Environmental Charter Schools is honored to welcome MacArthur award-winning educator, reformer, and author Deborah Meier and educator Emily Gasoi to discuss their book, These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools on the evening of Thursday, February 22, 2018.
This event is co-presented with Antioch University Los Angeles.
Deborah’s work inspired many of the essential principles upon which Environmental Charter Schools was founded — a small learning community, empowered teaching teams, environmental (both the natural and human communities) service learning, interdisciplinary curriculum and so much more. We know that when our students are engaged in relevant and authentic learning experiences, their interest drives their learning.
Thursday, February 22, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
Location: Environmental Charter High School-Lawndale
16315 Grevillea Ave.
Lawndale, CA 90260
Books will be for sale
About the Book
In These Schools Belong to You and Me: Why We Can’t Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools, Deborah Meier draws on her fifty-plus years of experience in education to argue that the purpose of universal education is to provide young people with an “apprenticeship for citizenship in a democracy.” Through an intergenerational exchange with her former colleague and fellow educator Emily Gasoi, the coauthors share their experiences working in democratically governed schools and analyze the last several decades of education reform. Reflecting on the trajectory of education and social policies that are leading our country further from rule “of, for, and by the people,” the authors apply their extensive knowledge and years of research to address the question of how public education must change in order to counter the erosion of democratic spirit and practice in schools and in the nation as a whole.
About the Authors
Deborah Meier, author of the acclaimed books The Power of Their Ideas and In Schools We Trust, is currently senior scholar at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education. She has spent more than five decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, and advocate, and she ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the United States. She also helped found the Coalition of Essential Schools in the 1980s, under the leadership of Ted Sizer. In 1987, she received a MacArthur award for her work in public education.
Emily Gasoi has been an educator for more than two decades and was a founding teacher at Mission Hill School in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Gasoi currently lives in Washington, DC, where she is an educator at Center for Inspired Teaching and the cofounder of Artful Education, a consulting firm focused on helping schools and arts organizations improve practices related to creative teaching and learning.
