Deborah W. Meier has spent more than three decades working in public education as a teacher, writer and public advocate. She began her teaching career as a kindergarten and headstart teacher in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City schools. She was the founder and teacher-director of a network of highly successful public elementary schools in East Harlem. In 1985 she founded Central Park East Secondary School, a New York City public high school in which more than 90% of the entering students went on to college, mostly to 4-year schools. Today, she is the Director of New Ventures and founding principal of the Mission Hill School a K-8 Boston Public Pilot school serving 180 children started in 1987.
The schools she has helped create serve predominantly low-income African-American and Latino students, and include a typical range of students in terms of academic skills, special needs, etc. There are no entrance requirements. These schools are considered exemplars of reform nationally. These schools are all affiliates of the national Coalition of Essential Schools led by Dr. Ted Sizer.

Between 1992-96 she also served as co-director of a project that successfully redesigned reform of two large failing city high schools. She was an advisor to New York Citys Annenberg Challenge and Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University from 1995-1997. From 1997-2004, she was the principal at the Mission Hill School, a K-8 public school she founded in Roxbury, MA.

A learning theorist, she encourages new approaches that enhance democracy and equity in public education. Meier is on the editorial board of Dissent magazine, The Nation and the Harvard Education Letter, and writes and speaks extensively on educational issues. She is a Board member of the Educational Alliance, the Association of Union Democracy, Educators for Social Responsibility, a founding member of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation, and a member of the National Academy of Education, among others.

Meier was born April 6, 1931 in New York City; she attended Antioch College (1949-51) and received an MA in History from the University of Chicago (1955). She has received honorary degrees from Bank Street College of Education, Brown, Bard, Clark, Teachers College of Columbia University, Dartmouth, Harvard, Hebrew Union College, Hofstra, The New School, Lesley College, SUNY Albany, UMASS Lowell, and Yale. She was a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1987.

Her books, The Power of Their Ideas, Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem (1995), Will Standards Save Public Education (2000), In Schools We Trust (2002), Keeping School (2004) and Many Children Left Behind (2004) are all published by Beacon Press.