by Theresa Fucci PeaseTo find the man Teacher magazine described in 1996 as "America's most famous educational reformer, "you turn off Route 2 in bucolic Central Massachusetts, pass a guard house and veer left until you see a large, nearly windowless brick building.
It looks like a fortress. "This facility was built by the U.S. Army as a place to teach encryption, "Theodore R. Sizer explains."It's impervious to Soviet electronic surveillance."
Welcome to the Francis W. Parker Essential School, a grade 7-12 charter school that draws 350 boys and girls from 31 Massachusetts communities to what was once Fort Devens in Ayer, Mass. It is at Parker that Ted Sizer and his wife, Nancy, who were involved in the three-year-old charter school's start-up, agreed to spend the first year of what was supposed to have been retirement, acting as co-principals.
WALKING ON AYER
By coincidence, Phillips Academy's visionary past headmaster decades earlier had taken an initial step on the road to academe in this exact corner of Fort Devens. Before enlisting in the military, Sizer had earned a B.A. at Yale, where his father taught art history and directed the Yale Art Gallery. But it was at Devens, his first posting in the field artillery, that Sizer prepared to become a training officer and classroom instructor."Later, when I got out of the army," he says, "I married Nancy, who was still in college. Teaching was the only experience I could sell to feed the two of us."
After teaching English and math for a year at Roxbury Latin School in Boston, Sizer used the G.I. Bill's education benefits to earn a master of arts in teaching at Harvard. He stayed on as a faculty member. By 31, he'd acquired a doctorate, published two books and assumed an illustrious post as dean of the university's Graduate School of Education.
AN EXTRAORDINARY TIME
"It was an extraordinary time to be a dean. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, just going through Congress, gave an enormous boost to university-based research, development and training," Sizer says. With civil rights in the national consciousness, the idealistic young dean set out to shed light on the needs of city schools and on issues of race and class. Assembling a brain trust that included intellectual luminaries like Daniel Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, plus a future founder of "Sesame Street" and a past research director of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Sizer soon enrolled a corps of minority students who went on to national prominence in education.But what goes up fast comes down fast, Sizer reports. After a few years, he found himself dismantling what he'd built.
"With the election of President Nixon, funding dramatically decreased in the Ed School, which at its high-water mark had been 75 percent on federal funds. We had to cut back from 22 programs to seven programs in the space of four years," he says.
When Harvard President Nathan Pusey announced his resignation in 1971, a disheartened Sizer followed suit. Hoping to join pedagogy's mainstream?as a practitioner rather than a theoretician?he presented himself as a candidate for principal at a large New York City high school. Lacking public school credentials, his application was rejected.
Sizer was ready to accept a professorship at the University of Michigan when he got a call from Scientific American president Gerard Piel, PA '33, who was both a Harvard overseer and a trustee of Phillips Academy. Would Sizer like to come to Andover as headmaster?
He would, he decided after numerous conversations with board members in which one mutually important condition was made extremely explicit: After almost 200 years of educating only boys, Sizer's Andover would become a coeducational institution.
AN AGENT OF CHANGE
While there are still members of the faculty who swear simply and boldly that Ted Sizer "saved Phillips Academy," Sizer insists coeducation was not just his personal agenda. Rather, the notion of educating boys and girls together represented both a sensible solution to the problems of the times and a consensus among the people who had thought deeply about Andover's future.For one thing, the Vietnam War era, with its culture of pot, protestation and rebellion against the establishment , had taken its toll. Straight-laced conservatism didn't sell. Applications to Phillips and Abbot academies were not booming. An hour north, PA's venerable rival, Phillips Exeter Academy, had gone coed just a few years earlier to good effect. Dying Andover headmaster John Kemper had advocated enrolling females, trustees supported the idea, and acting head Simeon Hyde Jr. was in Sizer's words "way out front on promoting coeducation on a philosophical basis." Further, in what Sizer sees as a lucky accident of vocabulary, Andover's forefathers had unwittingly paved the way for coeducation in the school's constitution, which called for the preparation of youth, not males, from every quarter.
"The question wasn't whether Phillips Academy would become coeducational, it was how," Sizer recalls.
SOME SCRATCHINESS
After reviewing the philosophical, political and practical aspects of a range of ways PA could become coeducational, with or without an Abbot affiliation, Sizer and the trustees announced Phillips Academy would, in essence, absorb Abbot Academy."Absorb is a very strong word," Sizer says now, but a quarter century ago, when he and Abbot principal Donald Gordon hammered out the rough draft of a coeducation agreement to be negotiated by the two schools' trustees, they decided to call a spade a spade. "We thought it was better to be clear. No obfuscation," he says.
It was not an easy message.
"There were winners and losers. Abbot lost its name. Some people lost their jobs," he says. On the other hand, many community members saw the move as inexorable, and even some of the faculty w ho had been most opposed to coeducation at the start of discussions worked hard to secure the combined school's success. An Abbot math teacher, Carolyn Goodwin, was named a dean and charged with making sure the "absorbed" Abbot girls were given every opportunity to succeed--for example, those already enrolled were allowed to choose between Abbot and PA graduation requirements.
"That first year of coeducation was overwhelming, but wonderful," Sizer says." At a certain point, the combined faculty realized it had a new school to design. Everything had to be changed. Everything! They had to do that in a summer. Over 1,400 children were going to show up in September 1973, and that unleashed a flood of energy. Sure, there was scratchiness. Why shouldn't there be?"
A DUAL WATCH
To help with the "scratchiness" during his nine-year tenure at Andover, Sizer relied on the counsel and assistance of his spouse, who besides nurturing the couple's four children was a full- time history teacher, academic adviser, tennis and track coach, and dorm counselor at Phelps House, which then housed students as well as the headmaster's family. "M y watch at Andover was really our watch," Sizer says gratefully.Giving shape to the coeducational Andover would have been enough to distinguish Sizer's administration, but the Sizer years also included the celebration of the school's bicentennial and its Bicentennial Campaign. In spite of a deep recession, that fund-raising effort brought in an unprecedented $50 million-plus as the couple criss-crossed the map in search of donor dollars. Often, the Sizers sough t ways for Andover's resources to benefit students who could not attend PA full -time for four years. One Sizer initiative created the Kemper Scholars program, which brought in the first students from the People's Republic of China, while others spawned outreach programs like (MS)2, Math and Science for Minority Students, which still flourishes. The ambitious outreach programs Phillips Academy runs today are widely seen as a Sizer legacy.
MOVING ON
By the late 1970s, Sizer reports, he was besieged by "a growing interest in why so many obviously good ideas in secondary education never found their way into practice and ideas that obviously didn't make any sense."Such as? "Teaching English and French as though they were from different planets, holding a child responsible for what she should be able to do solely on the basis of chronological age, when 60 years of research made it clear intellectual development is as haphazard as physical development," he replies.
With the help of a like-minded Andover trustee, Sizer approached the Commonwealth Foundation of New York for $100,000 to launch a research project at PA to look into such questions. "They told me I was off by a factor of 10; it would take $1 million. Before long, I realized I couldn't handle that big a project and run a school at the same time," he says.
Sizer turned PA's helm over to Donald McNemar and said good-bye. While Nancy remained on the Andover faculty, Ted began working out of the couple's home in Harvard, Mass., running the research project, which drew additional support from the Carnegie Corporation and other funders. Sizer visited almost 100 high schools in the United States and Australia while 20 research assistants ventured into 11 public and four private schools. The work resulted in Sizer's publication of a trilogy of books on the need for school reform, starting with Horace's Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School released by Houghton Mifflin in 1984.
TO THE ESSENTIALS
From 1983-97, Sizer worked at Brown University, serving as professor and department chair in education, founding director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and founding chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools.The coalition's mission was to put Sizer's research to work in real schools. "We used the word 'essential' in the sense that it was essential we do it, but also 'essential' in the sense that most high schools are asked to do too much. We had to ask, 'Of the 40 things we'd like to be doing, which are the most essential?'"
Eventually, Sizer winnowed the essentials down to a few common principles subscribed to by all the schools in the coalition, which began with five members and now boasts more than 1,200 public and private institutions of various sizes in the United States and abroad. Those principles include an expectation that students master literacy, numeracy and civic understanding before entering high school; an insistence that control of educational programs must stay firmly in the hands of principals and teachers; and a simplified curricular structure.
In the Parker School, for instance, the curriculum is organized under three domains: arts and humanities; math, science and technology; and health and adventure. Individualization to students' needs and account- ability by students are stressed. Progress is measured by presentations in which students demonstrate mastery, not by tests. Grade levels are not sharply delineated. Admission by lottery guarantees intellectual and personal diversity. The New York Times Magazine calls it "an extremely friendly, unbuttoned sort of place where . . . everyone knows everyone else and last names barely exist."
"It's a lot of fun, but it takes a lot of stamina, and at 66 I just don't have as much of that as I used to," laments Sizer, who with Nancy looks forward to retiring again in earnest when Parker concludes its search for a permanent principal.
He's not sure what the couple will do then, beyond promoting their upcoming book on character education, titled The Children Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract. Meanwhile, they have a school to run.
Copyright, Phillips Academy, 1999
