We are in an era of radical distrust of public education. Increasingly, we turn to standardized tests and standardized curricula-now adopted by all fifty states-as our national surrogates for trust. Legendary school founder and reformer Deborah Meier believes fiercely that schools have to win our faith by showing they can do their job. But she argues just as fiercely that standardized testing is precisely the wrong way to that end. The tests themselves, she argues, cannot give the results they claim. And in the meantime, they undermine the kind of education we actually want. In this multilayered exploration of trust and schools, Meier critiques the ideology of testing and puts forward a different vision, forged in the success stories of small public schools she and her colleagues have created in Boston and New York. These nationally acclaimed schools are built, famously, around trusting teachers-and students and parents-to use their own judgment. Meier traces the enormous educational value of trust; the crucial and complicated trust between parents and teachers; how teachers need to become better judges of each others' work; how race and class complicate trust at all levels; and how we can begin to 'scale up' from the kinds of successes she has created. 'A rich, nuanced reflection on trust and schooling that examines trust's many layers. . . . A terrific, important book.' --Mike Rose, author of Possible Lives 'A passionate, jargon-free plea for a rerouting of educational reform, sure to energize committed parents, progressive educators and maybe even a politician or two.' -- Publishers Weekly 'Listen carefully to Deborah Meier's In Schools We Trust: She speaks to the heart of a school-and of democracy itself.' --Theodore R. Sizer, author of Horace's Compromise and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools. MacArthur Award-winning educator Deborah Meier is author of The Power of Their Ideas and Will Standards Save Public Education? . She lives in Hillsdale, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts chapter one Learning in the Company of Adults One afternoon I find myself approaching a group of young teenagers hanging out in our hallways. They aren't hanging out surreptitiously. They are not always within earshot, but they frequently make it known that they are nearby, where we adults are also hanging out—fixing our rooms, meeting together informally, arguing about some important matter or other. They give me the distinct impression that they want both to have their own world and to be sure it is connected to ours. Still I am obliged to remind them (and myself), "School was over an hour ago. You can't hang out in the school like this; it's not safe." I mean safe for me, of course. I am worried about liability issues. Some years earlier an amused but genuinely curious adolescent boy had even put the irony into words for me: "Do you mean it would be safer for us to be out on the street?" So as usual I let it go with a warning that neither they nor I take seriously. Two things move me about the memory of these events, and countless others like them: the genuine, heartfelt desire of young people to be in the company of adults who are doing adult work, and the way our institutions and adult lives are structured more and more to keep us at a distance. As I think back on more than thirty years in schools, I believe that the contradiction between these two facts is the central educational dilemma of our times. In those boys' desire to hang out with and around adults lies the secret, the key to transforming our schools—and the key to the best avenues to learning. A television interviewer talking to a group of high school dropouts some years ago asked them whether they knew any grown-ups who were college graduates. They all said no. Not true, I thought—since, after all, they had known a dozen or more teachers over the years, all of whom had attended college. But I was wrong. As I began to pay closer attention I realized that of course they had not known any of their teachers. We adults were invisible to them. In commenting to a friend about how disrespected I felt when some teenagers poured in the subway car playing loud music, using what appeared to me inappropriate public language, and dressed to shock, I was reminded that, alas, my assumption that they were doing this "to annoy" might be wishful thinking—maybe they didn't really register our presence at all. It's a striking fact that kids don't keep a lot of company these days with the kind of adults—in or out of school—whom they might grow up to be (or whom we might wish them to grow up to be); in fact, they don't keep genuine company with many adults at all beyond their immediate family. Our children don't work alongside adults in ways that, for good or bad, were once the norm for most young people in training to become adults. Even when they take jobs, it's usually in the company of teenagers—at a Gap or McDonal