Posting to my blog a little earlier this week as today is the fourth anniversary of the passing of Ted Sizer, one of the key founders of the Coalition of Essential Schools. I was fortunate to have learned from and worked with Ted, time that had a major influence on my thinking about schools. You can read lots of other reflections about Ted from educators across the country here, but, instead of a blog post from me to read this week, below is an excerpt from a speech Ted gave back in 2002 to open CES’s annual Fall Forum:
Just what should school be?
We recognize the fact that no two of our students are exactly the same, and that each changes over time. All this bubbling variety is inconvenient. It would be handy if each thirteen-year-old was a standardized being, pumping no more or fewer hormones than any other thirteen year old and speaking no language other than formal English. Life as a teacher would be easier if each of our charges was so predictable.
Happily, however, that is not to be. No federal regulation or court decision or encyclical from a state Commissioner can change the colorful, often maddening, ever fascinating, inevitably noisy variety of kids that we teach. That variety may be why our work is so hard, but it is also why it is never boring.
To teach students well, obviously, we have to know each one well. For us in the Coalition, that means that the total, consistent student “load” per teacher has to be fewer than eighty in secondary schools and twenty in elementary schools; and each student has to be with us for more than a few months. All else flows from that ratio and stability. In most schools that means a program focused on the essentials, beginning with literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding and moving on from there.
However, knowing each child well requires more than a reasonable student load. I need to have colleagues who also teach my students, and we need protected time to confer with each other about them. We need to be part of a community of adults and children small enough so that we adults, with the students’ families, can fully share informed responsibility for our kids. We need the flexibility to act upon what we know about each one of our students. Our schools must fit each child; the child must not be fitted to the school.
The ultimate essential for students and adults alike is an attentive intellect. A citizen who cannot use his mind well is a citizen at the mercy of manipulative cultures that characterize our time. Our young people need and deserve the discipline of mathematics and the physical and biological sciences; the perspective of history; the music of literature and the arts and of multiple languages; and above all the modeling of thoughtful and empathetic lives of adults with whom they live, at home and at school.
Children learn as we adults learn, by engaging with tasks and ideas. Our students must be workers. It is easier simply to lecture kids, to tell them things, and harder to provoke and demand their serious engagement so that they discover much on their own. Mere “telling” leaves but a vague imprint. Doing the work leaves a permanent mark—the habit of doing important work.
The habit is key. Assessment of students must start here. What can this particular young person demonstrate that she can do when confronted with an unfamiliar situation? What can we tell about her informed habits while she makes sense of that situation? Such assessment is by exhibition complex and makes no claim for sharp distinctions. It cannot reduce a student to a number. Humility is the essential virtue for assessors.
Such ideas are where we in the Coalition start. We have no detailed “model put into place.” Depending on its people, on its local genius, each of our schools may differ from others in its particulars; but not in its intent, in the principles upon which it rests. The Coalition exists as a mechanism for us to share our best practices arising from those common principles and to learn from them. At its core, the Coalition is a conversation among friends, a conversation about patterns of practice and that demonstrably serve our students in the ways that we admire, a conversation which extends our abilities as teachers.
Neither you nor I should be surprised that some of our shared ideas and the practices that flow from them mesh poorly with some current educational policies and political opinions. So be it. We cannot pretend and should not pretend otherwise, even as some dismiss us as unwisely “radical” in our beliefs, “radical” in the pejorative, the opposite is the truth.
It is a radical idea that all children grow at the same rate and in the same way and thus can thereby be accurately classified and “graded” in narrow, standardized ways.
It is a radical idea that the power of a child’s mind can be plumbed by a single test and reduced to a small clutch of numbers.
It is a radical idea that people of any age can learn well in crowded, noisy, and ill-equipped places.
It is a radical idea that serious learning can best emerge from a student’s exposure to short blasts of “delivered” content, each of less than an hour in length, and unified by no coherent set of common ideas.
It is a radical idea that a child can learn what is needed to live well in a complex society with schooling that encompasses barely half the days of a calendar year; and that ignores the opportunities —or lack of opportunities— available to each child.
The list goes on. There is much in contemporary and widespread practice that fails to stand up to even common sense scrutiny. The Coalition challenges that practice.
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. We gather here in Washington to exchange ideas and practices for moving toward that goal, not in some vague future but in our immediate daily practice. We never will have all the answers but we must persist in pursuing them, difficult and impolitic though that pursuit may at sometimes be.
And so, let us persist. Let us learn from each other. Let us bear witness to what can be done. And let us be heard. — Ted Sizer, Washington, D.C., 2002