Beacon Broadside

All of us at Beacon Press are saddened by the passing of Theodore R. Sizer this Wednesday. Sizer was a powerful and thoughtful voice for educational reform in America. Beacon Press had the honor of publishing two of his books: The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (co-authored with his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer) and Keeping School: Letters to Families From Principals of Two Small Schools
(also co-authored with his wife along with Deborah
Meier).

The New York Times, in its obituary for Sizer, explains the Essential Schools Movement, which was inspired by Sizer’s book, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School.

The movement’s umbrella
organization, the Coalition of Essential Schools, spans an array of
public and private schools united by their adherence to common
principles.

Among the principles are that a school is an
egalitarian community and that the student is a valued worker in that
community, with the teacher in the role of mentor or coach. Depth of
knowledge is emphasized over breadth, with the mastery of a few core
subjects preferred to a scattershot spate of electives.

Begun
with 12 schools, the coalition now encompasses several hundred across
the country, and a handful overseas. Essential Schools active today
include the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham, Fenway High
School in Boston, the Urban Academy Laboratory High School in
Manhattan, and University Heights High School in the Bronx.

Sizer’s obituary on the NPR website includes the transcript of an interview with Robert Siegel from 2004. (Listen to the interview here.) Here’s an excerpt:

ROBERT: Let me begin by asking you what is wrong with the American high school.

SIZER: It tries to do too much, and it puts too much of the
work on the teachers rather than the youngsters. Most high schools are
a blizzard of opportunities, most of them really exciting, but they’re
all jammed together and the youngsters change what they think about,
change where they’re working every hour on the hour. And so much of the
teaching–rushed necessarily–is teacher talk. It’s efficient in
theory, but in practice it doesn’t make much sense. Schools that I
admire look more, in many ways, like studios where there is very
serious and focused questioning, answering, considering, where the kids
are necessarily drawn in to finding the answers to what they believe
are important questions.