Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 Ted Sizer By Cynthia J. Spence Theodore R. Sizer, June 23, 1932 –...

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007

Ted Sizer

By Cynthia J. Spence

Theodore R. Sizer, June 23, 1932 – October 21, 2009 Founder of the Coalition of Essential

Schools, Ted Sizer was one of the 20th century’s leading educational

visionaries and reformers.

http://www.spock.com/Ted-Sizer/pictures


Education

He received his B.A. in English from Yale in 1953

Sizer earned his masters and doctorate in education from Harvard University in 1957 and 1961

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Sizer’s Philosophy of Education

“’Hello. I'm Ted Sizer. What can we do to make our school better?’ were his first words. Postures straightened, some leaned forward as if to doubt their ears. A headmaster-to-be was asking them for advice.”



"I cannot teach a child well, whom I do not know well. How can I teach that child well, if I do not know her enthusiasms or why she makes mistakes or what seems to be out of sorts for her at a given moment, or what is behind her at home. And no two of our children are alike. And so the question for all of us is: how many children can I get to know well enough to know them and their families and their situations well at once?”



He believed that high school students should earn their diploma by presenting exhibitions to demonstrate what they knew, rather than to graduate after logging in a prerequisite number of high school courses.



“We need the flexibility to act upon what we know about each one of our students. Our schools must fit each child; the child must not be fitted to the school.”

“Depending on its people, on its local genius, each of our schools may differ from others in its particulars; but not in its intent, in the principles upon which it rests.”



“But there also is a moral part of this that is of a different order. A school is not, and should not ever be, a faceless factory where the young people are herded about by teachers, engaged in crowd control, and organized largely by their age.”



“If schools follow the factory model teachers will get into the habit of mindlessly doling out what someone else tells us to dole out and students will do only what is necessary to "pass" and little more.”



“We teachers must always remember that our students watch us, watch how we use our minds, watch how we relate to each other and to them. They watch our habits, watch our convictions. While young children may often remain tolerant of our foibles, adolescents notice, and hate, hypocrisy.”


Sizer’s Educational Plan

“CES is not a fixed school design. You can't buy a blue print, put it up on the wall, and build from those specific dimensions. It is rather, a set of ideas, ideas and conditions and convictions. We call them principles, which, on the basis of substantial experience and research, strike many of us as an essential part of life in a worthy school.”



Fifteen years ago, at the completion of the large research project on American high schools upon which the Coalition was launched, I and my fictitious friend Horace Smith identified "five imperatives for better schools." We wrote in Horace's Compromise:– Give room to teachers and students to work in their

own, appropriate ways. – Insist that students clearly exhibit the mastery of their

school work. – Get the incentives right, for students and for teachers. – Focus on the students' use of their minds. – Keep the structure simple and thus flexible.



“It can be done in the cities. It can be done in the suburbs. It can be done in rural areas. It can be done in public schools and private schools. This is not a kind of fantasy. If you really believe that your teachers cannot teach well children that they do not know, you find a way.”



“If America chooses to equate a successful education with a standardized test score, this will result in a bonanza for businesses, giving them an efficient entré into a captive market of over fifty million young citizens. Concurrently, however, such an eventuality will profoundly cheapen American education.”



“How do I persuade a student to write and rewrite and rewrite an essay again to achieve a graceful result when the ultimate test upon which the student is rated is a writing sample on a suddenly given topic to be written in a prescribed period of time?”



“We have to play the current game by the current rules - most of us are working, after all, in public schools - but we also have to look beyond the current wallow of contradictions toward what a better educating system might be.”


Answering the Critics

“Many people say, ‘Oh that's a pipe dream. How are you going to run a high school with those kinds of faculty/student ratios without changing the budget?’ It can be done if the school wants to. It's a matter of revising the budget of time and the budget of money. And this involves making tough decisions about what is more and less important.”



“It is a radical idea that all children grow at the same rate and in the same way and thus can thereby be accurately classified and ‘graded’ in narrow, standardized ways.”

“It is a radical idea that the power of a child's mind can be plumbed by a single test and reduced to a small clutch of numbers.”



“It is a radical idea that people of any age can learn well in crowded, noisy, and ill-equipped places.”

“It is a radical idea that serious learning can best emerge from a student's exposure to short blasts of "delivered" content, each of less than an hour in length, and unified by no coherent set of common ideas.”


Sizer’s Educational Legacy

When my wife Nancy and I visited Ted at his home to talk about how to measure the impact of The Mountain School on its students – how to “prove” its effectiveness — he said, “Don’t bother. The sample is too small. The students self-select. There is no control group.” Then he grinned, “But you have your graduates. Just tell their stories.” So that’s what we did.



“He stood for an ideal of school as a place devoted to nurturing "habits of mind," the ability to think deeply about the subjects that matter -- such as literacy, numeracy and civic understanding -- and connect that knowledge to students' lives”



"Ted has a respect for others that makes it very difficult for people to see him as an enemy."

Paula EvansThe Annenberg Institute

Ten percent of Walter Annenberg’s $500 million gift to American education went to support the Coalition of Essential Schools’ effort to transform high schools



In the spring 1981 Andover Bulletin editor Helen Eccles wrote, "He brought a breath of optimism with him and a can-do faith in humanity."



“The greatest tribute we can pay to Ted Sizer is to keep alive his vision—that students must be respected, and that the highest form of respect teachers can show their students is to challenge them with work that stretches their minds.”

John Merrow

Merrow is a broadcast journalist who has reported on education issues for more than three decades



“So we need people, like Ted Sizer, who can see schools as schools, to periodically come along and explain back to us, from first principles, what "schools" are and why. That they have a logic and ethos and beauty and tragedy all their own which, if we are to have a society, we must grapple with, understand and come to create.”

Tom Hoffman


Interesting Facts

Sizer went to Yale, graduating in 1953, but was, by his own account, a mediocre student, hindered by what today might be diagnosed as dyslexia.


Interesting Facts

“When he was a student Sizer was told by his teacher that he should not plan on going to college. Thankfully, Sizer did not listen to that teacher and went on to become one of the nation's most influential educational leaders, and in particular was Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Headmaster of Phillips Academy, Andover.”

Bill Dingledine – College Direction


Interesting Facts

Sizer was among the first Harvard deans to enter University Hall when students took it over.


Publications

Those Who Dared: Five Visionaries Who Changed American Education (Teachers College Press, 2008, Carl Glickman, editor)

The Red Pencil: Convictions From Experience in Education (Yale University Press, 2005)

Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools (Beacon Press, 2004, co-authored with Deborah Meier and Nancy Faust Sizer)

The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (1999, co-authored with Nancy Sizer)

Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School (1997) Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School (1992) Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School

(1984) Places for Learning, Places for Joy (1973) Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (1964)


Sources

andovertownsman.com essentialschools.org blog.grdodge.org latimes.com tuttlesvc.org

http://www.andovertownsman.com/local/local_story_314170737.html

http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/about/org/execboard/ted_page.html

http://blog.grdodge.org/2009/10/28/ted-sizers-legacy/

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ted-sizer24-2009oct24,0,3562085.story

Copyright © Allyn & Bacon 2007 Ted Sizer By Cynthia J. Spence Theodore R. Sizer, June 23, 1932 –...

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