Student activism, less focus on testing seen as part of solving inequity in education

Lehman was one of six panelists at the second annual Harmony-Meier Institute symposium on democracy in education Wednesday night at Binford Elementary School. The Harmony-Meier Institute is named after Deborah Meier and the Harmony Education Center in Bloomington. The education center includes Harmony School, Rhino’s Youth Media Center and All-Ages Club, as well as the headquarters for the National School Reform Faculty. Meier is an education reform leader. She was expected to be part of the six-person panel, but could not make it due to an illness. Lehman sat on the panel in her place.

While Meier was not in attendance, some of her thoughts were shared during the discussion through the reading of a letter she wrote to a principal in New York in 1968. Moderator James Damico, co-director of the Harmony-Meier Institute, explained the letter was written in protest of her daughter’s selection for an accelerated class in which all 30 students were white despite being at a school with a predominantly black and Puerto Rican student body. Reading Meier’s letter, Damico said our society does not suffer from a lack of scientists or readers and writers, but rather from a shortage of people equipped for dealing with social problems.

Meier’s letter, which is archived along with responses from the school’s principal and the superintendent in Indiana University’s Lilly Library, was written at the height of the civil rights movement, not long after schools were forced to desegregate. Several panelists suggested school segregation still exists today, along both racial and economic lines.