[00:00:15] Jon M: This is Part Two of a two-part interview with Debbie Meier and Jane Andrias. If you missed Part One, we invite you to go back and listen to it. 

[00:00:21] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.

[00:00:22] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Welcome to Ethical S chools.

Debbie Meier is the founder of the Central Park East Schools, among others, and a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award winner. Jane Andrias was art teacher and principal at Central Park East I, and has been an independent educational consultant for teachers, principals, and parents.

[00:00:41] Amy H-L: Debbie, as an involved parent, what I found was that those on the PTA and the PTO and the various governing boards were parents with social capital and also parents with the time and the freedom to be engaged that way had. Did you?

[00:01:03] Debbie M: Yes, absolutely. And that was troubling to us. At Mission Hill, we had white children, but a relatively small number, and we noticed that their parents, when they elected, had the parent election for the governing board, that most of the people who were elected were white. They were maybe 20% of the school population. And you’re right, it’s because they came from a different kind of background and relationship to their power, plus the fact that they had the time and the resources to attend and be active. So they came up with a rule that at least, I think it was maybe half, at least, I can’t remember exactly, but something like that whites could only be, couldn’t be more than half of, they were electing five people, each group elected five, at least three of ‘them had to be members of the, either Black or Latino.

[00:01:57] Jane A: When I became the director of CPE, I thought it was going to be for a year because the principal went on sabbatical. I think I was the only one in New York who was going to be for a year. So I, when I was actually installed as the director, there were a lot of a number of parents who objected to my being the director, not because they didn’t like me, they knew me as the art teacher. You know, I was the only art teacher, so that was it. But they wanted a person of color and nobody on our staff was willing to take the position. At that point, you didn’t have to have a supervisory license, so anyone could have done it. Nobody wanted to do it, and I didn’t either. But then I ultimately agreed.

They went to the superintendent, who was the first woman superintendent in district four, starting the same year as I. And she asked to hold a meeting in our school in what was called ” our office,” although it wasn’t just my office, and she said, I don’t know how Jane is sitting here so calmly and nicely. If I were here among all the men who might have objected to my being the superintendent, I don’t know how I would’ve reacted. She was a Latino woman. And the the parents were… We ended up having a very good conversation. However, where that left us was we had always had white women as the head of the PTA and at this point I said, well, why don’t we change the demographics of the parents association? Why don’t we change it somehow? And they did. And it became much more diverse. And we also started to have, when we had a meeting, parent meeting on Tuesday night, we also had it on Wednesday morning. We tried to find times that everybody could come and I asked them to help, and we had a very active, amazing PA or PTA, I don’t… what was it, a PTA or PA? I don’t remember. I don’t remember and it really, I don’t think I could have done anything without them because I had, the assistant directorship was taken away, so I had no support. But the thing is that we sort of put it out there for, well, let’s see how we can have this person, me, and I would’ve given up the job if any of you had walked into the office and wanted the job, I would’ve said fine, you can have it, and let’s see if we can do this together. And they were terrific. But it really was a superintendent who put it in front of us and she was also talking about herself. So that was, that was interesting.

[00:04:38] Debbie M: I think Jane and I were lucky that we had District Four where, East Harlem District, we had an unusual number of good superintendents of our district. I don’t know that it’s how long…

[00:04:49] Jane A: It’s also a small district. It’s a relatively small district, right.

[00:04:53] Debbie M: And it was a help to know that I was not in danger [inaudible] from that end. Even when the superintendent disagreed with me, he never implied that there was trouble, that I’d get in trouble for doing it. He knew I might get in trouble, the central board or parents association, and then he would help me solve it. But he was my ally and that’s rare. Jane and I both were very lucky in that respect. I was also lucky when I went to Boston because the superintendent there was an old friend of mine from the National Board for Professional Teacher Standards, which we were both part of starting founding. And he was a good ally of mine too, in the same kind of way. And his departure from the district was a factor in what happened to Mission Hill over the next 15 years because we never had another superintendent who was supportive. So I wasn’t there at the time after that [inaudible] left about the same time I did. But [inaudible], who followed me as principal of Mission Hill, what a hard time she had, precisely because she wasn’t respected by the superintendent.

By the way, of course, there’s the other parent relationship I have to mention, and that is the teacher’s relationship with the parents of her students. And that takes time and that’s why it’s a big help in private schools. The class sizes are 15 kids maybe, whereas in public schools, they’re 25, 30. Because if you’re going to have lives of your own as teachers, you have families and husbands and friends. And to develop relationships with the parents of the students in your class is both very important but very time-consuming.

And for both sides, both the parents and for the teacher, one of the things we did at Mission Hill, I’m speaking about Mission Hill more because that’s my last experience and so I remember it better, but at Mission Hill, we arranged ways in which we would say to parents. When we had a whole school parent meeting, we had babysitters. So parents had a choice. They could either bring their children to school or stay at home, but it made it easier for parents to bring their kids. And we also said that everybody should bring food, but we would supply dessert and drinks.

[00:07:14] Jane A: Yeah, we did that, too.

[00:07:15] Debbie M: And it’s easier for parents and at those meetings, then I knew the parents, my students, and there was a kind of community that included everybody in some level. And I think that’s what I’m scared about, about America right now.

[00:07:34] Amy H-L: Debbie, what happened to Mission Hill?

[00:07:36] Debbie M: 15 years later, after first making us move into. . We were in a community school that had been started in an area that we wanted to be in. It was predominantly minority, Black, Latino, and it had some white families. And they moved us into a largely white community, Jamaica Plain. And they moved us into a building where the principal didn’t want us to share the building with her. And it was a very modern building and the classrooms were never . . . Well, would be half a floor in one classroom and then another classroom over here. There was no sense of community about the physical space, and that was very hard for us. Especially with the moves, too.

[00:08:18] Jane A: Because it had been on one floor.

[00:08:19] Debbie M: Yeah. We had all been together on one floor in the old school and the hallways sort of belonged to the community, and we posted all of each other’s children’s work and kids were in the hall. In fact, we had some activities that would take place in the hallway. And you know, it was just very, very different and very hard. So then they made some of these other decisions, one of which was we were called pilot schools, and there was about 20 or 30 of them there and virtually none left. Now they began to crack down on all the pilots.

And one way was that they had to follow the same mandated curriculum that was citywide. And one of the enticements to become a pilot school was that you could design your own curriculum, and we had a very exciting curriculum. We’d study the same thing from kindergarten through eighth grade at the same time. And, but it was a kind of curriculum in which you would do different things at different stages. And we posted stuff in the hallways and the kids would help each other across the age [inaudible]. And there was a sense that we were all studying something in common in our own different ways. They didn’t realize the extent to which that curriculum was designed, and the curriculum decisions were designed, around the school’s philosophy.

And the standard curriculum, nothing was wrong with any one unit, but the way it was organized would not work for us. But the person who followed me as principal finally left. She retired, but very sadly, I mean, she felt she was being pushed out. And two teachers became co-principals, and we had the union support to do that. And anyway, they were harassed so much in the next year or two, very badly harassed. And then they sent some investigators in right after the pandemic, when the kids came back from the, you know, when they were in school was closed, summer vacation, no disease. Oh, COVID. The COVID thing. When the kids were, when the school was closed most of one year, and when the kids came back, they had removed the principals. They had removed three teachers and the charge against them was that some 4-year-old boy had sexually harassed a 5-year-old girl and that they thought this, the school was, didn’t do anything, but they did. What they didn’t do was report it to the police, which is what they’re supposed to do. And the principal, I think quite brightly, she brought in an organization to help the parents think about it. And they worked on it, along with some issues of bullying that were going on. Instead of which the city closed Mission Hill and, uh, left the parents, the teachers who were still there, you know, adrift and nobody seemed to care.

One of the judges threw out part of the case another parent brought. But that pandemic period had sort of collapsed the community. And I think partly they got away with it because the governing board in the community hadn’t been tied together in the way they had been for years.

[00:11:37] Jon M: So I have a question that, I mean, Central Park East I is still very much functioning. And it certainly had battles with the central administration and the secondary school, and now as you’re describing, Mission Hill don’t exist in the same form that they did or doesn’t exist. Do you have thoughts on, is it just chance, that innovative, creative, democratic schools survive? Or is there any advice that you can give to people who are, who are trying to do the same thing? Recognizing that, obviously, you know, there’s no magic formula, but how do schools like this, which are now so exceptional, how can they become more the norm? Or how can they be more assured of surviving? You know, that’s a sort of very broad question.

[00:12:36] Debbie M: Well, one thing is there are exceptions and there’s a group called the Big Picture Company that has managed to hold on and grow over the same period, which the rest of us suffer from. But partly, they played politics much more consciously than we did, you know? When I talked about how Tony Alvarado made it so much easier for me and maybe possible.

[00:12:59] Jon M: He was the superintendent . . . 

[00:13:00] Debbie M: [Inaudible] for that matter. And one time when, I told him, talked to a reporter about test scores and I had said something about that even this District Four, which was a wonderful district, that I suspected that the schools that got unusually high scores probably did some cheating. And unfortunately it was a stupid thing to probably share with a reporter, but I had actually already shared that with Tony Alvarado. I had recommended that he do his private small study to find out whether it was true. So he himself would think about what he has to do to help principals not do that. So the next day, this reporter reported it in print, and I didn’t realize that, but and when I came back from taking the kids to the park and there he was, and he said to me, one, did you say these things? And I said, yes, I did. And he said, oh, okay. I wish you hadn’t, but you warned me. And don’t worry about it. And I was very grateful.

And then he called me then a few days later and said, would I come to… The school board was having a party at somebody’s house? Would I come as his guest? And I said, yes. I understood what he was doing. He was making sure the school board knew that he supported me. That they would not try to take revenge. You know, you need that kind of security. So what else can give you that if you don’t have a friendly superintendent? I think that part of the problem at Mission Hill was also that the governing board during the last few years lost its sense of power and, you know, they hadn’t been together for a long time. I think they lost something during that pandemic period that meant that the school didn’t really organize itself and its allies. Two of its strongest political allies had died in the previous few years. That didn’t help. So one, you need some political allies, and number two, you need some other organizations, we created one in New York City, that didn’t survive, called the Center for Collaborative Education, precisely to do the political work for the schools like Central Park East saying, you know, we need someone to be paying attention to the political situation and, you can’t expect us to be doing our fighting in our schools to keep them strong, and also worrying about what the state legislature might do, and that, I think helped us for a while in New York. And unfortunately, we lost it. I can’t remember.

[00:15:38] Jane A: But, I think, schools have survived. It doesn’t mean they are the same as they were before, okay, that they have survived. But as we were talking about telling stories about the choices we made as school directors and teachers made, we’re talking about time. We made a choice of where we were going to spend our time, and teachers are making choices of when they’re making ethical decisions and democratic decisions, are they saying, okay, I’m going to postpone my math lesson for a half an hour. Or I’m not going to do it today. I mean, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that is a big deal.

But because there was a sense in, I worked at Mission Hill when I retired, and certainly I knew CPESS and CPE I and I worked in a lot of these small progressive schools after I retired. The kind of energy it takes to hold the center of what is ethical, what is democratic. And I’m going to use the progressive word, although I’m, I don’t know, um, what that means anymore, but that takes a lot of time and energy and effort.

And if, if the core isn’t held tightly and there are, you know, people, I’m sitting here looking at the way a flower grows and it’s not going to stay together if it doesn’t have. The, the core. Um, and it got, it became a little bit more hazardous as the years went on, and it may have been held by, in a lot of the schools I’ve worked in.

It’s held by a number of teachers, but, but the actual, um. I’m going to use the word agonizing over these issues of what is really what we should be doing. Kind of fell by the wayside because it’s, it’s hard work and certainly the, as Debbie says the support from the outside. The other thing that we did not continue to do is meet as a group of schools. We used to have our election day retreats and other retreats together. First, it was the three River East, CPE One, Two, and CPESS. And then we went to Brooklyn and we had the Neighborhood School. We were all together. The mornings, we spent working across schools. And then we were with our own group and we sent each other notes and we talked to each other. We visited each other’s schools. That stopped, and maybe that was a result of COVID as well, but it’s a lot of work and a lot of time to hold onto that while you’re also running the course of doing what you’re, what school’s supposed to look like. So I don’t know. I have some relationship to the.. Fannie Lou Hamer is a school that I spend time at, and I know that that school has really held onto its core. It’s the high school, it’s yeah, the high school in the Bronx. But it’s, it’s hard. I think the other thing is, and this is going to date us. A lot of us came out of the sixties when we were doing other things and teaching. For me, I was never going to be a teacher. It was the teaching as a political activity. Charles Silberman, remember that book? Do you know that book? That became sort of a bible, and one thing I had to learn, what was the difference between being political and trying to politicize children? Very different things. And a parent pointed out to me quite vigorously my first year of teaching, the second one isn’t the way to go.

[00:19:12] Debbie M: So, you know, the other thing is we, we have to tackle people’s definition of what we have education for and the connection between democracy and education. It stuns me to realize that there is almost no longer a recognition that we are raising future citizens of the country and that we have to prepare them for citizenry and a democracy that assumes a lot of practices, habits, that on the whole we not only don’t honor in school, but we actually dishonor in school. I don’t know what people’s definition of what the task of school is. To me, the first task of school is a task of producing the citizens one wants, and if it’s a dictatorship, he wants citizens who are passive, obedient. And if they’re angry, they’d take the anger out in a nonpolitical way. And, um, that’s if you want a tyranny, if you want a dictatorship. But since most of our history, I don’t know what people thought. I don’t think they thought they were raising kids to be the subjects of a tyranny, but I don’t think they thought through what they mean by democracy. And what, therefore, they mean we’re educating kids. We spend a lot of money on schools and we take 12 children’s precious years. We need to think about what’s important about it and what will we sacrifice to make sure that the next generation of citizens can hold onto our democracy. And I think that it’s hard to expect schools to fight the social norms and survive. Maybe it’s unrealistic and we have to fight out the question of how important is democracy to us and what are the habits of mind and heart that are essential to democracy. 

[00:21:12] Amy H-L: And I think habits of action, too, right? I nean we know that a successful democracy requires an engaged citizenry, right? So how can we encourage students to speak up about local and national issues and to become involved in their communities and civic institutions? I mean, isn’t that part of education?

[00:21:26] Debbie M: Yeah, and I think to do that, we need people from a number of different fields who all care about democracy to see how important schools are. That’s the one institution in a way we have set up and spend money on for the purpose of creating the next generation. And I think that should be important not just to educators, teachers, or parents of particular children. And I, I think we need to make, turn that discussion around and start asking, what’s this for? What are we doing this for? And we can need to involve in that discussion of what it’s for people from many different fields.

We have an election coming up. Maybe that’s one of the things we should start thinking about. How can this election also be about democracy and about schools as places to nurture democracy? But we have to define both democracy and schooling in different ways. Not just, you know, count up what their scores are on tests and even graduation rates or college rates, going rates, because you need that in a tyranny. You need that, maybe high test scores, and you need students who are in elite to rule the country. But you need a contented citizenry. But if you think that schools are not the place, I think the central place where the future of democracy is formed, you know, and I think it’s powerful also because it is an ethical issue. It’s an overlapping issue that it could excite people in many ways.

You know, one of the topics in the secondary school, one of the questions in one of the curriculums was, are justice and fairness the same? And then we, we studied that over historical periods and what we meant by both terms. So the curriculum matters too. But the curriculum doesn’t matter if it’s just trying to see that kids get a better score on tests and that they forget all of it a day after the test.

[00:23:32] Jane A: But the other part of that was that question of justice and fairness, which I’m thinking was enacted in the school. If there was something that a child, a student felt wasn’t fair or was unjust, there was always someone for that person to go see. It may not have been his advisor, could have been one of the school aides he had at CPE as a child, but there was access to somebody to listen and then see where it could be taken. So it wasn’t just the studying of something. So we know what Marbury versus Madison or all those things that we studied in high school. What does this really look like for me in my life? And that not only did kids feel that they could do it, but there was always somebody who would say, ah, I think so and so would be an adult who you would, would feel comfortable talking to. So everyone was engaged in that idea of people being able to talk to each other across ages. It could have been a school aide who was very important to a high school student, that everybody mattered in the school.

[00:24:44] Debbie M: You know, that in the secondary school it was also, I think sometimes people, they went to community service. Community service or internships. Yeah. Yeah. The kids starting in seventh grade, they all spent a half day or a day a week outside of the school. Occasionally, ,they had an internship in the school. In so many cases, we found out afterwards the help kids got in going to college. A lot of it came from a person that they had worked with at the community service who had a good relationship with college, they had gone to and liked our student and helped get them into their college. And we didn’t realize how much of that was going on between.. These were not institutions we were close to necessarily. But, you know, we did it so that kids would feel part of the adult world.

And we had a big hat fight about whether kids could wear hats or not in the secondary school. One of the things the kids said to us was, you say, you know, we have to be prepared for the outside world, but a lot of people wear hats. In a sense, they knew more about what’s going on in other workplaces than we did. And apparently, a lot of men were into the baseball caps anyway. So we wanted them to feel part of the world.

We took advisory trips. Kids, went to visit as a group, went to visit a college and went skiing the next day and so forth. But this was all part of an effort. And think, by the way, what it would be like if all schools were doing this. You know, you might think it would be harder to find places for them, but after a while you’d realize that most places began to do it and you’d have a citizenry, adult citizenry, that knew the next generation in a more respectful way.

[00:26:37] Jane A: And if you think of the definition of the Latin word educere, which means “to lead out.” It doesn’t mean to confine in, and I think that was one of the ideas of the school. But it’s interesting, we talk about schools of choice. Do we talk about choices schools make? And again, the intentionality of CPESS or CPE or a lot of the schools, there are, people are making choices all the time based on what they value, what they think is important. I may not agree with some of the things they think are important, but there’s an intentionality. Sometimes it’s just to be obedient to the administration. However, I think that schools aren’t even aware in some cases that they can make choices and choice is a part of democracy. You know, when before I started Central Park East, I was a kindergarten teacher in Central Harlem and young teachers used to frequently come to me and say, would I bring this up at the next staff meeting. And I did it at first without thinking about it, and then I began to ask them, why can’t you bring it up? And they said, well, she, the principal, takes it differently when you say it than when I say it. And I realized that teachers come out of schools too, and they’ve spent an awful lot of time being intimidated by authority, and it comes to them naturally. I, having gone to a school that was different and then went to Antioch College and then went to University of Chicago and being involved in civil rights movement, all kinds of things, I didn’t have the experiences they had of being put down and hurt and wounded by authorities. I had generally found them respectful to my ideas and disagreed sometimes, but I had had a very different history and it meant a lot. I didn’t, I was lucky to have experiences that made me safer. And I think that we have to make teachers feel safe enough to be bold. And that was our one hope that the union would do, help teachers in that way. And I think it was a good idea, but I don’t think teachers’ unions went far enough.

The contract is a standardized contract for every school so that even though there’s a committee that approves the contract, it doesn’t involve people thinking about their own community and decisions that are important to them. So there’s a lot of ways in which we have failed the wonderful idea that democracy is so that its practice becomes very hard and then it loses its adherence. And I think there’s a lot of Americans who don’t think democracy is very important these days. And it could be that they’re partly right, that it hasn’t been as important as it should be, as it could be.

[00:29:38] Amy H-L: So Debbie and Jane, you’ve been working on a documentary about the impact of Central Park East Secondary School, CPESS, on its graduates’ lives. What have you been finding about school’s impact in your interviews with alumni?

[00:29:55] Debbie M: Jane, she’s the producer.

[00:29:57] Jane A: I’m the producer. I’m not able to produce any funds though, that’s the problem. I interviewed, I don’t know, 20 students and some faculty. To a student, one of the things that has come up with almost every student are the habits of mind, and not only as they were in the school, because they said every place you looked, they were listed, talking about how they are with their own children, talking about how they inform their lives in their work or in the choices they make in their non-professional lives, the integrity they have and the respect they have for themselves in what they are doing in terms of earning a living. A couple of them are doormen and they’ve been in the same building for 35 years. They are in the union. They feel very good about themselves. And one of them said, you always said I was good with people, Jane, and you know who would we rather have open a door for you when you come home tired at the end of the day. Others have developed very interesting organizations that support teenagers in New York City. But every one of them has felt very good about the work that he or she is doing.

Relationships. Maintaining relationships with some of their teachers, certainly with each other. And knowing how to be in relationships with those who they come in contact with in their work and their life. I can go on forever. It started with, a class reunion the students had organized the year before COVID, or the summer before COVID. The students organized it. Debbie and I went, and when we left I said, “Oh, we gotta get these voices. They’re amazing.” Because they wanted to know about us, too. They wanted to know what we were doing, how our kids were, you know, whatever they knew about us, and the sense that this wasn’t anyone at the film, but it’s an event I went to where I, there were several students from CPE who hadn’t gone to CPESS who said, and this was true for these students, that they felt that they matter. And it’s amazing how everybody said that in one way or another. And in one case, one of the students who I knew very well. I asked him who he voted for, he happened to be in New York, and he said, Hmm. And then he said, “I can’t lie to you, Jane. I voted for Trump.” I said, “Do me a favor. Lie to me.” But the point is he could talk to me about it because he knew I was going to listen to him because that was his experience at the school. Therefore, he could engage in conversations with people with whom he didn’t agree. And this was a kid who, if he didn’t go to CPESS, I don’t know where he would’ve ended up. So the interviews are incredible. We are at a standstill right now.

And I think one of the other is the relationships between students. One student saying, I could have gone to one of the other, maybe more competitive, high schools. My parents wanted me at CPESS. He was the first year student. He said, I would’ve never met my best friend. Because my best friend came from that neighborhood and I learned about people in a whole different way. And they are still best friends, and they know a lot about each other. They’re in touch with each other.

[00:33:31] Debbie M: You know, the teachers in school, I don’t know whether we’ve interviewed them now. But I’m somewhat crippled these days. So I spend all my time up here in the country and people visit me, including former teachers and it’s wonderful. But what they [inaudible] me is how much, how they look upon the years they taught with us, as golden years. The school was intellectually, emotionally, and socially a powerful community. You know, I became a kindergarten teacher, and this was the last thing in the world I thought I would ever do when I was younger. Being a kindergarten teacher absolutely would be unthinkable, but I found the kindergarten children, because there was very little pressure in those days about what you did in kindergarten. Nobody noticed them. So we could do whatever we wanted together, and I found them so smart, thoughtful, and interesting that it restored my faith in the possibilities of democracy.

Because one of the things that people argue against democracy is they say that all kinds of people, Black and Latino, and used to say women, were not fully capable of serious thought, of intellectual experiences, of thinking about difficult things, and they don’t even have language. I was told that so many times in my teacher education courses, that certain language abilities don’t exist among Black and poor children because there is no language at home. And I knew, since I lived in an integrated neighborhood and I had a certain family history, I knew that was nonsense. But I was so impressed with what kids talked about and said. I am reading to them about the first man on the moon, and when they got to the moon, the newspaper account said they looked up in the sky and saw the earth and I said, “Wait a minute. They went up to the moon. So they looked down to see the earth” and some little girl says, “Mrs. Meier,” and I said, “yes.” “If you look down, you just see your feet,” and it was a breakthrough for me intellectually. I became fascinated by that realization that up and down or have different meanings in any case, and the kids got very excited, too, talking about up and down suddenly and thinking of what down is when you’re here, which is there. Anyway, I just think we underestimate the potential that’s there . So it’s kind of frustrating because we don’t spend enough money in schools and we know, by the way, this kind of education works because the rich have been doing it forever for their children.

I mean, you know, Ethical Culture was not a cheap school. And practically all the private schools in New York, which charge 50-60,000 dollars a year to go to school. They practically all have claimed to be progressive, and in some ways are, and that the tone of mutual respect is much greater, and even respect for teachers as professionals in private schools. But I’m thinking we know it works.

[00:36:45] Jane A: I do want to say that we didn’t have money at CPESS and at CPE, believe me. But, and I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have more money. But it’s not necessarily the monetary capital, it’s the human capital. And I think that’s because you can have a lot of money in a school and not have an ethical, democratic, decent place, and respectful. And so I think we have, I’m even thinking of parents who are still in touch with teachers. We have to really support each other. This is a wonderful profession. This is just… I knew it was never going to be a teacher. You know, my parents thought that was a way to have an MRS, not anything else.

And the creativity, the way of using your mind, of learning about people every day. And I think that the community of teachers supported that. They certainly did at the elementary school. And the families too, because they wanted to tell us about their children. This is how he is at home, you know, this is what he does.

[00:37:52] Debbie M: And we did work with a place called the Ackerman Institute that has done a lot of work in family therapies, and they began to look into the relationship between schools and families, and they made us one of their pet projects. So we had some very wonderful people from that institution who worked with us as teachers to think about what happens at a family conference. They would sit in sometimes when I would meet with parents and would point out things that had happened there that I hadn’t noticed. And it was an enormous help to realize that parents have a whole world they bring into school that we don’t tap into for the education of their children. And our own education.

[00:38:38] Jon M: Jane, you said that you’re at a standstill on the documentary. What help do you need at this point to complete it?

[00:38:44] Jane A: We need money. We can’t pay our filmmakers now. We’ve raised about over a hundred thousand dollars in small amounts.

[00:38:52] Debbie M: Not a single foundation that responded.

[00:38:54] Jane A: Well, we did have a foundation respond, but the foundation thought the students were making the film, so they couldn’t give us money. We need money. I went to see an incredible film made by kids through the ACLU, their educational arts division. This is very interesting and the topic was what it’s like to start your day by going through a metal detector. It was a musical. They haven’t disseminated it yet. It’s great. I was talking to the woman in charge, and she and I are going to meet. Now I’m thinking we need to get the support from other institutions that are interested in democracy because I think we’ve depleted the education part, so we need contact with that.

We’ve come far, we’ve done a lot, but we really need to spend more time with parents, with families, and with staff. And we also want to bring in some people who are not directly involved with, certainly not with CPESS,, or they may be professors, but they’re not necessarily in education. Or just people in the community, to think a little bit about how this extends into what’s beyond school. So, it’s money. I would say we need another, I mean, I’m not shy. We need another hundred thousand. And we’re working on it. It’s such a hard time now because everyone needs money. Institutions that were once funded by the government are not being funded by the government, so we will try to figure this out.

Also, the filmmaker has moved into looking at the elementary school as well, where this comes from, which I think is a very good idea. They’re working on something called a teaser. You must know what that is. It’s not a trailer. A teaser is a little bigger than a trailer, and that’s where, we’re waiting for it now so we can send that out.

[00:40:41] Debbie M: I would say a majority of the kids in the secondary school had gone to one of our three elementary schools.

[00:40:46] Jane A: Yeah, I think so.

[00:40:48] Debbie M: Maybe more than a majority.

[00:40:50] Jane A: And they’ve been helpful, but people, they just have so much money they can… Then we have to think about how we’re going to…

[00:40:57] Debbie M: You know, we do have some movies about the school, all of our schools. Mission Hill has a movie that was made by Amy and Tom Valens. And it was shown on television in Boston because it’s about a Boston school. And it’s now, a number of schools of education have asked to see it.

[00:41:15] Jane A: That was done in episodes. The Amy Valens one is 10 episodes, right, of different aspects of this.

[00:41:20] Debbie M: Well, no, it’s, it’s a monthly, yeah, I know, but I mean it’s not a one long. Actually. Jane? Yes. There’s another version that is one long film and there’s one version of episodes. Okay. Nick just said there is one version that’s a long film and one that is episodes they have different, and this is a democracy, what you’re experiencing right now. Everyone is saying what they have to add. And then, you know, Fred Wiseman, a very famous documentary filmmaker, made a three hour and 40 minute film about the secondary school. That was when it was cut, it was three hours and 40. Yes, yes. Very long. He, he cut it to three hours and 40 minutes , which is a slight handicap, and he wouldn’t let us play with it so that we could use parts of it. And then there’s Central Park East Elementary, the elementary school, there’s one film made about it. What’s it called? We Know Why We’re Here, we know Why we’re here. And it was made by Nick Holmes. I think it’s a wonderful film.

[00:42:15] Jon M: And the Wiseman film, it’s called High School Two.

[00:42:18] Debbie M: And there’s some other films. We have some shorter films. Some of them are available through my website, deborahmeier.com. We are trying to get somebody to try to collect progressive school films at different schools, doing things different ways, because there can be very powerful film of making it seem like this is really possible with ordinary people.

[00:42:41] Amy H-L: This has been wonderful. Thank you so much, Debbie Meier and Jane Andrias. 

[00:42:46] Debbie M: Well, thank you for being interested and patient with us. We both, before we got on, said we were so tired and we were so anxious, but it was nice to talk with you. It was nice to see. It’s nice to meet you, Amy, and Jon, I think of you often and your sons.

[00:43:04] Jane A: Any ideas for the film, please write to me. Tell me what your ideas are.

[00:43:09] Jon M: How should people write to you?

[00:43:10] Jane A: Janeandrias@gmail.com or deborahmeier@me.com. 

[00:43:17] Jon M: Okay. Thank you. Listeners, this has been Part Two of a two episode conversation with Debbie Meier and Jane Andrias. If you missed Part One, we invite you to go back and listen to it.

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