Deborah W. Meier

Deborah Meier is currently on the faculty of New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education as a senior scholar and adjunct professor. She is also 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 began her teaching career as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. Between 1992 and 1996 she also served as co-director of the Coalition Campus Project that successfully redesigned the reform of two large failing city high schools, and created a dozen new small Coalition 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 attended Antioch College and received a Master’s in history from the University of Chicago. She has received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Brown, Bard, Clark, Teachers College of Columbia University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Hebrew Union College, Hofstra, The New School, Lesley College, SUNY Albany, UMASS Lowell, and Yale. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987. Her books, The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem (1995), Will Standards Save Public Education? (2000), nbsp; In Schools We Trust (2002), Keeping School, with Ted and Nancy Sizer (2004) and Many Children Left Behind (2004) are all published by Beacon Press.