A Review of "The Road To Trust"
Article by Deborah Meier in the American School Board Journal/Sept. 2003

Since 1930 the number of school boards in America has gotten smaller while the population has not. There are 15,000 school boards in America today, the population is twice the 1930 population and there are three times the public school students compared to 70 odd years ago when there were 200,000 Boards. Then two of every thousand citizens sat on a school board. Today the figure is one in almost 20,000. Then school board members were known to the population, now it's rare to know one. Fewer boards administering many more schools for far more pupils hasn't been good for education, has isolated school boards from their communities and seriously polluted the education landscape says Meier. Undoing the resulting disconnects between the young people, their schools and their democratic communities is what the author, a co-principal of a Boston K-8 school, is writing about with impressive discernment and sensitivity.

For openers she insists children are not isolated from the larger word thanks to the mass media intent to turn them into global consumers. They are, however, cut off from their own communities and community norms by the isolation of their schools from the embedding communities (This position is not Meier's alone but shared by many education-oriented writers). She insists the loss of cross-generational interaction robs them of understanding of the larger, adult/democratic world, that we need schools where such cross-generational relationships "can be built around matters of importance to the world." She says kids also need non-school communities for cross-generational relationships, that they are necessary to the education process and that schools cannot do it alone.