Word: sizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...improving American public schools has been released over the past year by commissions, consultants and critics alike. This week a major new report by a respected reformer offers the most radical proposals yet. In Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Houghton Mifflin; $16.95), Theodore Sizer argues that the nation's high schools are rigid and out of date, and he calls for a drastic reorganization of the curriculum and school day. Sizer, a former headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., as well as a former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education...
Horace's Compromise is the first of three reports that will be based on a study sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of Independent Schools. Sizer and a team of researchers spent five years on the project, visiting 80 schools across the country. The communities and students varied widely, but Sizer was struck by the mediocre sameness of the schools. He concluded, "The more the high schools personalize their work with students, the more effective they will be." His report recommends that high school be open only to students who can demonstrate...
...colleagues have turned that attention to issues related to schools. During this year Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot has completed her study of "portraiture," six ethnographic studies of high schools. Professor David K. Cohen is completing a study of fifteen high schools as part of former dean Theodore Sizer's study of secondary education. Professor Anthony Bryk has worked with a group of students investigating the influence and consequences of Roman Catholic parochial schooling upon children...
...driving force behind much of the current revolution is the desire for economic revival. What will happen ten years from now if the results are spotty? Theodore Sizer worries about present motivations: "The rhetoric of toughness is so predominant today. There isn't the idealism and compassion that has been behind significant school reform in the past...
...sense, the prophets of doom and the harbingers of progress are both right about the public schools. The American education system is so complex and diverse that signs of hope mingle with tokens of disaster even within the same schools. Says Theodore Sizer, former headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and head of a new study on high schools: "You find marvelous things going on and not so marvelous things going on." Any report card on the public schools would have to consider at least four major areas: curriculum and standards, teaching, funding and community support...