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Home > Fall Forum > 2000
Ted Sizer's Opening Remarks
Fall Forum 2000
 I'm
Ted Sizer, the Chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and it is my happy
duty to give you a warm welcome. It is a particularly happy occasion for me to
be back in Providence. The first Fall Forum of the Coalition was in 1987. We had
the top floor of the Biltmore Hotel, and a big crowd of 200 people. Some of them
are here today, the grizzled veterans of the earlier years. For all of us from
those early days, it is really quite moving to be back in this wonderful and welcoming
city, and to greet such a large group of wonderful friends.
It is well for all of us, even those of us who've been at it for some time,
to review what the Coalition of Essential Schools is, and what it is not. CES
is not a fixed school design. You can't buy a blue print, put it up on the wall,
and build from those specific dimensions. It is rather, a set of ideas, ideas
and conditions and convictions. We call them principles, which, on the basis of
substantial experience and research, strike many of us as an essential part of
life in a worthy school. It's ideas, not specific practices, which drive your
and my work.
And precisely how those principles play out in practice will necessarily and
happily vary from place to place. And in any one place, the practical expression
of those principles will play out over time. Like all human gatherings, a school
is in constant motion. Who is there, and why they are there, and the moment in
time in which they are gathered, affect the community. We not only accommodate
this diversity, we revel in it, because people and places, God bless us, differ.
And thank goodness that they do. The trick for all of us is to gather the particular
genius of each place at a given moment in time to provide concrete experience,
around which our principles work. Context counts, and real authority over that
context, your and my ability to have authority in our place, our students, even
the youngest among them, having authority for their own place, is an elixir and
a provocation for the deepest and most rewarding kind of learning.
Now saying this doesn't mean that you and I are just kind of "fuzzy wuzzies",
and that these ideas which we share, to change the metaphor into a rather grim
one, have teeth. That is, if we take these ideas seriously, we have to do some
serious things. Serious in a sense that many of the ideas that you and I have
come to respect, fly in the face, when they are put into practice, of much of
the traditional American school-public and private, elementary and secondary alike.
Let me just mention three of the most familiar examples. "I cannot teach a
child well, whom I do not know well. How can I teach that child well, if I do
not know her enthusiasms or why she makes mistakes or what seems to be out of
sorts for her at a given moment, or what is behind her at home. And no two of
our children are alike. And so the question for all of us is: how many children
can I get to know well enough to know them and their families and their situations
well at once? And you and I struggle in high schools to get that number to no
more than 80, knowing full well that in many schools it is routinely 120 to 150.
And, by in large, the lower the income of the students, the larger the load you
and I are asked to cover. I think most of us, if we were rewriting those principles
again, at the high school level, would say 50 to 1. 50 kids and 50 for the whole
year, not 50 who are rescheduled in the middle of the year. 50, you can really
get to know 50 well. And in an elementary school, 20 on the outside, but it really
should be 12-15.
There is no one way to achieve this in the real world. No two schools will
adopt the same strategy. Many people say, "Oh that's a pipe dream. How are you
going to run a high school with those kinds of faculty/student ratios without
changing the budget?" It can be done if the school wants to. It's a matter of
revising the budget of time and the budget of money. And this involves making
tough decisions about what is more and less important. What we've learned since
that Fall Forum in 1987 is that it can be done. It can be done in the cities.
It can be done in the suburbs. It can be done in rural areas. It can be done in
public schools and private schools. This is not a kind of fantasy. If you really
believe that your teachers cannot teach well children that they do not know, you
find a way.
Take another idea, which is related to the first-the familiar clich/ "less
is more." Let us do a few things exceedingly well, rather than many things superficially.
The child will not use his mind well, will not learn the subtleties as well as
the obviousnesses of ideas if he is rushed over those ideas quickly and, if he
drops his pencil, he misses a whole century of European history.
I should say as an aside, in this moment where all of us rushed down here after
watching CNN, that my wife, Nancy, has joined me in watching this extraordinary
moment in American History. Nancy is always one to see the bright side of a bad
situation. She said, "you know as a social studies teacher, this will make my
job easier. The kids will know, indeed, will really know what the Electoral College
is. Thank you George. Thank you Al. But really, you could have done it maybe in
a less terrifying way.
But again, what is "less" is the school's decision. In the Parker School where
Nancy and I have worked recently, we made the decision that every student in that
secondary school would learn a foreign language, as long as it was Spanish. It's
not that we would not like to offer Japanese, or Russian, or German, or Latin,
or Greek. Wonderful. But our budget would not allow for it and still make it possible
for none of our teachers to have more than some 60 youngsters whose minds they
had to get to know well, and for most of them fewer than that. This "less is more"
involves the politics of subtraction, the most difficult politics. Because you
have to say we can't do this in order to do that well. And we've learned since
1987 that it can be done.
It ain't easy, but it can be done. And finally we say that students should
be able both to display their knowledge, and also to use it, ideally use it in
an unfamiliar situation. The real test for a student is when she is presented
with something which is unfamiliar and asked to use what she has learned and the
habits of hard thinking to make sense of it. That is, to make the unfamiliar,
familiar. And if we hold this as the standard-the ability to display the habit
of using one's knowledge and one's mind to make sense of the unfamiliar, to give
meaning to what may initially appear to be meaningless-you have to show it to
us. And we have to ask you about it, and you have to show us again, and we have
to see you do it. And that's serious learning, very serious learning. It's very
easy, indeed criminally cheap, to reduce learning to any kind of one shot performance.
Whether it's a standardized test or an essay, or one 10 minute prepared speech.
Our function is ultimately about our students' habits. What we really care about,
the ultimate assessment of your and my work, is what those young people do when
we're not looking. And how you build that objective in a practical sense into
the life of a school, with all its chaos and noisiness and peanut butter sandwiches,
which drop in the middle of a hall and somebody steps on it, all of that. How
you build that in, is very much a function of who you are and where you are. You
can't mass-produce the ways and means of encouraging our young people to use their
minds powerfully over ideas and things and artifacts and arts, which are worth
spending time on.
Every school should be a decent and thoughtful and safe place. Indeed each
school should be a moral place. What this means and how it is achieved is up to
those of us in the community of the school, the young people, their families,
staff, the community around it. These are things that you and I care about. These
are things that are hard to measure. These are things that are even hard to describe,
because they're complex, and they are rooted deeply into the humanity that we
all share.
And so we have these Fall Forums. Or, as a former Latin scholar, I should say,
Fall Fora. And what we do here, as those of you who have been to these before
know, is to provide a blizzard of examples of promising practices in schools that
share common principles. It's not that what you and I will see being shared by
colleagues in other schools is how we'll approach this problem. It's not that
we're going to copy it. It's that we are going to be provoked by it. We're going
to say, "that's interesting; they put a different spin on this. I bet we can take
something like that spin and craft something that will improve what we're doing."
The whole point is that we are learning from one another.
A sentimental way of describing a Fall Forum, or of the Coalition as a whole
for that matter, is a conversation among friends. We are teaching each other-every
one of us. Every student here, every teacher here, every superintendent and principal
here, we're all learning from one another. And the extent to which this gathering
will be a success is the extent to which all of us approach this as a collective
endeavor, where each of us is student and each of us is teacher. And let me repeat
again at the end here, that our convictions and these principles have clear pedagogical
merit. They work. If they are taken seriously, if we do engage with the terribly
difficult politics of subtraction, if we make sure that we think hard about each
youngster, if we ask enough of that youngster, it works.
But there also is a moral part of this that is of a different order. A school
is not, and should not ever be, a faceless factory where the young people are
herded about by teachers, engaged in crowd control, and organized largely by their
age. "I'm 14 therefore I'm in grade X. I'm 18 therefore I'm in grade Y." A school
can not be a factory where the adults do not know their kids. Every child deserves
to be known well. Every child deserves to have her or his specialnesses recognized
and respected. No two of them are alike. No two of them are inspired by precisely
the same thing. Every teacher, likewise, deserves the respect of substantial autonomy
within an honest and supportive community. You and I deserve the same kind of
respect that our children do, if not in quite the same way. We are not mere delivery
machines programmed to provide certain things on the table in front of each child.
Every student's mind should be stretched. Every student's values should be
tested, tested in the sense of confronted at the appropriate time. Every student,
without exception, should be able to succeed well at something consequential.
And our job is to make sure that every student, without exception, has that jolt
of self-discovery and confidence that emerges from doing something of obvious
importance exceedingly well. And from that, moving forward to achieving across
the board very well. Every school should be a decent, thoughtful, and worthy place.
We are in the humanity business. We're dealing with ideas and children's minds.
Our schools should be described and represented by principles and ideas, and how
those ideas and principles play out practically is for those of us close to our
own youngsters to shape.
And so friends, we are gathered again in Providence to share our experience-to
learn from one another. It's again a joy to be back near Brown University, in
the city of Providence, with old friends who took the risk in letting us start.
Discussion
The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract
Theodore R. and Nancy F. Sizer
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Page last updated: May 15, 2002
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