Theodore Sizer

Theodore R. Sizer may be America’s most prominent school reformer. A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and founder and chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, he has spent the better part of two decades promulgating a new vision of the American high school--one that advocates doing away with many of its most cherished features.

In Sizer’s view, the traditional high school attempts to do too much--and ends up doing nothing very well. It is too large, too impersonal. It keeps teachers isolated in their rooms, affording no time for collaboration, consultation and planning. It divides the school day into 50-minute fragments of time that encourage students to think superficially, rather than deeply and critically.

The high school needs to be radically restructured, Sizer believes, using nine principles of reform that refocus high schools on the “essential” activities of teaching and learning.

Some of his tenets are quite prescriptive--one says that no teacher should have more than 80 students (as opposed to the more typical 150 to 200). Other ideas are striking in their simplicity and, to some educators, unsettling in their generality, such as the dictum that less is more when designing curricula.

Each coalition school may interpret these principles somewhat differently. They offer a framework, rather than a blueprint, for reform. The evidence that these guiding principles work is not complete, but several studies suggest that Sizer’s schools are on the right track. Dropout rates are declining and more students are entering college.

Today, more than 1,000 private and public secondary schools have committed themselves to exploring the nine common principles, making the Coalition of Essential Schools the largest and fastest growing of the so-called belief-driven reform networks.

Sizer, 64, has completed a trilogy of books about high school, with the third, “Horace’s Hope,” due in bookstores this fall. Now he says he wants to concentrate on further expansion of the coalition. Thus, this year he will retire from his teaching post at Brown University and step down as director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

As an emeritus professor, he will lead a seminar for Brown undergraduates this year that will travel to various high schools. “It’s a way to keep an ear close to the ground about what is happening in schools,” Sizer says, “and a way to make sure that my description of schools is as accurate as it can be.”

Sizer is married to Nancy Faust Sizer, a writer and former teacher. They have four children and seven grandchildren.

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Question: Schools have been engaged in a multitude of reform attempts for the past 15 years, but many public-school critics say those efforts have produced little real improvement. How does it look from your vantage point?

Answer: I think, for paradoxical reasons, the voices saying there has been very little reform know whereof they speak. What gives me hope is more and more people in positions of authority understand why the reform has been so thin and are increasingly prepared to face up to the hard work we need to do.

Maybe the day of the silver bullet is over. Maybe people understand some painful choices have to be made--and that the time to make them is now. We haven’t tended to necessary changes inside the school. We haven’t attended to the searing effects of poverty. When a youngster comes in as abused and frightened, as many, many youngsters do, there is very little a school can do easily to help that child.

Q: Schools complain often that they are getting students these days who are harder to teach. Is that a legitimate defense?

A: I think what they’re saying is true. But I don’t think “harder” is as accurate a word as “different.” For many children, it is back to this poverty issue. The number of children growing up in desperate straits is growing and has been since the early ‘80s.

The other reason is the blanketing effect of the mass media. The media have never been more powerful in shaping the attitudes of adolescents . . . . When you have kids who are used to the reduction of complicated matters to three paragraphs in USA Today and the 30-second sound-bite, it’s hard for them to realize the world is not that simple. In that sense, it is more difficult [to teach them]. But “different” is a better word, because youngsters come into the classroom now in social studies and history, which I teach, with a range of information I didn’t have because they’ve seen so much on television. That is a plus. So it’s not all bad . . . .

Q: One of the main jobs of schools has been to bring immigrants into the mainstream. But many people feel schools are not as successful at that today as they were at the turn of century, when there was another huge wave of immigrants to America. Is that a misconception?

A: It’s largely a misperception. What happened 80 years ago, people said, must have been perfect. We overlook the chaos and terror of the great Eastern cities from 1890 to 1915. In fact, in that Oscar Handlin book on immigration in 1950s, “The Uprooted,” there is a chapter called “The Terror.” There is a poignant description [of] the children who are rapidly becoming English-speaking and the parents who don’t speak English, and the terror of the parents.

I don’t think most school people are that callous anymore--callous in the sense that if it relates to the old country, it had to be bad. I think that’s progress.

Q: Some would say that schools have bent too far in the other direction, accommodating other cultures.

A: In all the discussion of the arrival of folks from foreign shores, the most powerful school is the media. It’s the TV set. There was nothing even remotely like it in the great Eastern cities a hundred years ago.

Q: Is it wrong to talk about reforming the institution of schools, when kids come to school so needy? Some critics say the first priority should be reforming kids and parents.

A: You can’t reform schools if kids are growing up in terror. . . . You can’t reform how kids view serious questions in an era of sound-bites. Where the incentives in the culture do not reinforce hard, sustained work, it is very tough to run a school.

The whole thing has to be done at once. It can’t be schools alone, it can’t be culture alone, it can’t be families alone. It’s everybody.

Q: What have been the biggest disappointments in school reform of the last 15 years?

A: One is how difficult it is to carry off even reforms that are blatant common sense. For example, you can’t teach 150 youngsters at once. You can’t teach kids to write when you have 150 different kids. Nobody, if they look at what it takes to learn to write well, will say you can do that. The load for teachers has to change. We’ve been saying that for 20 years, and people say, “You’re right”--and nothing happens. There are big national conclaves on reform, and the issue never appears on the agenda. That’s frustrating.

People say, “We’re going to change teacher load.” [To a lot of educators], that means change the budget. The whole coalition thing is, you do it without changing the budget . . . . People have split off these issues, because to address them would involve making some very tough choices. If you’re going to reduce the load for teachers . . . you have to give up something. You’ve got to focus. That is politically painful.

Q: How do coalition schools give teachers smaller loads without spending more money on more teachers?

A: If I teach 160 kids social studies, and you teach 160 kids English, and we get together and I teach 80 kids English and social studies, and you teach 80 kids English and social studies, and I help you with social-studies work and you help me with English work, we each have half as many kids we have to know. That’s a crude way of explaining it.

There is no free lunch. It means you and I have to work as a scholarly team . . . . At the same time, we have to be prepared to teach more broadly. We can’t just teach history without regard to the quality of expository prose. We can’t teach “The Red Badge of Courage” without teaching the history of the Civil War.

Q: Most teachers are unprepared to teach this way.

A: Yes. High schools have a deeply ingrained tradition of teachers operating as independent contractors. I go into my room and shut the door. The notion that we would work collectively is a foreign notion to many of us. And, frankly, it’s threatening. If I’m incompetent, you’ll find out. Now you can’t find out. If my kids don’t do well, I can simply say they’re dumb.

Q: Is there any reform that schools have tried over the last decade and a half that has worked?

A: I don’t think there is one.

I know what piece of our work has been most important--public exhibitions of student work. It takes it out from behind closed doors, and it forces the focus to be on kids using their minds well. They have to explain things, they have to demonstrate that they understand things. It’s not enough for a youngster to tell you where Sarajevo is and the fact that there has been fighting there . . . [but] a youngster is supposed to say something about the Balkans and who lives in the Balkans and why they are at each other’s throats and why it might not have been surprising for the First World War to be triggered by something in Sarajevo and why conflict seems to arise out of ethnic and religious differences . . . . Then, you have to have an assessment system focused on questioning and dialogue. If you have that, you step farther back and say, “What do we have to do to prepare young people for this kind of demanding assessment?” The answer is spending more time on a smaller number of important things than we are now.

What are those important things? When you ask that, then you have hard choices. A comprehensive history course from Cleopatra to Clinton collapses.

High schools try to do too much. We assess high schools on the basis of that too-extensive curriculum, and the result is predictable superficiality.

Q: School choice and vouchers are issues that many educators run from. But you’re not afraid of choice. Why?

A: No, I’m not. I, as a teacher, would much prefer to have students select my course than have the youngsters forced into my course. It changes the nature of the relationship.

Most Americans have always had choice because they have enough money in hand or in the form of publicly subsidized loans, as I had as a GI, to pick their communities. A big part of the real-estate business turns on people saying, “Come to our town, our county, because the schools are good.” . . . It’s just folks without money who haven’t had choice. I’m for choice for everybody--not just for those who can afford it.

Q: In your book, you envision systems of schools organized not by geography but by education practice. Why does this make more sense to you, and where are the models for this?

A: There are the Montessori schools . . . and diocesan schools run by the Catholic Church . . . . What has emerged in the Coalition of Essential Schools are, in fact, groups of educators who are gathered around a common conviction about what makes good schooling. When they are roughly in the same region, they can link arms and support one another, hold one another accountable. They are, in a substantive sense, beginning to act like a significant cluster of schools gathered for educational purposes, rather than managerial purposes.

This also goes back to choice. What is right for your youngster may not be right for my youngster. Different kinds of schools with different emphases give people a variety of places to send their children. Not all children are always served best by a single entity. If you have money, you can say, “My child will do better in a school with more structure.” Or, “My youngster needs to be on his own feet rather than be in a school telling him where to stand.” This is a good thing--choice among congeries of schools which share educational convictions.