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 I was introduced to the work of Ted Sizer almost 20 years ago as a graduate student in a teacher education program where we read Horace’s Compromise as part of a history of American Education class.
As a group, our cohort of prospective teachers was a very confident bunch, sure that we were going to change the American education system, and here was Horace, the amalgam of hundreds of classroom teachers observed by Sizer in his trips around the US, presenting a very startling picture of what education was like for many students and teachers. The beauty of Sizer’s portrayal of Horace was that he was neither a hero nor a villain; he was just an overworked teacher toiling in a joyless factory system of education, which was serving very few well. Horace didn’t scare me away from teaching, but he prepared me for the realities and gave me respect for the veterans with whom I would work. And Sizer, obviously, did much more than just outline Horace’s reality; he--with other visionaries like Deborah Meier—launched the Coalition for Essential Schools movement which would provide bold new ideas to help American schools become more community based and personalized, to have teachers treat ALL students as active participants in their learning not as passive vessels to be filled, and to make assessment more authentic and based on mastery of skills not regurgitation of content. Click here to see the Coalition of Essential Schools’ full list of core principles. Although I have never worked in an Essential School, those innovations especially the push for depth rather than breadth, authentic assessment, and interdisciplinary teaching (as a both an educational and student load strategy) have shaped my teaching for much of my career. Years after I had first read Horace’s Compromise, when we started FacultyShack, I decided, on a whim, to try to contact Sizer at the Parker School. I called the main office and was directed to his assistant. I asked sheepishly if Sizer might be available for an interview. His assistant said she would call me back, and to my surprise, later that afternoon, I had an appointment to talk with him. That following week, for an hour or so he shared his thoughts on the state of the Small Schools Movement some 20 years after Horace. In that interview and in his writings and public speaking, the thing that I valued most about him was his straightforward common-sense wisdom. He believed (and I agree) that much of what is needed in education is not complicated. For example, making schools smaller so that students and teachers feel more connected and providing all students with opportunities to think deeply seem like ideas that are hard to argue against. Yet, these days it seems like we need his wisdom more than ever. With the rush for accountability, funding for small schools is eroding and the focus has shifted to forcing teachers to concentrate on test preparation (the anti-thesis of CES philosophy) to meet state benchmarks for standardized tests. Not that Sizer was against accountability; he was for it, but he supported it in a meaningful, not-content-driven, not fill in the blank way, which generally was seen to be done best in site level demonstrations of mastery. Unfortunately, with the President recently calling for teachers to be personally responsible for students’ state test scores, we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. Hopefully, the attention given to Sizer in his passing will remind us of what is really important in education.
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