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Home > About CES
The History of CES and the Common Principles
In 1984, Theodore R. Sizer and several colleagues published their findings from A Study of High Schools, a five year investigation of teaching, learning, and school history that resulted in the publication of three books: Sizer's Horace's Compromise (1984), The Shopping Mall High School (1985) and The Last Little Citadel (1986). This study found that despite their differences in location and demography, American high schools, by and large, were remarkably similar and simply inadequate.
By offering an incredible array of courses from "consumer math" to calculus and from drivers' education to volleyball, schools often failed to focus on their ostensible central purpose - helping students learn to use their minds well. Teachers, facing 150 or more students a day, regularly assigned work on the basis of what could be graded quickly rather than on the basis of what would push students to think deeply.
Students, traveling from room to room and from teacher to teacher for unrelated fifty-minute classes, rarely had time to sink their teeth into any topic and passed their days with little sense of the connections between the various subjects they studied. The typical American high school, while perhaps a friendly enough place, promoted apathy and intellectual lethargy; the lesson it succeeded in teaching best, perhaps, was that becoming educated is deadly dull.
Sizer's Horace's Compromise (1984) describes how the typical structures of schools helped to make these inadequacies all but inevitable. So Sizer considered how schools might be more wisely designed. Given the dismal historical record of major "top-down" reform initiatives over the past 50 years, Sizer's chose to approach reform not with a new and improved "model" to be imposed but rather with a general set of nine ideas or common principles which a school could fashion in ways that made sense to their community. In 1984, a group of eleven schools in six states agreed to redesign themselves on the basis of Sizer's ideas and to form the Coalition. A team led by Sizer, based at Brown University, was then formed to support these "essential" schools in their efforts.
The Common Principles soon caught on among scores of schools around the country, both public and private. After a decade, with hundreds of affiliated schools around the country, the national office of CES helped to arrange the founding of CES Affiliate Centers around the country. The Affiliate Centers offer direct support to schools in the areas of school design, classroom practice, leadership, and community connections. CES National relocated to Oakland, California, in 1998 and continues to lead the movement by maintaining and strengthening the national network and conducting research and advocacy at the national level.
For core activities and programs of the national office, read on >>
To affiliate with this robust national network, read on >>
Page last updated: August 21, 2006
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