[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.

[00:00:16] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical Schools. Today we speak with Deborah Meyer and Jane Andreas. Debbie Meyer is the founder of the Central Park East Schools, among others, and a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award winner. Jane Andreas was an art teacher and principal at Central Park East One and has been an independent educational consultant for teachers, principals, and parents. Welcome, Debbie and Jane.

[00:00:39] Deborah M: Welcome to you.

[00:00:41] Jane A: Welcome,

[00:00:43] Amy H-L: Debbie, you’ve spoken about what it would mean for a school to focus fully on helping students to become members of a democratic society. What would that look like?

[00:00:54] Deborah M: Well, they would have to experience, observe, and feel they’re part of a democratic community. That that’s how we learn everything else. You know, when we learn baseball, we have to practice it and play it and observe it. And that’s true of democracy, too. And instead of which we’ve created schools that are almost exactly the opposite of a democratic community. And it wasn’t so dangerous to democracy when most kids only went to school for five or six years. You know, when I was born, most kids never went to high school. But today, you know, the vast majority of kids spend 12 years in an institution that disrespects all its members and doesn’t treat any of them as though they were important contributors to the whole, that they had a voice in creating the whole, and they had an, obligation for that matter, to worry about and care about what the whole community was up to?

[00:01:52] Jon M: How much of that needs to be built into curriculum and how much of it is the overall environment of the school?

[00:02:01] Deborah M: Well, from what I know about human learning and for that matter, all mammals, the environment is probably the most important. The experience you actually are part of is what you learn most about. And the curricul if you respect the students, the curriculum has to be something of interest to them. If you’re going to make people spend five hours every day in a classroom with a teacher in the front of the room, you know, well, why should you be listening and paying attention? And certainly, why would you be curious? And curiosity is at the heart, I think, of democratic citizenship, that you find the world interesting and you’re curious about it and you want to understand it. Because if you’re going to participate in it as an equal, you have to know what you’re dealing with and know what you’re dealing with when you’re curious about it. And if you’re just made to learn it, you know, the reason kids spend hours in basketball shooting baskets is not because they were told they had to do it. It was because, boring as it seems to me, they’re doing this because they’re driven to do it.

[00:03:08] Amy H-L: So in a democratic school, would students have something to say about what they’re learning?

[00:03:15] Deborah M: Something, and depends their age. And in the end, they will have something to say, no matter what we do. Often if they learn to turn off what we’re doing, but there is no question that they’re going to respond to what we do, either in a way that makes us think, too, about what we are learning because I think you don’t learn from a baseball player who’s just doing it mechanically if you want to be a good baseball player. And if you want students who end up being powerful citizens of a democracy, you want students who find the world interesting.

[00:03:55] Jane A: And I think also if you are working with a child or children or they’re working together, and somebody expresses concern he doesn’t understand what you’re doing or has a question, so that moves the curriculum slightly because now you’re going to go in with the student along that question. So that changes the curriculum. But also at our schools, even with the youngest children, they had time during the day. And maybe more than one time. When they chose something they were interested in. For the high school students, for their portfolio presentations, they chose their area of study. It was within the context of their studies over the course of the seven years there.

But I’m thinking of a student who was an extraordinary potter. She was amazing with ceramics, and she did her… three of her exhibitions using the idea of ceramics. One was her autobiography, which was a set of tiles of her life in Sierra Leone before she came to the us. Another was for physics, a study of a clay hut and the thermodynamics of the clay hut. Now, I don’t think any urban kid would come up with that, but she knew about clay huts, so she moved the curriculum to another place that may not have been conceived of when everybody was deciding what do we teach in physics tomorrow?

And then the other curriculum is the not-so-visible, the unarticulated curriculum or plan of how we are together. And that’s a constant curriculum in our schools, I think.

[00:05:40] Jon M: What’s the relationship between talking about a school as a democratic or progressive school and talking about it as an ethical school? Are they the same thing?

[00:05:52] Deborah M: I’ve never, you’re asking a question. I’ve never thought about. I would say that a school that doesn’t feel ethical to me would be very hard to live in and would not be very healthy, if I couldn’t think how to make it an ethical community. So, I would think that ethics is a part of the life of a democratic community because questions of how you feel about each other, whether you trust each other, and if not, do you have good reasons to distrust each other, are very important in creating democratic institutions. And the schools are going to help us learn when to trust, and how to trust, and how to distrust, and what questions to ask, and how to understand someone else’s viewpoint you think you disagree with, and find that they’re right, or whether you’re right or wrong to disagree with them. It doesn’t determine whether you respect them or disrespect them, that it’s possible to have deep arguments with people that you’re very fond of and that you care about.

Now, I came from a family that loved to argue, so schools which turn off argument because they think to argue is bad are not helping students understand what must take place in a society that claims to be democratic. And certainly schools imply to kids that there are a lot of things that… free speech is not often honored in many schools.

And certainly today, the question of free speech is very, very, very important and very vulnerable because the administration we have now is quite frank in saying there’s some speech you, you’re not allowed to engage in. You’re not even allowed to engage in speech that criticizes the president of the United States. And there’s a lot of things you’re not allowed to talk about. And I gather there are teachers in this country right now who are being fired because of what’s on their social media, you know, what they’re saying. Anyway, I could go on forever. So, Jane.

[00:08:08] Jane A: Well, I’m just thinking the idea of ethics. I think sometimes it’s easier to be ethical, to think about things in terms of them being ethical, I’m just thinking this through now, than democratic. I think democracy is somewhat, not so elusive, but so difficult to define, and it isn’t definitive. I think a school can be ethical and not be democratic, depending on the basis of what they consider ethical. I mean, I didn’t go to Ethical Culture School, you know. Hardly. So I don’t know, but I wonder, how many times we said to a child or to a teacher or to a parent or to ourselves, is that ethical? I’m just trying to think how often we even used that word. Do you?

[00:08:59] Deborah M: Not very often I regret, but you know, we at at Ethical Culture, and I can’t remember what, whether this was just in the secondary school, not in the elementary school, we had a ethics class. And I think we had a very interesting and important leader running those classes. And there was nothing that you couldn’t bring up and talk about in those classes. And I think they were an opportunity for us to see each other in a more fulsome way, which is part of what being a democracy requires. You have to not have stereotypes about your fellow citizens, but you have to have a way of feeling what they’re feeling.

[00:09:42] Jane A: Can I, I’m thinking, I had forgotten about this. I was still in the art room and Jesse Jackson was visiting the school, a particular classroom, and he was going to be in this fifth, sixth grade classroom. But the teacher said that it was somehow decided, I don’t know how, that every other classroom could send two children to his visit. And at that time, several of us had children at the school. I had two daughters at the school, several teachers had kids at the school, and neither of my daughters were chosen to go to that talk. I don’t know how the choices were made. And nor were some of the children of the other teachers, but somehow those children got to go, anyway. I remember now that one of my daughters came to the art room and she said, how come I can’t go? I said, you weren’t chosen. She said, but so-and-so’s going. That’s not ethical. And I totally forgot about that. And I said, that’s a good conversation to have with your teacher, and maybe we could have it with the staff, but I am not sending you into that room just because you happen to be my child. I completely forgot about that. But she used the word. She was a sixth grader.

[00:10:54] Deborah M: So I wonder how many times we were making ethical decisions, but were not framing it in that way.

[00:11:01] Jon M: Jane, when you and I were talking the other day, you gave an actual example of an ethical situation that arose having to do, I think, with a science project with the chicks. You do. I mean, it’s interesting to think about a situation where an ethical decision has to be made. Would you talk about that a little bit?

[00:11:22] Jane A: Okay. And I want to say the ethical decision had to do with decision-making. Who’s involved in decision-making? So there was a, it was sort of written in stone that at 10 to 12, I go to the cafeteria to clean it, to get it ready for the next hour’s kids because the custodians only cleaned the end of the day.

[00:11:42] Jon M: And this is when you were the principal?

[00:11:43] Jane A: This is when I, yes. And everyone knew that unless it was an absolute emergency, that’s what I would be doing. So I was called to a classroom. Urgent. So I expected a child’s arm to be dangling or something. And teacher said to me, you have to make this decision for me. This is very urgent. I said, what is it? He said the school had a practice of hatching chicks, one I didn’t think was very ethical, but nevermind. And I didn’t win. And they had done a successful hatching. It was a fifth upper grade class and they were doing a second hatching. And some of, about half, the class wanted to open an egg before the end of the gestation period. And the other half did not want to, and the teacher didn’t know what to do. So he wanted me to make the decision. I said, no, my decision is no, we are not going to do it that way. So I said, if you’re willing to not have your math lesson at one o’clock, which would’ve been after lunch and recess, you and I can do a debate. We can each take a different side in front of the kids. The kids can pose questions and then they can decide what they think is the most ethical thing to do. But we were going to talk about the ethics of science and we did that. And in fact, it was still a pretty much an even split in the class. And we decided with the children that the group that was interested in seeing this could stay with the teacher and the other group could stay with me.

But I asked them to just give it a little thought, close their eyes and think inside their bodies how they were really going to feel when they did this. And they did. And half the class came with me and the other half stayed opened. What happened to be an unfertilized egg. But that was, you know, something they discovered. One child had experienced, his mother was very, very ill. She was, she was dying, and I was concerned that he chose to stay. And I said, just think about a little bit. He chose it. And then within seconds he ran after me and he said, I changed my mind. I want to go with you.

But the point is that I was not going just because I happened to be named the principal of the school did not put me in the position of making that decision. I wanted everyone to come to it together, and I think the teacher appreciated it in the end, too.

[00:14:07] Jon M: Are there any decisions?

[00:14:08] Deborah M: But there are probably some decisions I wouldn’t take that position.

[00:14:13] Jane A: No, no, absolutely.

[00:14:14] Deborah M: So, it is interesting to think about. We had a debate in the faculty, at one point, I can’t remember the guy’s name. In California, there was a Black man in LA or where was it? We had marches in New York and…

[00:14:28] Jon M: Rodney King?

[00:14:28] Deborah M: Rodney King. Maybe that was it. In any case, some of the kids had met and they wanted to take off that day and go on this march and demonstration. So we had a big to debate in the faculty about whether, what should we do about that? And what we ended up deciding to do is we wrote a letter to parents, which said, and we discussed, we told the kids what we were going to do, but it wasn’t their choice. We decided to tell the parents that we couldn’t outlaw it. But on the other hand, there are risks involved in a demonstration, and if they don’t want their child to go, they should probably keep their kid home that day because we don’t want to physically have to keep him from going, and that we weren’t going to send a faculty member to the march with the students whose family sent them to school that day. You know, we didn’t all agree about this, but somehow people were willing to live with it, which was an important dividing point in our school. When we had a discussion among the faculty, if even one faculty member said, I can’t do that. I can’t live with that, we then postponed making a decision, so we could spend a week thinking about alternative ways of convincing him to do it, or changing what we were going to do in a way that would make it possible.

[00:15:49] Jane A: After 911, our music teacher, at our business meeting, which was not a time to talk about these kinds of things, but he thought it was just a piece of business, said he was going to start teaching patriotic songs and there was whoa, everybody in the room… . So I suggested that instead of having the meeting we planned for the Monday, would the music teacher and the all of us agreed that he would teach us the songs, he would present them to us and we would see which of those songs fit in with what we thought was important about patriotism. And that’s what we did. So again, he couldn’t be in the position of making the decision all on his own. Neither could I. We did it together and we did come to an agreement about that.

[00:16:34] Amy H-L: And the music teacher was okay with that?

[00:16:36] Jane A: Yes. He was, I think even when people were mad at each other that there was this kind of respect for the ethics of the school that enabled people to give in on some things that they disagreed with it but could live with.

[00:16:53] Deborah M: And I think that it was part of the climate of the school, and for some teachers it was harder than for others. And, and Mission Hill, which is the school I started in Boston, which was a K through eighth grade school, there was a teacher who came with terrific qualifications in science educator. And we all liked her very much, but she had very difficult time with classrooms. She got along with individual kids, but she had very hard time with classrooms, and the kids were giving her a hard time. And we spent two years trying to help her overcome that, at which point some of her colleagues said, do you want to keep doing this? We are willing to. And she said, no. I think it’s time for me to think differently about my career.

But any case, again, we talked through her dilemma and our dilemmas at school. This was someone we liked and respected and she was having a hard time and should she stay and so forth. But we were able as a school, to help her come to the conclusion that maybe she should become a scientist instead of a science teacher.

[00:18:05] Jane A: I think that people, as I’m listening to this, people knew that each person will be heard. People knew the basis of the school, which we have to revisit continually, and I think felt that was fairness that they were respected, and I think children did, too, pretty much. Sometimes they questioned it, but 

[00:18:32] Deborah M: You know, one of the terrible things about too many of our schools is that the kids are tracked and compared to each other all the time. And some kids know they’re in the dummy class and some kids know they’re in the gifted class, and we don’t think about the damage it does to both, probably, in some ways, but obviously, I’m mostly worried about the damage to the dummy class. I think a lot of them end up being Trump supporters because who is it? Here are educators who have kept them, disrespected them for 12 years, treated them with disrespect. What’s it like to go to school day after day and where you know you’re expected to fail. Kids don’t move from one track to the other very easily. And I think it produces rage by the time they get to be adolescents, so that having to stay in school through high school as a disrespected member of a community where other kids and other, and teachers, adults and students, many of them look down upon you as less than their equal.

So I think one of the things that impressed me most of the time at our school was that kids’ friendships were affected probably by how they felt about many things, but they really, there are a lot of cross divisions, I don’t know how to put this. A lot of middle class kids who became close friends with kids who were very low income and religiously different and academically different.

And there are schools which literally daily put up a list of their best students who did best on the test. That was another area that I consider the testing system in America to be unethical and undemocratic. Well, but, [inaudible], but it’s unethical and its consequences in terms of democracy are terrible.

But that was hard for us, fortunately. We’ve had a few allies downtown who helped us survive when we didn’t give tests or when we did poorly in tests because we gave parents a choice of whether they wanted their kid to take the test. And any case, there are some issues we don’t think of as ethics, but to place a number on kids that determines what choices are available to them, based on an exam, even if it was a good exam, I wouldn’t like, it wouldn’t like the number. We gave exams of the sort that you either passed or failed and we weren’t…

[00:21:17] Jane A: You mean in high school?

[00:21:19] Deborah M: Yeah, that’s true. We didn’t, we didn’t do anything. But this was even for, for graduation in the end of the year to see whether we could describe and discuss with the kid why he passed or failed and what he could do to now pass.

And some of the kids wanted to, said, well, if we do something particularly wonderful, he had more credit. And there was a lot of discussion about whether we wanted an honors extrovert. Yeah, this you’re right. This was in the secondary school. But, you know, the discussions themselves, the arguments we had were part of what I think prepared them to continue to be now.

Many of these kids are now in their forties, fifties, and we’ve interviewed many of them. It is just, they still remember the habits of mind that in the secondary school were the basis of our curriculum. And they remember the disputes and they remember them with kind of pleasure.

[00:22:24] Jane A: I have a story about, and this is going off what some of your questions. One of our graduates who spent a lot of time in the art room as my community service worker, so I knew him very, very well, applied for the police, to become a police officer and he didn’t get into the first two AB classes. He got a C ranking and he had a job where he worked for a small science textbook publishing company in the stock room. And the owners really got to know him and like him, and he kept getting higher positions. I mean, he was an office worker and he got a call from, this was after graduation from SPES. He got a call from the police department saying that he could come in in the next group, but he was not to tell his any employer because he didn’t want them to hold it against him or if he didn’t get into the department, lose the job. And he called me. And this was a couple of years after graduation. And he said, what do I do? These people have taken care of me for years. They’ve given me things. I feel I owe it to them to tell them about this possibility. And I said, and who are you calling to ask this question? What do you think I’m going to say? He said, you are going to say, talk to them and tell them the circumstances that you’re telling them under, and they will be very happy for you in either way. I totally forgot that story, and that is an ethical decision and it’s a hard one because he wasn’t being obedient. Obedience and ethical are not the same things, but he grappled with it and then called to talk about it, which was great. And he became a police officer.

[00:24:11] Deborah M: Is he the one who became an officer of our district?

[00:24:13] Jane A: Mm-hmm. Yes. Oh, and then there’s a story about that too. Yeah. Wonderful.

[00:24:19] Jon M: Debbie, you’ve talked about, in terms of a democratic school, the importance of including all of the staff, not just the teachers in the culture of the school and the decision-making and so on. Could you talk a little bit about that, what that looks like and also what are some of the obstacles that schools might face in doing that?

[00:24:41] Deborah M: Yeah. And before we close, I want to think we should talk about the role of parents in schools. Because those are two areas in which I had a, well, I think it was an ethical position from the start, but it wasn’t sort of central to me. And, when I got to Mission Hill many years after I started Central Park East, I really thought, we have to tackle these two questions. Even the custodian, the lunchroom, the paraprofessionals, the school aides, school guards, whatever there are, why have we not included them? And they have never said anything to us about how come they’re not invited. And we didn’t solve the problem at Mission Hill because some of the staff, staff that didn’t deal regularly at the job with kids, didn’t want to. And I thought unfair to make them, because most of the discussion we would be having wouldn’t affect them.

So we opened it up that any, any of them were welcome, but that we would not make decisions that affected them without making sure they were in the room. And that was a new way of, for me, it was a jump. You know, I hadn’t thought about that before.

Whereas parents, I’ve always, you know, I was a parent myself when I started teaching, and I found my children went to New York public schools and Chicago public schools and for one year to Philadelphia public schools. And my role as a parent was very, you know, I was very active as a parent, and I thought parents were treated very disrespectfully by almost all the schools I was in, even when they had principals that I liked. And I suspected that we were doing that, too. We were very anxious that they should like us and they should approve of us, and that they should feel good about their children being in our school. But on the other hand, we were very possessive about our decision-making as a staff about curriculum and pedagogy. And parents didn’t agree with us. I think we avoided thinking about the repercussions of that and how we didn’t, I don’t think we took it as seriously as I really knew it was.

I was, during this period, when the start of the school, also on the school board. And all the decisions about the power structures, who’s on top and who’s comes next, and where.. Schools are a really powerful example of how hierarchy of caste systems and hierarchies and. When I went to meetings about my sons or daughter’s class teacher, sometimes I would just want to smack them because they treated me as though, even on the question of what I should be doing at home with my children, as though they were experts and I was a novice. And including teachers who had no children and I had three of them, and they were, but they would say things like, you ought to do this at home and you ought to do that.

There was very little opportunity for them to try to learn from me. It was all that assumption was that I had to learn from them and I knew we needed to do something about that, but it was an area that I never fully, I’m not fully satisfied with the way we dealt with that. I think we were better than most people at including them, and we certainly had a, a core of parents who were very involved with the school of life. Were you, Jon?

[00:28:26] Jon M: Yeah. At SPES.

[00:28:28] Deborah M: We had a governing board at Mission Hill. Did we have one at SPES? I can’t remember.

[00:28:32] Jon M: Not that I know of. I think what I remember is, the Parents Association and conversations with you, but not, I don’t remember a governing board.[00:28:41] Deborah M: Yeah, I think you’re right. At Mission Hill I finally, we had a governing board that consisted of an equal number of teachers, parents, and between the teachers and parents, chose five community members that they think would be important voices to add to it. And then the school went up to eighth grade and we included sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Eventually, after some years, they had an equal number. And notice we had rules, not just about the percentage of the total vote, when one way or the other to make sure that it was a supported by all four constituencies. And you know, we, we played with various ways of thinking about the issue, and I think the way we thought about it was very important to all of us. Not just what conclusion we reached, but all the issues that came up in the process of discussing it. You know, we learned ourselves as teachers, and Jane and I learned. One of the things that was exciting about the career was that there were so many things that fascinated us about our work that we changed our mind on, as well as things we just got to think about more deeply.

[00:30:37] Amy H-L: Thank you, Debbie Meier and Jane Andrias. And thank you, listeners. Remember: this is Part One of a two part interview. Tune in next week for Part Two. If you found this podcast worthwhile, please share it with your friends and colleagues. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating or review. This helps others to find the show. Check out our website, ethicalschools.org, for more episodes and videos and to subscribe to our email newsletters. We post annotated transcripts of our interviews to make them easy to use in workshops or classes. Contact us at hosts@ethicalschools.org. We’re on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. Our editor and social media manager is Amanda Denti. Until next week.