Deborah Meier, author of the acclaimed books The Power of Their Ideas and In Schools We Trust, is currently senior scholar at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education. She has spent more than five decades working in public education as a teacher, principal, writer, and advocate, and she ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the United States. She also helped found the Coalition of Essential Schools in the 1980s, under the leadership of Ted Sizer. In 1987, she received a MacArthur award for her work in public education.