Home > Fall Forum > 1999

Theodore R. Sizer's Remarks

1999 Fall Forum

As Amy has so well described, these are wild and woolly and "ever faster" times in education. Over the last decade, we in schools have been subjected to much rhetoric and stirring about, with folks telling us to do more and to do better. Interestingly, though, we have to date - save for a tidal wave of all-too-familiar tests - experienced relatively few truly fundamental changes to the system of schools within which we are to do more and better. School remains as school was - a building with its familiar routines.

All of us here at this Fall Forum know that, in spite of our best efforts, the current system of schools does not work well. It appears that those who make education policy are uncertain how to alter this system of schools, particularly if that "improvement" is neither to upset education's current power brokers nor to cost governments much money. This uncertainty is demonstrated by the extraordinary contradictions - not to say hypocrisies - in much current education policy. Let me give some examples...

• Many American political leaders favor parental choice among good schools of varied character and for schools which "break the mold"; yet these same leaders are willing to impose on all the schools stunningly conventional curriculum frameworks and tests that reflect the status quo, indeed often its worst elements. Which is it to be: variety and choice? Or choices between tweedle dum and tweedle dee...that is, no real choice?
• Many policy leaders call for "research-based" reform; yet most of these folk choose to ignore the implications of forty years of evidence about the inadequacy of current school design, about the limitations of standardized testing, and about what might be significant levers for change. The current emphasis appears to be to push ever harder on the old system - even as an avalanche of research challenges this system.
• Many political leaders have arranged to impose tests and narrowly to use the scores from these tests to shape policy, to reward the high scorers and humiliate the rest; yet we know, and have long known, that (as Amy recounted) standardized tests tell us something but not everything about a child and her school; and that humiliation is a practice as ineffective as it is demeaning of both the humiliated and the humiliators.
• Policy leaders call for a rebirth of the teaching profession and for the attraction to our classrooms of a new, talented and stable corps of educators; yet virtual all these leaders fail to address the compromised nature of teachers' conditions of work which is a major cause for the high turnover within the teaching force. Strong people take and stay in jobs that entrust them with important things. Trivialize the teachers' role and a powerful, stable teaching force will never appear.
• Our political leaders and the press repeat the mantra that "every child can and must learn"; yet we painstakingly ignore the crippling conditions under which many children in this country are growing up. Can a terrified and hungry child learn well? If not, what must all of us do?
• All of our leaders unanimously encourage Americans to reinvigorate our public schools; and yet many such leaders appear ready to turn those public duties over to the private sector.

We witness today the vigorous entry of for-profit business into public education. Now, there is nothing necessarily wrong with profit-making business involvement in education; indeed, some of our most esteemed texts and curricula come to us from private companies. It is all a matter of balance. Do the American people, through their elected local officials, ultimately control the schools, or should the marketplace drive the character and priorities of the system? Most private business leaders with whom I talk want to leave the role to the public sector, but I hear today more than ever before some business leaders strongly backing highly centralized curricula and testing, including high stakes national testing.

Why? Most of them argue this for business reasons. Profit in the education industry traditionally is wafer thin. To be successful, a company needs volume. Volume requires a common product. A test score used as the primary, even the single, measure of a serious education is a nicely focused product. If America chooses to equate a successful education with a standardized test score, this will result in a bonanza for businesses, giving them an efficient entré into a captive market of over fifty million young citizens. Concurrently, however, such an eventuality will profoundly cheapen American education.

The bottom line of a serious democratic education is not the same as the bottom line on an industry balance sheet. Again, I am not business bashing. I am merely asking that we all look carefully at the best interests of the children first, rather than at ways and means to lift the cost of truly public education from the tax payers by shifting it over to companies that must provide a return for their stockholders.

And so, as in so many arenas, it all ultimately turns on money; and here is the biggest contradiction. The political community is a-boil with talk about the reform of schooling - and I am glad that it is; yet this same political community to date has shown little stomach for the kind of financial investment clearly required and even less courage to face the hard facts abut the incompetence of our current system of schools and to do something about it.

The inaction is illuminating. Contradictions abound. They show us that there is not yet a powerful and persuasive vision for the future worthy of this great and democratic nation.

And so, what does this extraordinary moment mean for Essential schools? We must do two things at once. We have to play the current game by the current rules - most of us are working, after all, in public schools - but we also have to look beyond the current wallow of contradictions toward what a better educating system might be.

We must stick by our principles and work carefully and courageously to make them work well. We must take thoughtful risks. We must keep track of how we are doing. As Amy exhorts us, we must share our stories, share our results with each other and with the general public. In reform, there is strength in all sorts of evidence and leverage in being, as collaborating Coalition schools, more than the sum of our parts.

That is our immediate task. At the same time we must look tot he future to filling the vacuum created by today's policy contradictions. What do our children need not only today but tomorrow? Can a place called school meet some of that need? What, indeed, is a school? Is it only a place? Or is it a gathering, an alliance, an idea which musters its substance from experience in many places, in classrooms, on the Internet, in the workplace, on the street, at a kitchen table? How might an idea of a school as a congeries of international places find practical expression?

We must learn to ask all the old questions in new ways, thereby to discover new questions. We must learn to see young people whole and to craft schools which address their reality. It is no longer enough to tinker timidly with what has gone before. Whatever the risks, let us continue and let us be honest and bold.

Last year I was privileged to serve, with my wife Nancy, as the Acting Principal of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in north central Massachusetts. As I had been a principal before and as Nancy was a twenty-five year veteran of high school classrooms, much was familiar. Nonetheless, the newness of the school - it was then but three years old - meant that little was taken for granted, that all was in play. Parker - now, I am happy to report, a full-fledged member of CES and the Massachusetts' regional Center for Collaborative Education - was and is a strikingly self-conscious place, almost to a fault.

Being back in the life of a school reminded me of the ebb and flow of such communities, of how their moods wax and wane, with the weather, with some celebration or incident, however trivial. As a principal, I rejoiced again to be among adolescents, with their energy, spontaneity, smarts and color, to be part of a community of teachers, students and families, people who had linked arms to make our place of work worthy and special and appropriate, a community in which each individual knows that his or her satisfaction depends on colleagueship with others, a place that loves children even as it copes with their angularities.

Yes, schools are systems; but they are intensely human systems, destined thereby to be neither neat nor wholly predictable. Quintessentially, they are places of hope, committed to the future. Each school is thereby a deeply moral place, a crucible for the expression of our most important qualities of character. Each of us here at this Forum is blessed to be able to act upon such a stage.

Thank you.

The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract
by Theodore R. Sizer
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