Horace Index

The Journal of the Coalition of Essential Schools

Editors:
Jill Davidson (volumes 18-up)
Kathleen Cushman (volumes 5-17)

Named for the fictionalized teacher in Theodore R. Sizer's Horace's Compromise, Horace is an ongoing discourse on pertinent topics in Essential school reform. Each issue explores one topic in depth, considering both its theoretical underpinnings and its practical applications. Horace is now published four times a year.

Shortcut to Volumes: 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5

Volume 24 (2008)

Lifecycles of Educators: Essential School Staff Development H24.1
This issue examines the career directions of Essential school teachers and education leaders, focusing on professional learning communities to address the challenge of developing the capacity of educators and administrators to sustain success, create improvement, and start new schools.

Volume 23 (2007)

Exhibtions: Demonstrations of Mastery in Essential Schools H23.1
This issue features writing from CES educators from Sedona Red Rock High School, Greenfield Center School, Parker Charter Essential School, Mission Hill School, School of the Future, and Leadership High School. This issue looks at the how exhibitions ensure engagement within and outside the school community, prepare young people for 21st work and citizenship, and serve as a fulcrum for school transformation.

Essential Mathematics Education H23.2
Essential school mathematics educators debate the advantages and challenges of responding to “less is more” and other CES Common Principles in mathematics, addressing what’s happening now in Essential school math instruction.

What's Essential about Elementary Schools H23.3
This issue looks at the latest thinking in the CES network about what defines CES elementary schools, inviting practitioners to discuss the way elementary schools express the CES Common Principles.

Beyond Reform: Transformations H23.4
This issue explores how communities interrupt the status quo and create the conditions for transformed schools. How do transformed schools — and their larger environments — sustain and evolve as student-centered, collaborative, academically challenging and equitable places of learning?

Volume 22 (2005-2006)

School Design: How Essential Schools Prepare Students for Higher Education H22.1
Horace focuses on how the Common Principles guide Essential schools to cultivate the structures, guidance, and support for all students to be ready to be admitted to and persist in college and be ready for citizenship and leadership as adults.

Classroom Practice: Teaching and Learning Essential Literacy Skills H22.2
Horace spotlights the work of Essential school educators skilled in teaching heterogeneous groups while deepening meaning, relevance and academic challenge for all.

Community Connections: Community-Based Learning and Essential Schools H22.3
Horace explores the challenges and value of internships, service learning, community collaborations, independent projects and other non-classroom centered learning opportunities in CES schools.

Leadership: Students as Writers: Essential School Students on Education and Activism H22.4
Produced in collaboration with CES’s Small Schools Project, this student-written issue tells stories about and examines the impact of youth leadership in the CES Network.

Volume 21 (2004-2005)

Equitable Schools for a New Democracy: Responses from the CES Network H21.1
This special 20th anniversary issue of Horace is not available online. It features essays on twenty years of Essential schools from CES educators, parents, staff, students, and friends including Ted Sizer, Deborah Meier, and many others. Please visit the CES Store for ordering information.

Inclusion and Learning Differences in Essential Schools H21:2
This issue of Horace forcuses on inclusion that creates full access for students with language-based learning disabilities as a way to focus specifically on issues of teaching and learning. Accounts from Anne Clark (Boston Arts Academy) and others help frame the discussion.

District Change to Support Essential Schools H21:3
This issue focuses on creating school districts that support Essential schools, with case studies of Boston, Indianapolis, Maplewood Public Schools, Colorado, and Humble, Texas. Also featured: interviews with school reform leaders Theodore R. Sizer, New York City Public Schools' Chief Academic Officer for New Schools Eric Nadelstern, and Warren Simmons, Executive Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

Using Advocacy and Communication to Create and Sustain Essential Schools H21:4
This issue focuses on ways that Essential School communities have contributed to politcal action to create policy environments that support the CES Common Principles. Ann Cook and Phyllis Tashlik of the New York Standards Consortium discuss the challenges persented to performanced-based assessment by the New York State Department of Education, Steve Jubb of BayCES talks about how to create alliances to change district policies and Albuquerque's Amy Biel High School details their communication and advocacy strategies which have helped them meet stragic legislative goals.

Volume 20 (2003-04)

Mentoring and Collaboration among Essential Schools H20:1
Looks at how sustained mentorships and patnerships help new and restructuring schools effectively draw on the experience of long-established Coalition schools. Includes practical information about effective school visits, a sneak peak at CES ChangeLab, and a wide variety of practical resources.

Making Math Personal H20:2
Focuses on math in Essential schools, featuring an interview with civil rights leader Dr. Robert Moses, founder of the Algebra Project, highlighting the math curriculum development process at New Mission High School, and exploring ways in which CES teachers create personalized math curriculum.

High School Conversions: Essential Restructuring H20:3
Examines the issues and opportunities that arise when large high schools convert to small, autonomous schools. Laura Flaxman analyzes student achievement during the conversion process while Jay Feldman and Lisette López look at the ways in which conversion schools find professional development opportunites that lead to improved teaching and learning.

Advisories in Essential Schools H20:4
This issue explores the state of advisories in Essential schools. What do graduates think of an advisory centered high school education. Contributors explore how students' experiences have been shaped by advisories, present research that validates advisories' beneficial effects, and also look at how Esssential school educators are conducting their own data-based inquires to demonstrate the effectivens of advisory programs.

Volume 19 (2002-03)

Elements of Smallness Create Conditions for Success H19:1
Examines how sustained efforts to incorporate the Ten Common Principles support small schools as they make the most of student learning, personalization, school sustainability, collaborative leadership opportunities and student achievement.

English Language Learners in Essential Schools H19:2
Looks at the varied experiences of students in bilingual and English Language Learning classrooms in Essential schools. We will focus on classroom practice and teaching/learning strategies, the impact of high-stakes testing on ELL students, and the ways that Coalition schools are addressing multilingual equity and cultural issues.

Leadership for Equity H19:3
Includes a contribution authored by Linda Nathan, Headmaster of Boston Arts Academy, that describes BAA's efforts to support equitable academic success for all of its students. This issue also features equity-centered teacher and student roundtable discussions and a guest editor letter from Dr. Pedro Noguera.

Strengthening Bonds H19:4
Focuses on strategies for family involvement in CES schools, looking at the power of - and limits to - family participation in school life. Describes strategies for making the most of parent and teacher time and details families' roles in supporting academic achievement.

Volume 18 (2001-02)

Educational Architecture on a Human Scale H18:1
Expounds upon the power of flexible designs that support personalized learning and relationships, relating the experiences of educators and architects trying to design best spaces for learning and provides guidelines for both designing new spaces and transforming existing ones.

Personalized Assessment and Standards H18:2
Provides another look at the various ways Coalition schools are confronting the challenges of the accountability and standardized testing movement by providing invaluable alternatives for students to demonstrate their mastery of essential habits and skills.

Democratic Leadership in Coalition Schools H18.3
Shows how administrators and teachers are redefining their roles and developing leadership and decision making practices that emphasize collaboration and trust. Davidson and contributers honor the challenge of creating schools that function democratically.

Working for Equity through Community Collaboration H18.4
Looks at Oakland's new small autonomous schools effort and the relationship of three organizations involved in the effort: Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools, Oakland Community Organizations, and Oakland Unified School District.

Volume 17 (2000-01)

What Good Schools Do When Their Students Don't Do Well H17:1
Surveys school practices and programs that provide intensive support and resources to assist students who are not meeting standards. This issue also describes the challenges schools face when students who demonstrate mastery on performance assessments don't pass standardized tests.

Equity Drives Essential Schools' Push for Adolescent Literacy H17:2
Provides powerful reasons and methods for developing adolescent literacy. Noting the increasing diversity of student populations, Cushman urges readers to use the lever of literacy, coaching students to master basic skills and practice complex strategies, to achieve equitable outcomes across content areas. This issue includes very helpful examples and tools for teachers.

Looking Back on 15 Years of Essential School Designs H17.3
In her last issue as the editor of Horace, Kathleen Cushman looks back on 15 years and 60 issues, observing how the change process has affected school cultures deeply. She notes the 10 most powerful changes she has witnessed, including the dismantling of huge comprehensive high schools, the creation of networks of critical friendships, and the integration of curriculum. This issue also includes tributes from Coalition co-founders, Ted Sizer and Deborah Meier.

Volume 16 (1999-00)

Ten by Ten: Essential Schools That Exemplify the Ten Common Principles H16:1
Illuminates how Essential schools interpret the Ten Common Principles in ways that necessarily reflect very different local contexts. As the principles work in concert, moreover, schools often find that one rises to prominence, prompting a press for excellence that illumines and ignites other areas of change as well.

What Makes for Powerful Learning? Students Tell Their Own Experiences H16:2
Provides seven students' accounts from around the country of powerful learning experiences, which provide clues to such pressing concerns as how teachers might assess and document such learning, how the whole school can help facilitate, and what the common threads between these experiences are.

High Standards for Essential Learning Demand a Mix of Measures H16.3
Continues the discussion started in Vol. 14(2) about alternative assessments that capture skills and habits of mind that transcend both narrow academic disciplines and standardized measurements. Includes current examples of the use of multiple measures in Coalition schools as well as reports from a "Competencies That Count" conference jointly sponsored by CES and Jobs for the Future.

Volume 15 (1998-99)

The Family and Essential Schools: Mobilizing Democracy Toward Equity H15:1
Sets out ways schools can empower all families to support students' learning, connecting family involvement to a culture of inquiry and action. [Includes Parent Survey]

What's Out There? Curricula that Support Essential School Ideas H15:2
Presents a selection of curricula that reflect and support the Ten Common Principles, and helps teachers critically analyze their content, pedagogy, and purposes.

Student Development: How Essential School Practices and Designs Can Help H15:3
Examines how teachers can best coach kids in the habits of thoughtful adults and support them in their different rates of growth and what this implies for how we organize Essential schools.

The Cycle of Inquiry and Action: Essential Learning Communities H15:4
Explores how a continual dynamic of asking good questions and finding evidence can guide a school's actions. Inquiry and a culture of evidence are powerful tools in the growth of an Essential school community.

Essential School Structure and Design: Boldest Moves Get the Best Results H15:5
Shows how the way schools are designed, from what they teach to how they allocate time and people, should emerge from local priorities and build on what we know about student learning.

Volume 14 (1997-98)

What's 'Essential' About Learning in the World of Work? H14:1
Explores the links between Essential school learning through projects and other authentic contexts and the school-to-work movement's move to situate more learning in the workplace.

Demonstrating Student Performance in Essential Schools H14:2
Presents ways Essential schools are augmenting data from norm-referenced standardized tests to offer richer and more public evidence about student learning.

Democracy and Equity: CES's Tenth Common Principle H14:3
Provides ways schools can promote democratic principles and challenge inequity and discrimination in their policies, practices, and pedagogies.

Teacher Renewal: Essential in a Time of Change H14:4
Examines what new and experienced teachers in Essential schools need in the way of professional education and support.

How Friends Can Be Critical As Schools Make Essential Changes H14:5
Provides ways that school people can help each other participate in a cycle of inquiry that examines data, teaching practices, and student work as a means of making change.

Volume 13 (1996-97)

Networks and Essential Schools: How Trust Advances Learning H13:1
Shows how building relationships within and across schools can profoundly shift the culture of schooling to one in which teachers create new ways to share and examine their work and to hold themselves to higher standards.

Looking Collaboratively at Student Work: An Essential Toolkit H13:2
Explores how loking closely at student work together can help school commuities reflect upon their educational purpose, assess their progress as a school and plan strategies for serving all students better.

Why Small Schools Are Essential H13:3
Examines recent finding about the benefits of keeping schools small - or turning bug schools into small ones - and how Essential schools are doing it without sacrificing the quality of their students' education.

Essential Leadership in the School Change Process H13:4
Considers what it takes to lead a school through change and offers suggestions and experiences that have helped Essential school leaders find a balance between promoting change and supporting those who are going through it.

What Makes an Elementary School 'Essential'? H13:5
Looks at what is drawing elementary schools into the Coalition and how the nine Common Principles play out in a younger setting, especially regarding curriculum, assessment and personalization.

Volume 12 (1995-96)

Information, Literacy, and The Essential School Library H12:1
Addresses what "learning to learn" looks like and how school librarians can redefine their roles as generalists and information specialists to become partners in collaborative decision-making and curriculum development.

Using Time Well: Schedules in Essential Schools H12:2
Explores new ways of conceiving and ordering the school day that work with rather than against the Essential School philosophy and considers what teachers need to plan and use the long-block schedule effectively.

Documenting Whole-School Change in Essential Schools H12:3
Offers new ideas about what data schools should collect and how they can use it to evaluate their programs and create more meaningful ways to record student progress and hold themselves accountable to their constituencies.

Developing Curriculum in Essential Schools H12:4
Looks at ways to reconcile Essential school ideals about curriculum with the realities of time and teaching and whether teacher-developed curriculum serves students' learning needs better than courses "off the shelf."

The Arts and Other Languages: From Elective to Essential H12:5
Reveals what the arts and foreign languages can contribute to improving teaching and learning, designing interdisciplinary curriculum and addressing issues of inclusiveness and community.

Volume 11 (1994-95)

Empowering Students: Essential Schools' Missing Link H11:1
Examines various ways in which students can be involved and supported as schools work toward more student-centered learning.

Less Is More: The Secret of Being Essential H11:2
Explores the ramifications of this particularly challenging principle; includes approaches to developing a curriculum that embodies "less is more."

What Research Suggests About Essential School Ideas H11:3
Looks at historical, sociological, statistical, and cognitive research that informed Essential school ideas and presents several key findings that support Essential school change.

Making the Good School Better: The Essential Question of Rigor H11:4
Describes strategies and initiatives that Essential schools are using to raise the quality of student work, to increase the range of students expected to do rigorous work and to develop measures for deciding what is good enough.

Essential School Pathways: Connecting Across the Grades H11:5
Explores how teachers, parents and administrators are working together to create a coherent educational program from kindergarten through high school.

Volume 10 (1993-94)

Teacher Education in the Essential School: The University-School Partnership H10:1
Discusses the benefits of placing student teachers in schools involved in reform and describes two programs that integrate teacher education and Essential schooling.

How the National Standards Debate Affects the Essential School H10:2
Explores the issue of setting meaningful standards and describes the role Essential schools can play in higher-level decision making; includes a checklist to evaluate state standards and assessments.

Technology in the Essential School: Making Change in the Information Age H10:3
Looks at key areas of Essential school change to see how technology can speed progress; includes technology tips for school people and a resource list for technology and learning.

Starting a New Essential School: What It Shows About Change H10:4
Examines the struggles of planning and opening an innovative school and suggests some similarities and differences with established schools undergoing change.

College Admissions and the Essential School H10:5
Demonstrates through conversations with college admissions officers and high school personnel how some colleges are accepting Essential school students even without the traditional grades, ranks, and standardized tests.

Volume 9 (1992-93)

The Essential School Principal: A Changing Role in a Changing School H9:1
Illuminates the multidimensional roles of Essential school principals and suggests ways to balance effective leadership with participatory decision making.

What Works, What Doesn't; Lessons from Essential School Reform H9:2
Sets forth more than 20 hard-earned lessons and advice from veterans of Essential school reform about how-and how not-to approach school change.

"So Now What?"-Managing the Change Process H9:3
Presents a framework and various approaches for managing organizational change and getting people to work together; includes resources for developing successful change strategies.

What's Essential? Integrating the Curriculum in Essential Schools H9:4
Examines what it means to integrate curriculum across the disciplines and explores some of the difficulties and political implications; includes sample curricula from several schools.

Essential Collaborators: Parents, School, and Community H9:5
Cites experiences from three Essential schools to suggest how to involve the community in the process of change and how to get the community and its schools to work together.

Volume 8 (1991-92)

Taking Stock: How Are Essential Schools Doing? H8:1
"Takes stock" of how well Coalition reform efforts are going; includes preliminary figures on Essential school successes and questions to ask in assessing progress.

The Essential Conversation: Getting It Started, Keeping It Going H8:2
Offers techniques-including key questions-for starting a school-wide "conversation" on reform and keeping it going to promote whole-school participation in change.

Math and Science in the Essential School H8:3
Portrays the benefits and the obstacles inherent in integrating math and science; includes examples of several successfully integrated math and science programs.

Essential Schools and State Systems: How Is the Climate Changing? H8:4
Explores how state education policies affect reform efforts and suggests some strategies for changing schools when policies do not support reform; includes some examples of far-sighted policy decisions.

Essential Schools' 'Universal Goals':How Can Heterogeneous Grouping Help? H8:5
Offers a range of approaches in teaching methods and curriculum for making heterogeneous grouping work for students at all levels.

Volume 7 (1990-91)

Are Advisory Groups Essential? What Do They Do, How Do They Work? H7:1
Describes the powerful role that advisory groups can play in personalizing students' educational experiences and improving the tone of a school; includes suggestions on organizing advisory groups.

Practice into Theory: Teachers Coaching Teachers H7:2
Introduces a practice-based approach to professional development in which teachers coach one another to achieve classroom and school change.

Breaking the Barriers to Change: A Fall Forum Special Report H7:3
Presents strategies offered by Essential school practitioners in workshops dealing with curriculum, assessment, heterogeneous grouping, leadership, and resistant teachers.

Behavior in a Thoughtful School: The Principle of Decency H7:4
Looks at how the climate in two Essential schools affects both teachers and students and identifies characteristics of a decent school; includes one school's model for student decision making.

Creating a Climate for Change: Essential Schools in Louisville H7:5
Examines how one large urban-suburban school district, under a reform-minded superintendent, encouraged schools and staff to explore new ideas and practices.

Volume 6 (1989-90)

At the Five-Year Mark: The Challenge of Being Essential H6:1
An interview with Ted Sizer, the Coalition's founder, about what he and others at the Coalition learned the first five years' work with Essential schools.

Educational Policy and the Essential School H6:2
Explores how Essential schools have progressed in spite of apparent obstacles from state and district policies; includes a checklist for dealing with policies that conflict with Essential school principles.

Performance and Exhibitions: The Demonstration of Mastery H6:3
Examines performance-based assessment-what it looks like, what it measures, how it is graded, how standards can be applied; includes examples and ways to implement and evaluate them.

What Students Say about Essential Schools H6:4
Voices students' ideas about the role that personalization plays in their learning and about how attending an Essential school affects their motivation and learning.

Volume 5 (1988-89)

Teaching in the Essential School H5:2
Addresses concerns about teaching in an Essential school, particularly about becoming a "generalist" and about designing interdisciplinary assignments.

Getting Started in an Essential School Program H5:3
Describes school start-up experiences to address such questions as, What are the first steps? Must the whole school take part? How will we find and maintain support?

Scheduling the Essential School H5:4
Provides strategies schools have used to create new schedules to enhance learning; includes sample schedules from three schools.

Asking the Essential Questions: Curriculum Development H5:5
Examines why curriculum should be organized around thoroughness instead of coverage, questions instead of answers; includes a guide for using essential questions in class.

*Individual issues: Vols. 5-17 ($5 each); Vols. 18 and up ($10 each)

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Page last updated: September 01, 2005

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