Deborah Meier is a senior scholar and adjunct professor at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. A board member of the Coalition of Essential Schools and several other education organizations, Meier has spent more than four decades working in public education as a teacher, writer, and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and Head Start teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. She started a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem, and in 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90 percent of entering students went on to college, mostly to four-year schools. From 1997 to 2005, she was the founding principal of the Mission Hill School, a K-8 pilot public school in Boston. She serves on the editorial boards of Dissent magazine, The Nation and the HarvardEducation Letter and has received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Bard College, Brown University, Clark University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Teachers College of Columbia University, Yale University, and numerous other institutions. She was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and is the author of The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem (1995), In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization(2002), Will Standards Save Public Education? (with Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, 2000), Keeping School: Letters to Familiesfrom Principalsof Two Small Schools (with Theodore Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer, 2004), all published by Beacon Press, and numerous articles and co-written books.