Thoughts From Detroit About Schools
Deborah Meier writes again today to Robert Pondiscio of CitizenshipFirst.
Dear Robert,
I had you, and your last letter to me, in mind as I arrived in Detroit last Thursday for the annual meeting of the North Dakota Study Group (NDSG). What would Robert think?
The NDSG has been meeting since 1972 when Vito Perrone (then head of the North Dakota School of Education) brought some dozen educators together to discuss a problem that was presented to him by parents of the relatively new Head Start movement. Vito and his colleagues were under pressure to assess Head Start by test scores, in part to find the one best model. They were resisting. His hope was that we could be useful to them, by supporting their contention that test scores were missing the point and that there might be some alternative more reliable assessment system. My "mentor" from New York's City College, Lillian Weber, suggested my name to have a working early-childhood teacher present.
We met again the next year and every single year after—although only one more time in North Dakota. We tried to keep our numbers under 100—so continuous face-to-face discourse would occur. We've gone through many transformations, internal struggles, but we just couldn't give it up.
"It's all talk," some complained. "What about DOING SOMETHING?" But we mostly resisted since we were all too busy "doing" at our particular locations around the country. We needed a place to