I was saddened to read the obit on Ted Sizer in the Washington Post last Thursday. Ted was, for me, the wisest and most humane of the education reformers of my generation. I came to know Ted in graduate school at Harvard, where we were both students of a then very young Bernard Bailyn. Ted was in the Education School and I was in the History Department, but we were both historians at a time when Bailyn was explicating the social embededness of schooling.
Ted Sizer took this insight and ran with it for his whole career. He was then, and until his death, among the most thoughtful of men — one of those rare academics who cared deeply about the relationship between his research and the improvement of everyday life. He was later the dean of the Harvard School of Education, the headmaster of Phillips Andover, and the chairman of the department of education at Brown University, where he developed (in 1984) the Coalition for Essential Schools. The Coalition, as the Post put it, espoused “flexibility for schools to be shaped by teachers and students in concert with local communities; smaller class sizes to personalize education . . . and an emphasis on depth of study . . .”
As the Coalition’s website noted, two of Ted’s hopes were that schools might “allow sustained and deliberate focus on every individual student” and “honor the professional lives of educators.” It was this dual focus on the education of individual students and respect for the professionalism of teachers that most drew me to Ted’s efforts, although I recognize that the Coalition remained controversial among educators. Ted emphasized the craftsmanship of education, as opposed to the bureaucratic approaches that have dominated more recent education reform. In his most famous book, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School, Ted remarked that “hierarchical bureaucracy stifles initiative at its base,” “and given the idiosyncrasies of adolescents, the fragility of their motivations, and the needs for their teachers and principals to be strong, inspiring and flexible people, this aspect of the system can be devastating.”
I could not agree more, and I was reminded of Ted when I read in Saturday’s New York Times a letter from Seth Blum, a New York City math teacher, complaining about “test-driven data collection and the use of test-prep textbooks in the classroom.” Blum’s argument is that “curriculum should be project-based and created by the teachers themselves,” and his complaint is that “most teachers don’t have the permission or motivation to do anything else but prepare for an exam.” I share both Mr. Blum’s aversion to test-driven curriculum and his implied concern for the deprofessionalization of teachers. I think Ted Sizer might also have agreed. Those of us in the universities who care about education in the schools have lost our most profound leader.
(Photo at essentialschools.org)
