In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Standardized Testing by
Deborah Meier

A Forum — November 13, 2002

Background

In her new book, In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Standardization, renowned educator and school reformer Deborah Meier sets forth her vision of public schools and underscores their essential role in a democratic society. She argues that we now live in an era of extreme distrust of public education, and we have increasingly turned to standardized tests and curricula to convince ourselves that schools are working. Meier believes that schools must win the trust of the public by showing they can do their job; standardized testing, however, is the wrong tool for this job. Tests cannot give the results the public expects them to, and they actually serve to undermine the kind of education we truly want in a democratic society, she said. Meier argues that in place of test-based accountability policies, we should construct schooling environments in which teachers have the responsibility and the freedom to use their own judgment, families are invited to be in a close relationship to the school, and children are surrounded by adults who know them well. She says, “The forms of accountability that we need to rest our trust on need to be multiple – and above all require adults to exercise judgments regarding the work of our children.” Her book describes some approaches to public accountability that rely on adult judgment – more like doctoral orals, or juried panels.

Forum Summary

At this forum, Meier addressed some of the themes from her book. She described her vision for public education, one in which schools operate as learning communities where teachers, students, and families develop trusting and caring relationships. She argued that the use of standardized tests as the focus of accountability – above all as the sole definition of achievement – further undermines the development of such communities, undermines the necessary authority of adults, and inhibits the development of student understanding which depends on trustful respect between students, teachers, and families.

Drawing upon her experiences founding and running small, successful public schools serving predominately African-American and Latino students in New York and Boston, Meier claimed that the real crisis facing schools today is not that too many students are not prepared for college or that they don’t know about the date of the Civil War. While these things are important, the real crisis is that children today suffer from a lack of meaningful relationships with adults who care for them.

We have, Meier said, created a society in which the closer our children get to becoming adults themselves, the more distant their relationships with adults become, and the less access they have to positive adult role models. As an example, Meier pointed to today’s high school students who often do not know their teachers long enough and well enough to solicit letters of recommendations for college, even if they have solid high school records.

In previous generations, fewer children attended formal schooling during the adolescent years. The lessons they learned about what it is to be a responsible adult and how to negotiate the social, political, and economic world were learned by working alongside adult members of their communities. Today’s young adults, however, are separated from the adult community and put in high schools where they have little opportunity to develop meaningful relationships with adults. Over time, as the number of adolescents attending high school increased, the size of these schools also increased, contributing to the anonymity and alienation of young people from adult culture. Today’s young adults move about in peer packs with their own cultural codes, and these groups are largely impervious to adults and adult culture, said Meier. And while families continue to love each other and do have some influence over children, the fact of the matter is that they, too, have less time together in which they can interact meaningfully.

Meier argued that there are vast consequences to how we currently approach the education of adolescents in modern high schools. Not having sufficient opportunities to develop meaningful relationships with adults, today’s adolescents have an impoverished concept of what it is to be a responsible adult and a member of the adult community. They do not see how adults make decisions, interact with one another, disagree with one another responsibly, or behave thoughtfully. Human beings learn by the company they keep, and when there are sufficient opportunities for children and adults to interact, adults exert a powerful influence on children: children learn what it is to be an adult by observing adults and imagining what it is to be an adult. Therefore, Meier asserted, we need to rethink how we structure our schools; they should be reorganized in such a way that it is possible for children to learn from and develop trusting and caring relationships with teachers, parents, and community members. Smaller class size, better trained teachers, and effective instructional methods are all important if we are to improve teaching and learning; however, at the heart of school reform must be the creation of human-scaled communities of learning, concluded Meier.

Discussion

During the discussion period, Meier addressed her reservations about standardized testing and high-stakes accountability policies. Increasingly, we are coming to believe that there is some instrument that can replace human judgment, she responded to a participant. This is wrong-headed and dangerous. Tests cannot and should not replace direct human knowledge of students in our decision-making about what is best for those students. And insofar as standardized testing and associated accountability policies undermine the professional authority of the educator and the development of trusting relationships between teachers, students, and their communities, they threaten the development of schools as learning communities and undermine learning, said Meier. While test data are useful in the sense that they allow us to observe changes in scores over time in different populations, Meier continued, it is inappropriate and dangerous to rely solely on test data to make judgments about the learning that has taken place in individual students or schools. “The data simply cannot stand up to the task imposed – not only because it is focused on too narrow a range of skill and ignores critical aspects of what it means to be well-educated, but because the technology of testing itself was not designed to be used for such high stakes purposes.” Meier suggested that a more desirable approach would be to provide teachers with the rigorous professional training they need to help all learners succeed and to re-make schools into intellectually engaging and stimulating environments for both students and teachers. “While this might be a slower path,” she argued, “it is the most efficient way to get where we want to get if our goal is a more thoughtful citizenry.”

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