re collegial and public in nature, not solo and private as has been the custom in teaching. (p.140)In 1974 Deborah Meier founded Central Park East Secondary School, an alternative public school in East Harlem, where she worked for two decades as a teacher and principal. The small school achieved national acclaim not only for its non-traditional approaches (no bells ring, classes are often up to two hours long, and students, addressing their teachers by first names, are encouraged to raise questions about what is being taught), but also because of its results. Over 90 percent of Central Park East's students graduate, and over 90 percent of those graduates go on to college, in a city where, on average, only 50 percent of all public school students even graduate from high school. Some of Deborah Meier's innovative approaches to education seem almost commonplace today interdisciplinary learning in small groups, real lessons that use the city as the classroom (a curriculum that includes such things such as mapping Manhattan or testing the water quality of the East River) and public "exhibitions" to demonstrate students' learning, rather than reliance on multiple-choice, standardized tests. Perhaps the best known of her ideas is that a school, to be effective, cannot be large. Meier holds the firm belief that students and teachers should be able to deal directly with each other as human beings, and that can only be accomplished when the school, in essence, is its own community. "Small school size is not only a good idea but an absolute prerequisite for qualitative change in deep seated habits, not just rhetoric" (p. 107). One of Meier's aims is to how America's big comprehensive high schools into communities of a manageable size. According to Meier, schools are not merely buildings, and creating new schools doesn't "depend on new buildings, just using the ones we have differently" (p. 107). Just as Central Park East shares a large building wi...
