Home > Fall Forum > 1997

Ted Sizer's Speech

1997 Fall Forum
San Francisco, CA

Tonight you will hear from two of us, first your Chairman and then your new Executive Director. It is my happy task to speak briefly of the Coalition's beginnings and present situation. Amy will talk of the future and what it may bring us.

Fifteen years ago, at the completion of the large research project on American high schools upon which the Coalition was launched, I and my fictitious friend Horace Smith identified "five imperatives for better schools." We wrote in Horace's Compromise:

1. Give room to teachers and students to work in their own, appropriate ways.
2. Insist that students clearly exhibit the mastery of their school work.
3. Get the incentives right, for students and for teachers.
4. Focus on the students' use of their minds.
5. Keep the structure simple and thus flexible.

Of these ideas, the central one addresses the ways students use their minds. Schools are to provoke young people to grow up intellectually, to think hard and resourcefully and imaginatively about important things. While a child is much more than only a well-stocked mind, and while the mind and heart are connected in every one of us, intellectual development is at the center of the work of schools.

If the school cannot help a child to become intellectually free, that child is profoundly at risk. If democracy is about responsible freedom, it depends on a citizenry which sees the world clearly, which is respectful of past ideas but never their prisoner, a citizenry which is not easily gulled by specious arguments, which can imagine something new in the familiar, which has the courage always to ask the questions why? and what if?

Teaching in such a school is difficult, tricky work. While the end is to help each child learn to think on his own, to have his own worthy interests and enthusiasms, we teachers have to provide the guidelines and provocations for the young person's leap into that kind of independence. We teachers always labor under a painful paradox: I will force you to think hard in order that you become free.

The other four "imperatives" support this core focus. No one of us and no one of our students is quite like any other. To be effective, the pedagogy-the detailed matters for study and the ways that these matters are approached, whether with seven-year olds or seventeen-year olds-must reflect both sound general convictions about scholarly substance and attention to each of our happy idiosyncrasies. As a history teacher, I might introduce both American slavery and Nazism in somewhat different ways to a Hmong student just arrived from a Thai refugee camp, a young white person from an old South family, the Jewish great grandchild of a person lost in the Holocaust and an African-American whose family has been here since the eighteenth century. And my teaching will reflect my own roots.

Such is good and necessary pedagogy. It also is an act of respect for each student's history. We all must work at the lessons of history, but we enter those lessons from often profoundly different places and, inevitably, with profoundly different points of view.

This is "giving room to students and teachers." We must use their and our own histories in our classrooms. This is neither to say that we should not bring into all our work some powerfully common themes nor is it to say that there isn't a common culture across all of us which should be respected and forwarded. It merely means that each of us and our children need substantial space in which to provoke these lessons. Our individuality is important, not to be devalued or trivialized or neatly standardized.

This notion connects with incentives. I teach well that which I personally have organized, which has intellectual rigor and authenticity and which honors both serious scholarship and the special interests of me and my students. Being trusted with the control of my own teaching is a powerful incentive. Addressing my interests is an elixir. I will teach and stay in teaching if I am given this elementary dignity. My student will learn when what is before him connects with situations which are of consequence to him or which capture his curiosity.

The overwhelmingly most important work of schools happens at the lowest level of the educational hierarchy-in the confrontation of student, teacher and ideas. If the incentives in a school do not honor this important reality, I-the-teacher will get into the habit of mindlessly doling out what someone else tells me to dole out and I-the- student will do only what is necessary to "pass" and little more.

We teachers must always remember that our students watch us, watch how we use our minds, watch how we relate to each other and to them. They watch our habits, watch our convictions. While young children may often remain tolerant of our foibles, adolescents notice, and hate, hypocrisy. We must live what we teach because how we live teaches. We cannot escape being models. Children look to us for fairness, for clarity and consistency and inspiration. They look for our joy in playing with ideas, for getting explanations for things, for taking the time doggedly to find something out, for telling the truth and standing up for it, for genuinely liking them. We should provide nothing less.

To adapt the work of a school to its immediate children and adults requires great flexibility. What worked with ten-year olds in science in October fails them in April. The routine, therefore, must be changed. A good school must be able to shift. That requires both a simple, focused program and small enough scale to allow for creative adaptation. The typically overloaded and exquisitely scheduled large high school makes such adaptations extremely difficult, even when its leaders value flexibility.

Finally, there is performance. Is each student using her mind well? Is each asking enough of herself? Where is the creative spark? Where is the thoroughness? Where are the intellectual habits which she will carry away from school? We cannot answer these questions without looking carefully and regularly at her specific work. She must endlessly exhibit the fruits of her studies. We must thoughtfully challenge her on all of it. While we must be sensitive and generous, we must never lie to her. If her work is shoddy, we must let her know that it is shoddy and invent ways to help her make it less shoddy. We must always be ready to say to her, "You are a good person, but this work is not as good as it should be. Here is how we together will get your work to a better standard....."

None of these five imperatives is either bizarre or out of the mainstream of the most admired traditional American educational practice. However, all of these imperatives imply substantial changes in most existing schools.

Even more difficult, these imperatives imply changes in the ways that all of us, and our students, their parents and the policy community look at human intellectual development. These imperatives imply a view of intellectual development which is not dominated by the metaphor of the mere "delivery of subject matter content." Quite the contrary. Serious disciplinary content is exceedingly important, but it is a means , not an end. The difference is crucial for all that we do, from teaching to assessment. In a true story recently told about college alma mater, during the 1950s a professor told a student as he returned a failing paper, "Mr. Jones, I do not want to learn what you think about this. I want to learn what you remember about what I think about this." This attitude is still true of too much school work and is exactly what we need to question. One studies hard in order to be able powerfully to use his own mind, not merely to parrot what someone else's mind in the past thought was important.

These ideas challenge some chestnuts of current school practice. Today we classify students by age, rather than by their accomplishments. We organize schools around curricula which take too little interest in or give approbation to the particular interests of particular students and their teachers or of the context where they are working. We remove from high stakes assessment any concern for a student's intellectual habits or his persistence and imagination or his own learning style. We confuse regulation with relationships.

The Coalition's challenge to these familiar chestnuts is necessarily radical. That is why our work is so difficult.

What gives all of us strength and hope is that there is a growing army of people who agree with these demanding sentiments and who have the energy and the courage to push them into practice. Our strength comes from our collaboration, from the endless trading of practices and experiences from which we all learn. In this respect, the Coalition is quite like big science-an endless conversation about ideas and their demonstrated application, the successes and the failures.

Our Coalition's work is never finished. It is in constant movement as we learn what seems to make a difference. We will do ever better as we keep talking honestly about our practice and acting on what we thereby learn. The Coalition exists to foster such conversation. The schedule of this Fall Forum is ample testimony to that.

The 1983 "imperatives" of which I have been speaking say nothing about the context in which the schools and the families who depend on them exist. This was a serious omission.

How can I get a child to work hard on the important abstractions of mathematics if he is hungry, cold, baffled by age mates who do not value school, frightened, endlessly distracted? How do I persuade a student to write and rewrite and rewrite an essay again to achieve a graceful result when the ultimate test upon which the student is rated is a writing sample on a suddenly given topic to be written in a prescribed period of time? How do I address a student from a racial or cultural group who fully understands that his group is politically and culturally devalued and besieged? How do I teach toward deep understanding-the application of knowledge to an unfamiliar situation- when the syllabus allows no time for plumbing the unfamiliar? How do I get to know all forty kids in each of my five classes?

The way we organize schools-even the very way we all too often think about them-still smacks more of early twentieth century administrative Progressivism than of late twentieth century scholarship about human learning and contemporary democratic values. As the Coalition's work has evolved, these broader issues which so strangle what we need to do in schools have become ever more insistent for all of us. The consideration today by the Coalition Congress of a new "common principle" which highlights our commitments to equity and democracy is important evidence of that. Whether we like it or not, the scope of our concern must extend beyond school buildings, if only to protect the imperatives inside the schools. Our commitments and alliances must reflect this emphasis.

How this is to be done must be explored. The times are right, for often paradoxical reasons. Current political initiatives, so reminiscent in many respects of the early twentieth century obsession with order and the appearance of efficiency, increasingly run up against stubborn challenge from all across the political spectrum. As a result these are roiling times, and because they roil they present extraordinary opportunities. We must seize them.

Our newly designed Coalition-an association of Centers as well as schools-is eminently well positioned to take on this enlarged mandate. We are also blessed by having Amy Gerstein as its new colleague leader for that effort. Brown and Stanford graduate, science teacher, scholar, diplomat, imaginative educator, old friend . . . take this podium now and tell us what you see for our future. . . .

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