An Interview with Deborah Meier
(Deborah Meier codirected Central Park East Secondary School in New York City for 20 years. A national activist in education reform, she also served as president of the Center for Collaborative Education in New York City.)

Deborah Meier: I believe that the primary goal of schooling is intellectual, not academic.

John Merrow: I don't understand.

DM: Well, 'academic' has to do with what people study. 'Intellectual' means using your mind. Good professors use their minds well, but so do good plumbers. And so do good beauticians and good lawyers.

JM: The word 'intellectual' makes me think of really smart people, but I don't think that's what you mean.

DM: I think that everybody is better off by being intellectual. By developing their capacity to play with ideas and to take ideas seriously. And that is a human capacity. Every human being is by nature an intellectual.

JM: Then what's the goal of schooling?

DM: It is to develop the capacities for intellectual behavior, rather than turning it off. For example, people go around saying, "Well, I have an opinion. You have an opinion, and we all have the right to our opinions." As if that settles whatever the argument is. But, the intellectual process means being able and willing to sort through those opinions and to examine them. It means listening to opinions, and being open to hearing how your opinion differs from someone else's opinion. It means pulling out new ideas, from these opinions....things you've never thought of before. And, to put two ideas together that we never realized might belong together; to take two ideas apart that used to be one. And to communicate these ideas back and forth, so that we learn from each other. That is intellectual, the capacity to hear each other and to be open to each other. Little children, five-year-olds, can do that, but we actually get less and less accustomed to doing that, because schools don't encourage it and society doesn't really value intellectual ability.

JM: Is there a test that you would give to a high school senior to see if he or she can do that?

DM: I wouldn't give the same test to everyone. I would rather test students in the same way that we test most things, by having good conversations. I'm more interested in seeing what a student does with a challenging question than I am in finding out whether he knows the precise answer to some limited question. When you ask me, "What should schools do?" I ask myself, "What do I want to other citizens to know and be able to do, so that I'm safe?" After all, these children are going to vote, they're going determine the future of the continent that my own children live in. They may be on the jury when my case goes before the trial. I want them to be able to recognize the phony from the non-phony when they listen to politicians, or when they read the newspapers. So what kind of intellectual abilities do I want to make sure they have? The same ones that I want my own children to have. Democracy has to be taught and practiced, and I believe it has to happen in the public schools.

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An interview with Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
(Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. is Chairman and C.E.O. of IBM Corporation. He is at the forefront of a business-led movement to create national education standards. In 1996 he chaired a National Education Summit attended by the nation's governors, business leaders, and President Clinton.)
John Merrow: You've been active in school reform for a long time, with American Express, RJR, and now IBM. Frustrating?

Lou Gerstner: Yes. But that doesn't mean I'll stop. We are making some progress, but I'm frustrated with the pace of the progress, yes.

JM: How bad is the situation?

LG: Well, our schools today are basically where they were in 1960. Some defenders of the schools say, "Hey, we're still pretty good. We're where we were in 1960. We haven't really lost any ground." But the problem with that thinking is that no other institution in the United States would be successful if it were still operating at 1960 standards. Whether that was agriculture, industry, the media, sports, you name it. The fundamental issue of the last half of the twentieth century has been change and adapting to change. Self-renewal. The public schools have not faced up to this challenge.

JM: Why haven't the schools changed?

LG: Change is difficult for every institution. The reason I believe schools haven't changed is that we haven't had a measure of their performance. We don't know what to change. We don't create the need to change, because we don't measure the output of our schools. We are the only industrial society in the world that doesn't have a set of educational standards, and a measurement system that says, "How are we doing? Are our students learning what they need to learn to be effective in today's economy and today's political environment, with democracy?" We don't measure that.

JM: You're convinced that students aren't learning enough?

LG: Every single test that emerges today indicates that our students simply don't have, for the most part, the skills to compete in the world's workplace, or to make the tough decisions that one has to make in a democracy.

JM: In your book, "Reinventing Education", you wrote, "Ask any busy leader who competes in the world economy what it's like to be up against a well-educated work force." Let me ask you your own question. What is it like?

LG: Workers in other countries come to the work force with far more skills than American workers. American business spends in excess of twenty billion dollars a year just training workers that come out of the school in basic skills. In reading, writing, computing, communicating, thinking. Not technical skills.

JM: And you believe that national standards for schools would cure that deficit?

LG: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because we're not talking about standards that just are multiple choice tests. Standards can be written that require students to explain things, to answer questions like why and how, as opposed to just what. Those skills of writing and thinking can be built into standards, and those are the skills that say basically, "Can this person think through a problem and communicate?"

JM: Debbie Meier, who is herself a thoughtful education reformer, says that, "Setting standards and getting tough is not going to do it. If American business wants thoughtful people to work for it, we have to have thoughtful schools."

LG: Oh, I do agree. National standards encompass the idea of being able to think and communicate and put ideas together, not simply just giving back facts.

JM: So you're not just saying, "get tough."

LG: No, I don't think this is a question of getting tough. I think this is a question of getting honest, and fair, with children in this country. If you look at the history of public education, you see that we have an idea every six months. We go from charter schools, to longer school days, to longer school years, to vouchers to.. hey, everybody's got an idea. Everybody's looking for the silver bullet to fix public education in this country. There is no silver bullet. What we need is a framework, a fundamental framework that says, "Ok, let's go try some of those ideas, but how are we going to know whether they succeed? How are we going to know whether they really produce results?" We never will know whether anything gets fixed in public education until we establish a system that says, "Here's what children should learn. Here's what they should be able to do when they graduate, and here's how we measure their progress." That is the fundamental change that we're striving for today.