In Memoriam: Theodore Ryland Sizer-June 23, 1932 - October 21, 2009

[Mike]

Hi All...... hope this finds you well!

Sizer and his ideas have influenced my work for many years....

Some highlights from around the web:

"Good schools focus on habits, on what sorts of intellectual activities will and should inform their graduates’ lives. Not being clear about these habits leads to mindlessness, to institutions that drift along doing what they do simply because they have always done it that way. Such places are full of silly compromises, of practices that boggle commonsense analysis. And they dispirit the Horace Smiths, who know that the purpose of education is not in keeping school but in pushing out into the world young citizens who are soaked in habits of thoughtfulness and reflectiveness, joy, and commitment."--Horace's School

A New England native, Ted Sizer is widely recognized as a giant in the modern educational reform movement in the United States. His life and work have greatly influenced the instructional practices of schools, districts, states, and educators across the country and abroad for three decades. His eloquent and fervent championing of progressive educational ideals has had a profound effect on hundreds of thousands of educators and students.

After a career that included U.S. Army service, classroom teaching, serving as the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and leading Phillips Academy Andover as its Headmaster, Ted Sizer came to Brown University as chair of its education department. There, in 1984, Ted founded the Coalition of Essential Schools to bring together examples of the radical school restructuring that was the focus of Horace’s Compromise, his work about the state of American high schools. Ted served as the executive director of the Coalition of Essential Schools until 1997; during that time, he also established and led the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. He retired from Brown as Professor Emeritus in 1996 and accepted an appointment as Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught, along with Nancy, until very recently.

Ted and Nancy helped to found the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School where they served as trustees, and for one year as co-principals. With Nancy and other educators, Ted also co-founded the Forum for Education and Democracy, an "action-tank" designed to promote an education system for an informed and enlightened citizenry. Until his death, Ted remained an active part of many of the institutions with which he was affiliated and organizations that he founded, including CES, of which he was Chairman Emeritus.

Instead, he believed we needed to invent, create, and re-imagine what school should be according to a set of principles. These principles, the CES Common Principles, inspire, guide, and challenge us to be bold. Ted urged us to remake schools and their systems to allow sustained and deliberate focus on every individual student, to honor the professional lives of educators, to structure schools with fundamental commitments to democracy and equity, and to teach and learn essential content with more depth and mastery. His vision of the Common Principles requires us to liberate intellectual pursuit from the bonds of "disciplines" and senseless schedules, and to assess student learning and school effectiveness based on first-hand, detailed understandings of what students know and can do. And he made it clear that the culture of a school and its academic endeavors are, quite simply, one.


The Common Principles of CES....

1. Learning to use one's mind well
2. Less is More, depth over coverage
3. Goals apply to all students
4. Personalization
5. Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
6. Demonstration of mastery
7. A tone of decency and trust
8. Commitment to the entire school
9. Resources dedicated to teaching and learning
10. Democracy and equity

Can find out more about his life and views here:
http://www.essentialschools.org/pub/ces_docs/about/about.html

be well.... mike

[Deborah Meier]

I met Ted when I decided to wor on starting a high school to follow up on the elementary school we developed in East Harlem. Although my teaching experience had almost exclusively been in Kindergarten, I knew that a really good high school could be built around that tradition. ed Sizer's writings suggested that he was the person I could best learn from, and who could help us design a 7th-12 grade public high in East Harlem, NYC. He was, he did and all of us together changed many many lives thereafter by working out ways to translate his insights and observations into daily practice. It's a loss to us all to have his voice stilled at a time we need to hear his voice--over and over. But we can read his books, talk about them, and then look at what's happening in your school or your children's schools. Who has it right? Wha do we do next to live up to his high expectations of us all.

Deborah Meier


Deborah Meier

[Connie Weber]

Hi Mike and Deborah,

I want to add in a link to Deborah's letter on Bridging Differences posted October 29th (today).

"Remembering Ted Sizer"

There's also a great article in edweek by Debra Viadero, "Sizer's Legacy Seen in Appeal of 'Personalized' High Schools," but you have to register or log in to read it.

From that article, here's a quote from Howard Gardner: "In the last 50 years, more than anyone else, Ted Sizer carried the torch for progressive education and reinvented it for our time."

I just ordered Sizer's last book, which I haven't yet read: The Red Pencil: Convictions From Experience in Education (2004) I'm thinking I'll use that for my class presentation on standards, testing, and accountability. (I chose the "con" side for our panel discussion; surprised?)

Thanks Mike and Deborah. The Horace trilogy made a big impact on my early teaching career. Now I'm thinking his voice should ring even louder today.

From Deborah's letter on Bridging Differences:

"Ted, we shall overcome in time the obstacles facing us, and we will use the wisdom of your character and your ideas to do so. These ideas, propositions, and principles may not flourish tomorrow or even in my lifetime, as they didn't in your lifetime. But you made a huge difference in the lives of hundreds and thousands and more of us—those you taught formally and informally about how schools could be. The impact you have had can never be taken away from us. It has already changed the shape of so many schools and school people (including parents and kids). What lies at the heart of your mind and heart will persist, and persist, and never die."