Taming the Blackboard Jungle? : Schools: Theodore Sizer’s mission is no less than a restructuring of secondary education. And now, Walter Annenberg is giving his coalition $50 million to get the job done.

Imagine the amazement, the giddy elation you might feel if you learned you had just inherited $50 million, and you will have some idea of the mood these days at the Coalition of Essential Schools.

“I’m still numb,” said Theodore R. Sizer, director of the school-reform effort.

His phone has not stopped ringing since last month’s announcement that his Brown University-based project would receive part of the largest single gift ever made to American public education: a five-year, $500-million challenge grant from publishing mogul Walter H. Annenberg. Long-lost professional acquaintances were calling, Sizer said, insisting that they had intended to call for months--and then hinting broadly that perhaps a portion of the coalition’s new fortune might tumble in their directions.

Seated behind a plain wooden schoolteacher’s desk, Sizer gazed over his horn-rim glasses and said: “It’s very hard to be civil.”

This is difficult to fathom, because civility and decency seem to be at the core of this 61-year-old educator. A professor of education at Brown, Sizer is a former dean of the School of Education at Harvard University and was headmaster and history instructor at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. He is a firm adherent to the principles of American educator John Dewey (1859-1952), who loathed the notion of teaching by rote and instead advanced the maxim of “learning by doing.”

In his tweeds, and with his Brahminesque elocution, Sizer resembles no one’s image of a revolutionary. Yet in ignoring such things as test scores and bypassing the ranks of experts to listen instead to teachers and schoolchildren, he has emerged as one of the leading voices of school reform.

School reform was for many years “a huge umbrella phrase that meant both everything and nothing,” said Theodore R. Mitchell, dean of the graduate school of education at UCLA. Recently, Mitchell said, there has been “a winnowing-down from 100 concepts (of what the phrase means) to four or five”--of which Sizer’s is among the best known and least faulted.

Sizer has distinguished himself in large part by advocating ideas that can be adapted readily to local situations.

“That’s the beauty of his principles,” said Kathy Lesley, principal of Pasadena High School, which joined the Coalition of Essential Schools in 1991. “There are no set prescriptions. They’re ideas, and you have to fit them to your school.”

*

In 1979, Sizer began studying and visiting hundreds of American high schools. His research was synthesized in his 1984 nonfiction book “Horace’s Compromise,” in which his protagonist--a composite character based on a number of teachers Sizer encountered--begins: “I am a high school teacher. Let me tell you how it hurts.”

Along with its 1992 sequel, “Horace’s School,” the book became a primer in the swelling move to restructure secondary education. Sizer decried the rigidity of conventional classroom teaching and learning and called for flexibility that focused on students’ needs. In turn, he made a demand that was at once obvious and radical: that high school students actually learn before they graduate.

Sizer’s “nine common principles” provide the foundation for the Coalition of Essential Schools, established at Brown in 1984 and housed since October under an umbrella organization known as the National Institute for School Reform. Nearly 700 public and private high schools and middle schools around the country have joined the coalition, pledging to redesign themselves according to goals Sizer has put forth.

“In my opinion, this is one of the most significant reform efforts going on in the country,” said Ilene Straus, principal of Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica. She said her school, with a student body of 1,050, joined the coalition because “schools are alienated,” and because “you get a sense of some of the most current thinking, cutting-edge practices in education.”

Robert Stein, who calls himself the CEO--for chief educational officer--of O’Farrell Community School in San Diego, said he was attracted to Sizer’s project because “people are desperate to even smell change. When you’re in the city, most of the time you don’t have the luxury to be intellectual. Usually you’re too busy trying to keep the kids safe.”

Besides, Stein added, “we liked what the coalition had to say.”

So, apparently, did Walter H. Annenberg. His gift to American public education, announced in a White House ceremony, included equal grants of $50 million to Sizer’s project and to David Kearns’ New American Schools Development Corp. in suburban Washington, D.C. Among the immediate effects of the grant is that the National Institute for School Reform will now be known as the Annenberg National Institute for School Reform.

The renamed institute will establish a network of “exemplary redesigned” elementary and secondary schools to be designated as Annenberg National Schools. At least 20% of those schools will be in the nation’s nine largest school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District. (L.A.’s Hollenbeck Middle School and Jefferson High School are members of the coalition; many others are pursuing reform through the district’s LEARN program.)

But beyond what Brown University President Vartan Gregorian called the “stunning generosity” of Annenberg’s grant, Sizer, for one, was celebrating the implications for America’s schoolchildren. School reform, he said, can mean nothing if it is just an abstraction, just a theoretical phrase tossed about by self-interested parties.

“To me, it means reform of schools, when 50 of us get together with a bunch of kids to try to help them learn,” Sizer said.

“But other people, they say well, ‘Should we have an elected or an appointed school board?’ ‘Should we have vouchers?’ Most of the howling and screaming is about this kind of thing, and not much gets done for the kids.

“They figure out what’s right for the grown-ups,” he went on, adding darkly, “We have a long history of using children to meet our social problems.”

*

One explanation for the mess so many public schools find themselves in is a huge game of population catch-up, Sizer said: “This country went from partial enrollments to essentially full enrollments at the same time the population was expanding.” Demographic reshuffling has continued, and schools have too often been overwhelmed.

Sizer said his coalition recognizes this diversity by assuming that “no two communities are ever alike--and that, therefore, no two solutions will ever work the same way. The notion that there is only one set of standards is something we won’t buy.”

And rather than talk about incentives for change, Sizer points to what he calls “disincentives”--justifications that some schools use for maintaining the status quo.

“There is a continued belief that the high school should continue offering what it has always offered,” Sizer said. “The system screams that it is too much to expect change--and what it results in is intellectual chaos.”

Very few school districts or states say they want serious reform, Sizer said. “They say, ‘We want test scores to go up.’ ”

Such frank assessments have not earned Sizer universal affection. He acknowledges “a whole bunch” of criticism of coalition-style learning, most of which faults Sizer’s approach for being too soft or for allowing too much discretion by teachers.

At Lincoln Middle School, Straus said that at first, Sizer-style reform efforts received mixed reviews from parents and from some teachers. Dividing the school into teams of students and teachers confused some parents, who wondered what was wrong with school the way they knew it. “Double-block” periods, in which students stay with the same instructor for two subjects back-to-back provided more flexibility and a chance for in-depth learning, Straus said--but also raised questions from some parents.

“We’ve changed the structure of the school, and we’ve changed the way we teach,” she said. “Initially, things that are different and that don’t feel like the way you knew it are bound to make some people uncomfortable.”

*

UCLA’s Mitchell said that at the conceptual level of school reform, however, Sizer has “no serious detractors.” After many years in which “school reform” meant “looking in a mechanistic way for a single lever to pull” to improve things, Mitchell said, Sizer’s coalition was “the first of the school-reform strands to embody and to bring to life the principles that people had been talking about.”

Sizer in any case is untroubled by the prospect of ruffling academic feathers. Nothing less than the future of the country is at stake, he contends.

“Democracy depends upon devoted and informed citizens,” he said upon learning of the Annenberg grant. “And the secure future of a decent America depends upon schools which prepare such citizens.”

Sizer acknowledges the frustration felt by many in America’s schools, but he refuses to give in to gloom. He rejects the possibility, for example, that by the time some students are in high school, they might already be considered lost educational causes.

“It’s never a lost cause,” Sizer said. “All sorts of people who have been written off can go on to perform beautifully.”

His optimism is mixed with a firm sense of determination. “Our assumption has got to be that it is never going to be unsolvable--because to say that problems in schools are unsolvable is far too despairing.

“In the richest nation in the world,” Sizer said, “that is not a silly statement.”