maybe it's the same one that actually existed in 1983, but that we overlooked it then. And I want to acknowledge that you didn't cause this crisis either, but you might help us solve it. The two-fold crisis that we have facing us is that our best education, as your friend Ted Sizer reminded us at about the same time, never was good enough and certainly will not do for the 21st century, when we need young people who think deeply and well, and who know how to, in his words, use their minds well. And number two, that we have a huge gap in what we offer those at the bottom and those at the top of the social and economic ladder in this country. If our schools aren't good enough for the most advantaged, they are that much more out of synch for the least. And I know that your Coalition is tackling both of these and I pledge you my support.
The challenge we face, as Ted Sizer wisely noted thirty years ago, and your keynote speaker noted on Thursday night, is not the economy, stupid. It's the state of our democracy. The state of our mutual respect for our fellow citizens and our capacity to create schools that teach kids the habits and understandings to tackle the 21st century, or as Cornel West said, how to turn the unfamiliar into the familiar. I pledge that in the years ahead, I will do my best to level the playing field both in schools and in the nation as a whole, and I pledge that nothing I do will further damage those most left behind. Those will be my litmus test."
End of speech. End of fantasy. It helps me to imagine what ought to be said, because it sets the stage for what we ought to be doing. However, I got to a point in writing my little speech as President of the United States when such a longing came over me. Is it possible that, someday, we might have a candidate who might say something along these lines? But then after all, that would be asking a lot given that within our own ranks of educators, on both the left and right, traditional and progressive, there is a history of our not following such a litmus test--of not experimenting on those least able to defend themselves. It's often done even on behalf of the victims.
It reminds me a little, but not quite, of parents who spank their child saying this may hurt but it's for your own good. But in this case it isn't the child we are spanking that we even claim to be helping. We acknowledge that many of the latest reform ideas may be very destructive to many of the children already hurting most. The kids held-over won't benefit, but maybe the ones not held-over will. The millions more who will drop-out of school won’t benefit, but think of those future generations of kids, kids "like them." It's they whom we believe may benefit; we are planning to punish children today in order to better succeed with other children tomorrow. At least, say the test-driven reformers, that's our hypothesis.
High stakes tests advocates are saying to the poor, "We may be obliged to hurt you, but it's in a good cause; so that future generations of kids like you won't be so badly hurt." That is the best argument I've heard for the testing reforms with which we are now experimenting. It's a scientific experiment on live subjects. In the usual science lab experiment no one denies that while the mice being experimented on may die, it's not for their own good. It's so that other mice (or people) may live that we sacrifice these particular innocent mice now. So be leery my friends about these kinds of experiments. Because these experiments are done too in the name of Hope. But you'll note that my imaginary president pledges that he doesn't care where the scheme comes from, left or right, but that he will not pursue solutions that sacrifice other people's kids, but not his own. Sacrifice is a great thing, if it is self-sacrifice.
I still remember a New York Times editorial a few decades past which explained why we had to raise class sizes in the special ed. classes in New York City. For the greater good, they said. In these austere times, we have to pull in our belts. I, knowing who the editors of the New York Times are, thought to myself how interesting that not a single one of their children's schools--Dalton, Fieldston, or Trinity--has thought for a moment that they ought to be pulling in their belts in those austere times. Watch out when people say that this or that sacrifice is necessary for the welfare of "the nation." The current nation-wide rage for state-driven, top-down testing is one of the biggest and most radically imposed experiments in the history of education. But who are the mice?
When I left school this week, I got a copy of the testing schedule for Massachusetts 4th and 8th graders. And I hate to say this in front of the kids in our 8th grade, but they are going to face something like 20 hours of tests in May, just when they are preparing their magnificent final portfolios--the final demonstration of their right to a Mission Hill diploma. Twenty hours of tests, including tests in subjects we don't intend to teach because they are a mile wide and an inch deep.
And then, just as I was about to leave, I got a memo from my superintendent explaining to me how I was supposed to make sure that I had aligned everything we do in our school to meet the needs of the tests. Not the kids, but the tests. He particularly noted that children's course grades should reflect their test scores on the state tests! And on the same day I got another memo explaining how the State of Massachusetts would directly report test scores to parents. That was no longer part of my job. That would save me stamp money. But in doing so, they would fill in our school name, and sign it with my name so it would have, in their words, a more personal touch. The chutzpah of them. I feel personally outraged, defiled. But then, it was a week of outrages.
Because, of course, when I sat up last Tuesday night chewing my nails about the election I was also filled with outrage. And I recall that I was thinking that the real reason we need school reform was so that we could have a better electorate. Now that is a little bit of chutzpah on my part too.
So when I heard Cornel West say, it's okay not to be optimistic, but you've got to hold on to hope, that made me perk up. It's what I needed to hear and think about; because I wasn't feeling very optimistic and I knew how dangerous it was to lose hope.
The great thing about teaching after all, is one never really knows for sure whether what you do works. I'm not even sure that we can know what works with mice, but surely not human beings. The consequence of ones best intended actions are open to question, because the subjects of them, the kids, have agency too. They have their own intentions. The future, their futures are therefore unpredictable. We can offer them better odds, but in the end, what lies ahead for each child, lies out of our capacity to manipulate, or shape. We can only do our best. For some this limitation may be frustrating, for me it is liberating, exhilarating. It's a recipe for hope.
That's true also, I reminded myself, of politics, as of all human affairs. In the long haul of history, what the meaning of this amazing election campaign and result will be is, after all, still unknown and, in certain sentences, will be unknown forever. Because even in a 100 years the biases of that time will make it look like it was either a great thing, or a terrible thing, or of no consequence. We can only do our best and keep on doing it and see. Not waiting passively to see, but nevertheless persevering, not knowing the ending, which always remains just out of our reach. There is always a possibility that our intentions may make a difference. There is always possible way of having a silver lining to all sad stories.
We need to act on our uncertainties. For those of you who supported Bush, Nader, or Gore, this is not to say that you should have just said "what difference does this make." We need to act on our tentative uncertainties, those open-ended possibilities with all the enthusiasm some folks, but not well educated folks, think you can only summon up for certainties and absolutes. To act "as if" is the best we human beings can do. Only Gods can do better. And it is this spirit of both tolerance for uncertainty, skepticism about one's own best ideas as well as an equal passion for those ideas that we can pass on to our kids. It may seem contradictory, but it's a contradiction we must live with and love. It is the gift we have as human beings, that we can do both. To shift the odds slightly on behalf of justice and democracy, needs our best efforts, even if we are not always certain that our best efforts are nearly enough.
So while it's a fact that standardized tests overwhelm today's schools, without any benefits that I can see coming out of them, it's well to remember what's happening is a symptom of a much larger problem that is going to take much longer to deal with. It is, for that reason, going to be harder and not easier to cure. We can't solve it just by getting rid of the tests. The cure doesn't lie in more tests or less tests. The testing crisis, the testing mania, is a symptom of a culture of distrust gone amuck. It requires us to reframe the agenda--a much bigger task.
But we need to be prepared, because the present test-driven mania and the marketplace ideology that goes with it, won't even serve its own purposes well. It will falter, and we need to be pursuing a parallel agenda to take advantage of those faltering moments. In a society that has taken the marketplace, as Cornel West suggested, to absurd lengths the current top-down reform strategies won't even, I predict, serve the marketplace well.
Hope depends also on a second theme that's been obsessing me lately. Who besides the people who organize the marketplace for our young, I speak now of the mass media, is keeping company with our kids? Who else is observing them closely? Is offering them a picture of the world to guide them through perilous times? And who is not keeping company with our kids? Why and at what cost did we abandon the idea that to educate our young we need to surround them with real life adults, not virtual adults, that they personally have a possibility of trusting? Who can foster hope in them--embody what it means to live hopeful lives? Not the kind of trust and hope we are supposed to invest in presidential candidates or politicians, because of the way they have been trained to grin or not grin, comb their hair, or use their hands, but because of experience every day, daily, day after day, year after year, on what it means to be trustworthy.
Everything else we do in school is a frill. Very important frills, mind you, even very critical ones. I am not denigrating the importance of choosing the right curriculum, the right writing method, this reading method over that one, and selecting which are the most important themes. But they are still of no use at all without that environment of mutual trust. The schools I love best are very special places, meaning they are each very different. Folks are right to say they can't be replicated or brought up to scale. They say that as an attack on the kind of schools we stand for. I say that as praise of them. It's the wrong way to think, not only about good schools, but good families, good communities, or good friends. Children are right to say when their dog dies and the mom says, "Oh don't worry, we'll get another one," that there is no replicating the one we love; you cannot replicate something special and something important.
At their heart, these special places work because the people who make up these particular communities, have a shot at knowing each other well enough to sort of trust each other, with plenty of checks and balances to support the equally appropriate skepticism. There is an important balance between trust and skepticism, which takes time to work out. There are a lot of good reasons, after all, to distrust. Imagine what it takes in a deeply racist society, to ask young people and their families to trust the institutions of that deeply racist society? And after all, we are not always trustworthy, either to ourselves or even to those we love, not to mention to those we serve without love.
Having said this, however, it's important to remember that trust is still a necessity. I have to trust, when I get into a car, all the rest of the drivers on the road. Think of the level of trust you have to invest in all the unknown people in those other cars, or you couldn't drive a car down the block. It is not possible to drive a car without that level of trust. But I also know I better stay alert, because after all they're not all trustworthy. The same is true when you are a passenger in a car--even more so.
It's like leaving your kids with a baby sitter. You shouldn't have a baby sitter come to your house in the evening whom you've just told your kids shouldn't be trusted. What would it mean to an 8 year old to be entrusted to the care of someone but told that they should take careful notes of the things she does right and wrong and to assure them that you have set up a few cameras up there to observe her for potential malfeasance? When it gets to that point, take the kid with you.
There is a level of trust that's a prerequisite for raising kids, and schools are a part of the business of raising kids. There is a level of trust necessary to teaching young people to become adults. Because there's no way to trust one's own judgment in the absence of having experienced trust in other people's judgment. But to what level must such trust extend? And what are the needed checks and balances? That's what we need a lot of tinkering to discover. That's one of the tasks of reinvention for us. And the answers will vary from one year to another in our own schools. Not to mention that the answer in school X and the answer in school Y won't be the same, though there may be some common underlying guidelines.
Under such circumstances as we face, hope is not a mere rhetorical mantra to keep us from despair. And it needs to be buttressed precisely because optimism may be hard to come by. It is not foolish. It's not an avoidance of reality. It's an awareness, that if we don't have hope, we can't change an untrusting and untrustworthy world, nor help our kids grow up to succeed within it not to mention change it. Kids do not need schools, even for the sake of the economy, that mirror the marketplace, where money is always the measure of a man and where trust is particularly unnecessary. "Buyer beware" the marketeers tell us. That's part of the name of that game. Everyone is out there telling you something--trying to pull off a big sale. You are not supposed to trust them, but to outwit them.
What we need is a strong counter-force. I don't say anti-force to the marketplace, but a counter-force, something equally compelling to balance the power of the marketplace. Or to look at it differently, maybe they need an image of a different kind of marketplace. I was thinking that maybe we need to remind kids about another kind marketplace, the marketplace of ideas. There is also the old-fashioned village marketplace which is the place people came, not only to buy and sell, but also to share and show off, to gossip and to build a culture together. That's another image of a marketplace that maybe our children need. I sometimes think of the big hallway that connects all our classrooms at Mission Hill as our shared market place--the school's cultural meeting place.
Cornel West reminded us of how fragile the ideal of democracy is, and how much we owe to that ancient image of Greek democracy. But I thought as he reminded us of what we owe Socrates and Plato, that even at the height of classic Greek democracy, some of its greatest intellects--like Plato--were arguing against it. You know we slip over that uncomfortable fact with kids. It so happens that this winter we are all studying Ancient Greece at Mission Hill so that is why I'm up on this stuff and why I was so grateful to Cornel West for opening up with the meaning of Ancient Greece for us today.
But some of the most prominent Greek intellectuals are not so different than a lot of other experts today--who say that at least when it comes to the raising of our children, we can't afford democracy. One of the reasons those experts were against democracy, and one of the reasons that many experts today are against the idea of trusting communities to make important decisions about schools, are one and the same: Plato and Socrates didn't trust the motley passions of even that limited citizenry of free white males in 5th century BC Greece. Today’s experts feel the same way about parents, teachers, kids and local school boards.
The task that I think that Cornel suggested to us is the task of marrying such intellectual zeal with compassion, to insure that intellect never gets disconnected from love. It's that combination of forces that makes possible democracy. It's the act of loving faith that goes into continuing to try to work through the fragile idea of democratic practice. What Cornel called the marrying of Athens and Jerusalem, reason and love, even love that must contain pain, is not impossible. But it is possible as long as we can imagine it, as long as we've experienced it someplace, somewhere; that's why it's so critical for children to have such settings in our homes, neighborhood and schools. We can only imagine it, and work for it, and continue to hope that it can exist on a wider scale and in more places because we know first hand what it can be like.
Our faith in this possibility is what we can keep offering our kids, without illusions regarding the odds in its favor. It's in the little daily acts in school that we give them this hope. It's not in long speeches like I'm giving here, that we can convince the young that this is an idea worth living for. It's in all those smaller fights against the zero tolerance mentality, the "bottom line" rhetoric, and the seekers for "guaranteed success or your money back." In human relationships there are no guarantees and no money back that can make up for the pains we suffer when we let each other down.
I think of all the discussions I have in schools, and we've all been part of them, in which we keep asking: so if a kid breaks that rule, what will happen to him? Well, first we'll scold them, then we'll detain them in class, then we'll suspend them, and then we'll kick them out of school. But, ask the doubter, what then? Line them up and shoot them? There is no way for human beings to live without endlessly exhausting tolerance. For some things, there aren't alternatives. One doesn't choose one's life's work on the basis of odds. The odds may be against this fragile project of democracy, also schooling and equity--the projects that we have undertaken to work for. One takes the odds into account, but one doesn't choose one's beliefs and passions on the basis of them.
It hurts, Steve Jubb reminded me, too much sometimes to imagine what seems hopeless. Hopelessness is a killer of imagination. All those people who say to me, "You just have to accept it Debbie, we may not like it but that's the way it's going to be," have lost the capacity to imagine that it could be otherwise. And imagination is at the center of the idea of hope. We cannot allow our fear of being hurt to stop us from loving or our fear of losing to stop us from dreaming.
We are extraordinarily lucky to live in a time when, however uphill the fight might be for our educational ideas, there are amidst us living examples of such schools in the public sector that did not exist when I entered the field of education. It's important to remember that there was not one such example in New York City in 1965 when I first started teaching there. There are today in New York City, hundreds. Still a minority phenomenon, a drop in a huge bucket, but it's alive and robust. Ditto in Chicago, Boston, Oakland and on and on.
With all their faults and errors, such schools make the dream tangible in a way it wasn't for me in 1965. At that time I could only look to independent schools, largely designed only for the elite. There were no good public examples of such schools, certainly not in our teeming cities, where I knew the schools all too well. But today we have schools all over the nation that are trying over and over and over again to unite Athens and Jerusalem. We have something worth protecting, but also something to remind us that hope is possible.
When I chose to become a teacher 35 years ago at the age of 35, it was out of just the sense of foreboding that I sometimes feel today. In fact, it was what made me decide to sink my teeth into doing something like teaching. Something I could learn to do well, a craft I could hone over time that was at least some of the time likely to be useful, that was all the time interesting, and occasionally even the source of unmitigated joy. And so it has been for 35 years. But it occurs to me that it was also because I was worried about the potential of doing harm--mind you, out of the best of intentions.
I had, unlike many of you, been raised at a time when two so-called well-intentioned movements flourished in the world--two movements that attracted the commitment of some of the world's most famous experts, folks dedicated to the loftiest of ideals. Fascism and Communism. The impact of such passion was part of my childhood. I grew up intensely political as a result. School teaching, in contrast, offered me a chance to act passionately without fear of doing harm. Or at least not on a grand scale. That's a modest ambition, to do no harm. It's enormously hard to carry out. And I recommend it.
Maybe when all is said and done, democracy depends on a healthy respect for such a modest ambition, even as we are equally and properly tempted to enter into flights of fancy and prepared to launch grand ventures. I don't mean to say to any of you here--please don’t misunderstand me--that we shouldn't have bold and grand ideas and that we shouldn't fight for them. Like falling in love, it's okay to have that vision. But in the process you will make both little and big mistakes. But the mistakes are not dangerous to democracy or love if they are tempered by an equal passion for doing no harm. Keep both thoughts in mind as you act out your passions.
On Thursday night, when I arrived here, my granddaughter was acting in, A Midsummer Night's Dream. She was a mustard seed! It was the first show she's been in, and she's now fourteen years old, that I didn't get a chance to see. But my daughter, who is here today, has shared the euphoria with me. This was not, she said, one of those exhilarating but driven piece de resistance of an overworked and semi-crazed teacher director. I am not criticizing those, we all know them and they are marvelous. This was something different, she said. It was done by folks who had learned how to create magic in a different way. And thus it was a chance to see kids become owners of the most glorious language, as though they had invented it, and were now in the position to play with it. It was done from start to finish joyously. Without tantrums.
My daughter and I agreed we are probably not capable of carrying out such a project. But while in that sense it's a dream beyond my mortal possibility, it's a dream that can drive me to reach beyond where I am. That is the kind of dream that does no harm, unless it should lead us to conclude that we shouldn't try because we can't achieve such magic. We need to settle for all manners of means of joy, to revel in the accomplishments within our reach.
Which leads me to note that hope requires something else. To use Steve Jubb's words to me the other night as we were discussing our work, we need, he said, to go back from here proudly, as joy mongers. To be a joy monger is part of our mission. It's that "something," in the midst of much else, that makes possible hope. Go forth; be joy mongers; and thank you.
Discussion
Will Standards Save Public Education?
Deborah Meier
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Page last updated: May 15, 2002
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