The Arbor Director
CHARLES MEISGEIER
Professor Emeritus, Educational Psychology
The University of Houston
Dr.
Charles Meisgeier is a nationally recognized educator, author and speaker.
A primary focus of Dr. Meisgeier's career has been the development of programs
and interventions for children and adults with learning and/or behavior
problems. Many are now used in schools throughout the nation. He is Professor
Emeritus of the University of Houston, where he was the founding Chair of
the Educational Psychology Department and served for nearly 30 years as
Coordinator of the Special Education Program. He has been a consultant to
public and private schools, colleges, government, non-profit agencies, and
businesses throughout the nation. Dr. Meisgeier has conducted seminars and
workshops throughout the United States and in Europe.
Dr. Meisgeier's interest in the field of exceptionality began when he attended a special high school for academically gifted boys in Pennsylvania and was awarded the Bachelor of Arts degree upon graduation. The students who graduated with Charles received an excellent education. More than 99% went on to hold positions of leadership in many fields. At the same time, the school's narrow academic focus and uniformity of programming seemed constrictive. Charles' interest in the things they did and did not do in that school led him into a career in education with an initial interest in the education of the gifted. Many years later, he was particularly gratified to be part of a team that launched major new programs for the gifted in HISD. Dr. Meisgeier then was appointed Full Professor at the University of Houston, and became coordinator of Special Education for the UH College of Education, where he initiated the first graduate classes and program preparing teachers of the gifted.
After graduation from high school, Meisgeier entered the US Air Force and served with a detachment of the 148th Fighter Squadron of the 111th Bomb Group during the Korean Conflict. After honorable discharge from the military, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania State University, graduated with a second Bachelor of Arts Degree three years later and received the Master's Degree in Education the following year.
Because there were few if any opportunities to work in the area of the gifted, Charles was encouraged by his major professor to take a special education teaching position that involved mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed and socially maladjusted adolescents. The diversity represented by his first class of eighteen boys challenged Charles to develop an individualized approach for dealing with the unique problems presented by each student. This experience fueled a fervent belief in the importance of nurturing every learner's unique gifts and capabilities. A quest for the matching of innovative teaching strategies with the individual learning styles, abilities and interests of students has been a strong driving force in Dr. Meisgeier's career in education.
While employed as a public school teacher, Charles also worked as a volunteer and helped to establish the community's first sheltered workshop, one of the few in the nation at that time. As a result he was awarded a fellowship and invited to participate in a special study group at Columbia University in 1957. The outcome of that group's work was the publication of one of the first books on rehabilitation of the mentally retarded by Jacobs and Weingold.
In his third year of teaching, Meisgeier was appointed principal of a special school serving children who were retarded and/or disturbed. As principal, he developed one of the nation’s first curriculum guides for trainable retarded children. It reflected his conviction that children learn best when their education is tailored to their unique learning styles, interests and abilities. He established a summer camp program and an ongoing social activities program for the mentally retarded. Soon afterward, Meisgeier was appointed the first Executive Director of the Texas Association for Retarded Children (TARC), an organization that became a very powerful advocate group of parents, professionals, and volunteers representing individuals who are mentally retarded.
Dr. Meisgeier initiated pilot and ongoing programs of every kind from pre-school to older adults in cities all over the state. The massive efforts of TARC have had a lasting impact resulting largely from its initiation and support of legislation to provide children with disabilities access to educational, social, medical, rehabilitation and residential services.
As TARC's Executive Director, Meisgeier was chief lobbyist and also had the privilege of writing many segments of legislation that is public law today in Texas. He wrote many components of the legislation that established the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation. This department has now become the Texas Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority. House Bill 3 established mental health and mental retardation centers in communities around the state. Charles wrote the portions of that law dealing with the mentally retarded and negotiated with other special interest groups to make the legislation a reality. Community Centers are now a major part of the MHMRA'S programs and services for the retarded and the mentally ill. Charles initiated legislation that provides testing of newborns for PKU and other metabolic conditions, new state residential facilities, and transportation to school for children with disabilities. His efforts helped increase state budgets, establish new state schools, and improve programs of Texas State agencies for children and adults with disabilities.
Meisgeier served on many blue ribbon committees, was a Texas delegate to the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and to the White House Conference on the Handicapped. He served as a member of the Texas Blue Ribbon Committee to Combat Mental Retardation. In his last year as TARC Executive Director, he served half-time as Special Consultant to Governor John Connally's Interagency Committee on Mental Retardation and co-wrote the draft of the Texas Plan to Combat Mental Retardation.
Early in his career, Meisgeier taught during the summers at Pennsylvania State University and taught the first graduate level special education courses offered at New Mexico State University. He was a member of numerous professional and related organizations and was a Fellow of the American Association on Mental Deficiency and President of the Federation for the Handicapped.
Over a four year period, Meisgeier and two other consultants helped develop the program of the Texas Corsicana Treatment Center for Disturbed and Delinquent Children, a facility run by the Texas Youth Council of the Texas Department of Corrections. This program was based on a milieu model operating without walls with every person on the campus involved in treatment aspects of the program. Charles had a counseling practice that focused on adolescents and families for twenty-five years and was able to include many state-of-the-art interventions and theories into the Corsicana program.
Dr. Meisgeier served many years as a National Teacher Corp consultant and advisor and was principal consultant for the development of the State of California Master Plan for Special Education. He was co-chairman of the Texas State Advisory Council on Mental Retardation of the Texas Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority and chaired several committees. He was appointed to the School Health Advisory Committee of the Texas Department of Health in 2000. He served the Office of Education in a variety of ways as consultant, panel member, reader, and site visitor to universities, medical centers and schools throughout the nation. He has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Richmond State School for more than twenty-five years, was a long term member of the Advisory Board of the Harris County MHMR Authority and was a member of the Professional Advisory Board of the Arbor School. Meisgeier has been active in professional and community organizations. He served on national commissions in the Presbyterian Church and has served as an elder and teacher and conducted training seminars in churches.
In 1964 Meisgeier was appointed an Assistant Professor of Special Education and Assistant Professor of Educational Administration at the University of Texas at Austin. He was Coordinator of the program to prepare special education administrators and became Chairman of the Consortium of Universities with Special Education Administration Programs. The consortium was a unit of The University Council on Educational Administration (UCEA) based at Ohio State University. At the University of Texas, Dr. Meisgeier received one of the largest federal grants of its kind to develop the program to prepare special education administrators. In his third year at UT, Charles was appointed Associate Professor of Educational Administration and Associate Professor of Special Education.
With the support of President John Kennedy and his family, a new interest in the retarded and other disabilities was developing in Washington. Charles was recruited to lead the Mental Retardation Program at the US Office of Education and took a leave of absence from UT to assume this responsibility. His experience in Washington brought him into contact with a small group of leaders who were exploring the concept of mainstreaming, an idea that was new both to special and to regular education at the time. After returning to Texas, Charles wrote a grant for the Education Service Center Region XIII that was generously funded and established the Shift of Emphasis Project several years prior to the passage of Public Law 94-142. 'Shift' was a pilot program to develop mainstream programs in approximately a dozen school districts from Waco to Seguin. Charles helped to develop the plan and worked with these districts to train the teachers and establish the new programs.
Meisgeier was one of the small group of advocates nationally who developed the first programs for students with disabilities in the mainstream or regular classroom. This small group of pioneers relentlessly advocated the education of the handicapped in regular classes in the face of striking obstacles and attacks from both regular and special educators. These programs today represent common practice.
Meisgeier then assumed a position as Coordinator of Special Education and Psychological Services for HISD. He served on the administrative cabinet, reported directly to the Superintendent, and was involved in many programs in the District. At HISD he formulated and implemented the Houston Plan which was the first large public school mainstreaming program in the United States in 170 elementary schools and 20 junior and senior high schools.
Meisgeier knew that mainstreaming programs and the inclusion model would not be successful unless the mainstream itself changed to accommodate the wide degree of diversity present among students in all classes. Along with efforts to reform special education, he focused on the renewal of regular education by increasing the accommodative power of schools and teachers to provide individualized, differentiated classrooms. To provide the infrastructure necessary to implement the Houston Plan, Meisgeier developed a new comprehensive delivery system that decentralized the special services administrative support system of the district. These reforms established a team structure that exists today.
Under Meisgeier's leadership, six teaching centers were established in the Houston school district and he received a multi-million dollar grant to provide regular education teachers, special education teachers, principals, aides and others with the skills necessary to accommodate the wide degree of divergence evident in every regular classroom. This program provided teachers with the skills necessary to individualize instruction and to establish differentiated classrooms. He established the first public school classes for autistic children in the Southwest employing the Engineered Classroom Model.
The Houston Plan brought marked progress toward the positive, upbeat programs that afford success to both children and teachers. The Houston Plan received national attention and HISD entertained visitors from all of the Great City Schools and from other school districts across the nation. Many innovative practices were developed in those years that are now common in inclusion programs everywhere.
At the same time Meisgeier was supervising massive efforts to individualize instruction in HISD, the Dean of the UH College of Education had a vision to establish the College as a research and demonstration center for individualized instruction that would practice what it expected others to do. Charles was brought in to expand this effort and to add the special education mainstreaming component.
Meisgeier joined the faculty of the University of Houston as a Full Professor and Coordinator of the Special Education Program in 1974. Under his guidance, the UH Special Education Program developed many innovative practices. Working with Dr. Meisgeier, the faculty of Special Education totally individualized the first four courses in the Special Education sequence. Students had the experience of being taught as they were expected to teach their students, employing individualized, self-paced instruction.
Shortly after arriving at UH, Meisgeier received the first three of many federal grants to follow. One of these established the Child Service Demonstration Center. As the director and principle investigator of the center, Dr. Meisgeier was able to pull together many ideas and experiences he had accumulated over the years. Middle school students with learning disabilities from Spring Branch ISD were bussed onto the University of Houston campus daily. Interventions developed by Dr. Meisgeier and his associates were tested and evaluated on a daily basis. Out of this work came the simultaneous development of four program components: The Synergistic Social Behavioral Program, The Parent Training Program, The Synergistic Reading Fluency Program and The Content Mastery Model, a new system for delivery of services to children who were having serious learning problems in school.
After an initial period of development on the UH campus, the Child Service Demonstration Center's Synergistic Model was moved into a number of schools in the Spring Branch District. In subsequent years the project involved both special education and regular education teachers throughout the district. The program was then extended to Carrollton Farmers Branch School District, then to California and school districts on the East Coast. The US Office of Education recognized the Content Mastery Program as one of the Five Outstanding Innovative Educational Programs. It was the only special education program selected for this honor.
The Texas State Board of Education adopted the Content Mastery Program as the Texas model for Special Education and most school districts established Content Mastery Centers, now often known by other titles as well. Many of the methods and strategies utilized in the Content Mastery Centers now an essential part of the Co-Teaching Model as well. The influence of the Synergistic Social Behavioral Curriculum and the Content Mastery Program, produced at UH by Charles Meisgeier, is widespread. Many innovative programs and research projects report the use of practices developed as part of these projects. Over the intervening years, major conferences in Special Education have presented sessions that address aspects of Content Mastery. In the books The Best of ACLD I and The Best of ACLDII, Dr. Cruickshank devoted chapters to a comprehensive overview of Meisgeier's work on Content Mastery and the Synergistic Reading Fluency Program. The Reading Fluency Program consistently obtained reading improvement of I ½ years over a ten week period in children with severe learning problems. Others have elaborated upon this program and offshoots are widely used throughout the nation.
In the late 1970s, Meisgeier became chair of the Counseling Department, chair of the Foundations of Education Department, and chair of the Special Education Program at the University of Houston. The next year, he became the founding chair of the Educational Psychology Department that combined these programs into a new department. Bringing together three diverse groups, each with traditions and ideas about students, programs and beliefs about how departments should operate, proved to be a challenging experience. The new department eventually established its own traditions, developed a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, and doctoral programs in Individual Differences and Special Education.
While chair of the EPSY Department, Meisgeier and a colleague developed an instrument designed to identify significant psychological type or personality differences in children. Published by Consulting Psychologists Press, the MMTIC identifies type indices similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The Indicator has been translated into many languages and has been used in innumerable studies and dissertations. It is emerging as a standard part of an assessment battery in school districts. The MMTIC provides teachers with vital information about students' learning styles that influences teaching methods and behavior management practices. An understanding of the principles of Psychological Type provides a powerful rationale for the individualization of instruction. The MMTIC is used to identify and affirm a child's strengths, to increase self esteem, to provide children with a tool for understanding themselves and others, and provides practical information for teachers, counselors and parents to use for guidance and academic support.
The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Journal of Psychological Type recognized Dr. Meisgeier as one of the thirty top contributors to the journal since its inception. In addition to academic publications, a New York Times Education Supplement recognized Dr. Meisgeier and his work and highlighted the children's instrument. Charles has been on many radio and television programs and his work has been the subject of an assortment of publications. Meisgeier has published over 130 articles, guides, books, etc., the most recent being a co- authored curriculum guide, Connecting With Others: Lessons for Teaching Social and Emotional Competence Grades 9-12, published in 2001 by Research Press. A second co-authored book Discipline Options: Establishing A Positive School Climate, provides a unique model for addressing behavior problems in schools. It integrates classic behavior management approaches with his work on personality type, learning styles and multiple intelligences. It was published in 2001 by Christopher Gordon Publishers.
Meisgeier's career includes a very broad variety of successful experiences in diverse areas. He is a seasoned administrator and a dynamic leader in his field. He has designed and supervised staff training, support services and extensive program development. He has been the principal investigator of 34 research or demonstration grants with awards amounting to millions of dollars. He has produced significant academic research and has applied that research to all kinds of classrooms and schools. His personal contributions and supervision of the implementation of his programs has not been in isolated pilot projects, but rather in system-wide applications.
Charles Meisgeier is respected by his students and sought after as a teacher. Many of his doctoral students hold key leadership positions and several have won national or regional awards for their dissertations. He has served at one time or another on most college, University, or department committees as member or chair. Most recently he was chair of the Faculty Executive Committee of the College of Education and served on that committee as chair, secretary, or as a member over a period of many years. He has received many honors in his long career.
Currently, Dr. Meisgeier is Director of The Arbor, a non-profit organization that provides services for children with severe disabilities including a pre-school, elementary school and vocational training through the Arbor Products program.
Charles Meisgeier has had an outstanding career. He consistently has been on the cutting edge in his field. He continues to plow new ground seeking innovative applications of such concepts as Psychological Type, the manipulation of classroom regularities, and innovative instructional and behavior management strategies- With these efforts, he continues to work to increase the educator's ability to accommodate individual differences and needs of learners of all types and ages.
Charles Meisgeier
713.827.8830
