Students at the Center: The Legacy of Ted Sizer
By Vicky Schubert
In his opening remarks to a 2002 gathering of school reform advocates, Dr. Theodore Sizer expressed with characteristic clarity the challenge they faced: "We stand behind an old, but enduring idea, a conservative idea in the best sense, that the American dream of a democracy driven by informed and committed citizens is both an aspiration and a necessity. We believe that we are currently falling short in meeting this end, and that we must think anew about how to achieve it."
Sizer, who died last week, was a role model to many systems thinkers and one of the most influential voices in the movement to find and apply new educational approaches in the U.S. A former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Sizer founded the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of schools and individuals devoted to "creating and sustaining personalized, equitable, and intellectually challenging schools."
Throughout his career, Sizer challenged traditional notions of what constitutes excellence in education. He rejected large systems and a reliance on excessive standardization as mere "crowd control." Time and again, Sizer stressed the importance of personalization and rigorous academic engagement for both students and teachers.
Schools, Sizer believed, should be most concerned with igniting students' passion for learning and helping them develop the habits of mind necessary to respond to real-world challenges. "The real world is not a series of set, pre-digested answers," he said in an interview with John Merrow, "the real world is a set of questions. One of the most important things kids can learn in school is that there aren't always nice clean answers to good questions."
Key to engaging students' deepest interests, Sizer believed, was the principle that "less is more," and that curricular decisions should be guided by the aim of thorough student mastery and achievement rather than by an effort to merely cover content. In other words, as Howard Gardner explains, "Rather than try to cram thousands of facts into a kid's head, decide what's really important and spend more time on it, on powerful concepts, rather than trivia that they forget after the test is over." This idea, along with nine others central to the philosophy of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), are captured in a list of "common principles," a set of shared beliefs about the purpose and practice of schooling.
In the fall 2009 issue of the CES journal, Horace--named for the composite high school teacher Sizer had created for a series of influential books he published in the '80s and '90s--author Kathleen Cushman shared her thoughts about the impact of Ted Sizer's life and work: "His lucid words, which changed the way people all over the world now think and speak of school, cut through the rhetoric of 'reform' and trained our gaze acutely on the students at the center. What are these interesting young people doing, what are they thinking, what can we learn from each other? I can see him now, belief and expectation lighting his face as he went right to the kids in the room, to commence another conversation that could change the world." The many important conversations initiated by Sizer will be only part of his lasting personal and professional legacy.
Vicky Schubert is marketing director of Pegasus Communications.