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Debbie Meier has since become a nationally known authority on education, the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” award, but in June 1976 that wasn’t the case.

. What was not yet clear to outsiders was that it had been deliberately designed to thrive on conflict.

From the first moment I walked into a public school I was intrigued.

. “The principals paid lip service to us and our aspirations,” she remembers, “but the changes didn’t last.” By the end of 1973, just as she was becoming disgusted by her lack of progress working within the established system, she got a call from Bonnie Brownstein, a science coordinator in District Four. Brownstein told Meier that Superintendent Alvarado had heard about her work and wanted her to start a new school in East Harlem. Meier, attuned to the ways of educational bureaucracies, was skeptical at first, but when she met with the new superintendent, he convinced her that he was serious.

and she had tried to create “open classroom” programs

an educational method which she believed reflected the cognitive development of children, combining John Dewey’s learning theory with more recent psychological investigations of Jean Piaget.

Meier and her associates proposed a pedagogy based on “open classrooms” where teachers would provide children with stimulating materials, observe them working and playing with those materials, and, guided by their observations, offer each child assistance to extend his or her skills and interests.

Neither the parents in the neighborhood nor the other teachers in District Four understood what the school was trying to accomplish, and they regarded Meier’s efforts with attitudes ranging from indifference to outright hostility.

Local educational conservatives, on the other hand, were equally mistrustful of what they saw as the school’s permissiveness.

There would be one rule: Children would come to Central Park East because their parents chose that school for them

parents were required to visit with their children in order to gain admission. Beyond that, Meier set forth no policies and promised no particular results.