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An educator, Sizer taught high school in Massachusetts and Australia before going back to get two graduate degrees from Harvard, and ended up as a professor there, in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he developed theories on how education should work. Wanting to try his theories first hand, he left Harvard, where he had been promoted to dean, to become headmaster at the prestigious Phillips Academy. There, he found that even disadvantaged students excelled, when they didn't do well in regular high schools. So he quit to work full time on studying why. The result is what is called the "Essential Schools Movement". Sizer found American schools to be mired in "friendly, orderly, uncontentious, wasteful triviality," which produced "docile minds". Standardized testing is "at best snippets of knowledge about a student and at worst a profoundly distorted view of that child." Instead, school should be about "learning to use one's mind well" -- deep, rather than broad, literacy, numeracy and civic understanding that is made relevant to students' lives. Naturally, politicians and educators vested in the status quo rejected Sizer's ideas, but publisher Walter Annenberg donated $50 million to help Sizer establish the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University; Sizer was its first director. There are now 600+ Essential Schools operating under his ideas. "Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools," Sizer wrote. "The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way." He died October 21 at home from colon cancer. He was 77.
From This is True for 25 October 2009
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