May/June 2002

HOW SCHOOLS FAIL KIDS
AND  HOW THEY COULD BE BETTER
An interview with Ted Sizer, retired founder of the
The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) 
 
by Ravi Dykema

RD:  You founded the Coalition for Essential Schools in 1985. I imagine you had to feel passionately about something.

TS:  Well, I had taught school in three different places as well as in the Army, and during the '70s I was Headmaster at Phillips' Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which is an extraordinary place.

RD:  I remember hearing it was one of the prep schools that sent a huge number of graduates to Harvard.

TS:  Oh yes, and all over the place. The more I worked there, with those kinds of resources, the more I wondered about how the ideas that formed that school played into the public school system, or didn't play into the public school system. I started a little study group, the trustees found out about it and provided some money for some staff, and one thing led to another. Several foundations urged me to head a large research project on high schools.

RD:  To ask what questions?

TS:  Primarily, how do they work? What is it like to be a kid in such a school? What is it like to be a teacher in such a school? What are the assumptions underlying the way schools function? Have they changed in the last 30 years, the last 100 years? The historical spin came out of the fact that my doctoral was in history, and my doctoral dissertation was about a very influential report on a high school that was issued in the 1890s. We put together a team and studied 15 schools over 18 months, largely as ethnographers and journalists. We sat, we watched, we listened, we kept careful notes, we arranged those notes and looked for patterns in schools from Louisiana to California to Massachusetts.

      The project led to a book being written by three of my colleagues called The Shopping Mall High School, and the title is illustrative. We found that the high school was expected to be everything to everybody. If you didn't want to work hard, you ought to have a program which allowed you not to work hard. On the other hand, if you wanted to work hard, there had to be, if you will, a shop which allowed you to really stretch. I also wrote a popular summary volume, called Horace's Compromise, which looked at high schools through the lens of a veteran high school teacher. He's a composite of people I knew. I called him Horace, and he taught English.

      What Horace saw was not very pretty. The schools expected him to teach 120 kids at once, but they kept changing who those 120 were every semester. It didn't pay him enough, so he had to have a part time job. These are very familiar things. The book caught the attention of other foundations and they said, "Writing a book is easy. Now, what are you going to do about it?" At that time, I was headed to Brown University to join the faculty there, and proposed to the then-president of Brown that I bring this project there.

      I hoped to find five to a dozen high schools in the Northeast, primarily for travel cost reasons, that were in the political position to redesign themselves. I knew enough about high schools to know that there never could be a model you could just pop in. Schools that I had learned to admire especially were schools which were very close to the character of their own communities. They reflected the best of their own people, whether they were in Denver or Key West or northern Maine.

      We didn't come up with a model. We came up with a set of very simple ideas which reflected the compromises that Horace had to make. We said no high school should ask a teacher to be responsible for more than 80 youngsters at once. We said kids should be promoted not because they get older, but because they exhibit real mastery of their work. So, what counted was what the kids could show us they could do, rather then just that they had collected credits in courses that they might or might not have learned anything in. These were simple, common-sense ideas, but very counter cultural.

    I found the first dozen schools and we began to work together. As those schools came to national attention through newspaper accounts and professional organizations, more schools wanted to be involved. That grew into what we call the Coalition of Essential Schools-the "essential" meaning you focus on a few of the most essential things and meet them head on, instead of trying to do and be everything. There are now anywhere from 1,000 to 1,500 schools around the country.

      The work is hard because the traditional patterns of schooling, increasingly reflected by state policies, don't allow the kind of focusing that is necessary to do the work that needs to be done. However, schools that have been able to do it have had remarkable success, particularly noticeable when those schools were serving low income kids.

 

RD:  When you evaluated the schools in your study, you must have seen something that was shocking but incontrovertible.

TS:  Actually, I don't think any of us were surprised. We were experienced school people. For me, what was poignant was the contrast between able, committed teachers and the work they were able to do. The problem wasn't the people, the problem was the system. And the frustration of the Horace Smiths of the world was very poignant. A lot of teachers got frustrated and left. The ones who stayed said, "This is my work," but the conditions make it difficult for them to do that work. The worst of them became cynical. The best were deeply offended and had all kinds of tricks to get around the system. Those were the Horace Smiths.

 

RD:  What would characterize a kid's experience in those schools?

TS:  Most schools are nice places. They are not dungeons. Full of so many lively adolescents, they have a strong, humorous side. You can stand in the hallways and watch the play as it unfolds during breaks between classes.

Some kids figure out how to work the school to their own advantage and get a good, strong education. On the other extreme, are kids who, if they don't drop out, might as well. They have figured out how to do the least amount possible, and they use school as a safe place to meet their friends and play around. I don't think you will find many kids who will say, "My school was horrible" because they tend to be places where people like each other. But it is the lack of an edge, of giving kids the kind of questions that inspire them, that is very costly.

RD:  Do you think this movement is going to have a dramatic impact on the nation's schools?

TS:  Oh, no. I used to think so, but now I don't think it will be dramatic. When our research came out and when the Coalition of Essential Schools design was put forward, no one said that we were way off base. We got virtually no criticism of our analysis of the problem. But when you say, "Okay, we agree what is wrong. Now what do we have to change," it runs in the teeth of all sorts of special interests. If you say that you can't teach children well by breaking it up in to six or seven little pieces of math or gym or French, you have to say which of those are more important and which are less important and how much you redesign these vessels called English, math and science into more intellectually defensible areas.

As soon as you do that, you run into every conceivable pressure group. English teachers say, "We're English teachers, not history teachers." History teachers say, "We teach social studies, we certainly can't teach economics or business." And the biologists say, "Well, gee, I'm not a chemist. I can't teach chemistry." On and on it goes. The notion that there would be a dramatic change, that people would stand up and say, "Yes, now we have it right," is not going to happen. There are probably 200 to 300 of those 1,000 schools that have broken through all this and who have a fair chance of sustaining their work. That's a pretty thin gruel after 20 years.

 

RD:  But the system by and large still doesn't work very well. The utter failure rate for many kids, measured by the dropout rate, is high, isn't it?

TS:  Terribly high. And with the testing business, that's the way you get your test scores up in high school-you make sure the low testers drop out. You look at the average test scores in some schools and say, "Boy they are really improving," and then you see that there are 1,000 ninth graders and 300 seniors. The shell game going on that gives the appearance that there is progress being made is pretty depressing.

 

RD:  Children who go through this system are influenced for the rest of their lives by their exposure to poetry or biology or history or whatever. Those people's lives are impaired.

TS:  But then you get other records. For instance, a careful study was made of kids who started in the three elementary schools in East Harlem that Deborah Meier and her colleagues started, and then most of them going through the secondary school she started. Most of these kids were African-American and Latino, and virtually all low income. All of them graduated from high school. Virtually all went to college. Virtually all of them graduated from college. As Mrs. Meiers says, sadly but happily, all of them are still alive, which is quite remarkable for young people growing up with the conditions they grew up in. It made a difference in the lives of those people. Some of those kids weren't high testers. Some of them were pretty craggy people. But if you hang in, stay the course and not look for quick solutions, you can change things.

      I've been recently involved here with a charter school in central Massachusetts designed along these lines. My wife and I, one year in our retirement, served as its acting principles. So I've seen what you can do once again very close up.

 

RD:  That was an experience of revisiting the classroom, which you hadn't done in years, right?

 

TS:  Right. I never had the fun of working in a school like those I wrote about. Nancy and I were the co-principals of Parker Central, and we are still very much involved with it. Unlike 20 years ago, there are significant numbers of examples, there are enough places to look at where the kids do what no one expects them to do. That's progress.

RD:  So when you were actually in the school, did you see ways the theories you had been espousing weren't working?

TS:  Of course. The experience we had from 1985 and other schools shaped the way we designed Parker Central school. It was very gratifying. The fact that families from 55 Massachusetts towns and cities put their names in the lottery to get their kids into this small school says something.

RD:  So there was a demand for seats in that school?

TS:  Absolutely. One of our teachers got a charter and is opening a sister school in Pittsburgh, and even though the school building is an unrefurbished, old 19th-century factory building, even though it is sitting in the middle of a tough part of town, more than 200 kids applied before a single faculty member was hired. There's a hunger out there, and there are enough families-all kinds of families-who take the time to think hard about what they want, without bashing the regular schools. There is no future in bashing the regular schools. Too many good people are trying to do jobs they can't do well. Insulting them makes no sense. When there is an option, families pay attention. They may not have done that some years ago.

 

RD:  So the charter school movement may be just the thing.

TS:  Yes, in their various forms. Mrs. Meier was able to do what she did in New York because of a combination of a series of chancellors of that enormous city who backed the idea and the sustained support the Teachers Union. There are now some 200 small schools in the city of New York with admirable records-most of them coalition schools, all of them influenced to some significant degree by the Essential School ideas.

 

RD:  Some interest groups would rather these things not change. So maybe it is the parents who are choosing these schools who will make the difference.

TS:  Absolutely. Ultimately they will make the political difference.