from Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School

Theodore Sizer

Theodore Sizer (1932–2009) was one of the leading figures in the American school reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s, pushing schools to be more effective places for students to learn. A former high school teacher, professor, and college dean, Sizer is probably most well-known for his work in founding the Coalition of Essential Schools, which is an organization designed to support school leaders who are undertaking the kinds of reform Sizer promoted. Specifically, the Coalition focuses on what Sizer called the Common Principles, which include learning to use one’s mind well, “less is more,” depth over coverage, and personalization.

KEY CONTEXT This excerpt is taken from Sizer’s book Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (1997), which is the middle volume of a trilogy examining the state of American high schools and making suggestions for their improvement. In all three of the books, Sizer utilizes an unusual storytelling device that he calls “nonfiction fiction.” Sizer invents the character of Horace Smith, a teacher and school leader (and likely named as homage to Horace Mann) at a fictional school called Franklin High, which he says is a composite of a number of schools he visited. This excerpt begins with Sizer’s own personal account of a real classroom he visited, but ends with a fictionalized scene of Horace leading a faculty meeting. In his introduction, Sizer suggests that this device “carries its own sort of authenticity.”

When seeing schools as a visitor, I often ask to take a class. Sometimes teachers let me, though rarely with the brisk assent I received in a northeastern city high school when, on a moment’s notice, I was handed a ninth-grade humanities group for a period of an hour and a half. I inherited the topic under study — crafting an essay — and plunged into questioning the kids on their topics. Each essay was to center on an incident involving a close family member and was to include, in one graceful way or another, a portrait of that person, the narrative of the incident, and a description of the writer’s deeper or differing sense of his relative on the basis of that incident. It was a demanding topic for fourteen-year-olds.

However, not every kid presented the essence of fourteenness. Of the twenty or so youngsters eyeing me doubtfully, there were little and big ones, the bearded man and the childish boy, the women-girls looking like mothers or children, sometimes both. They were surely a tough lot, on the whole; they had probably seen much of life, much that was foreign to my own experience. The class was predominantly black and brown; there were no Asian-Americans or Asians.

Some talked easily about their work; most did not. Two large girls stumbled badly in English; their whispers to each other were in rapid, easy Portuguese. The most vocal student was a stringy, slouched boy wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the face of a recent film character and a Chicago Bulls cap with the visor turned to the back. He had a quick retort for everything, usually spoken into thin air, not to me or even to his classmates. These comments were usually apt, always funny, clever, bordering on but never crossing the line of insolence. He was utterly unignorable. He was intensely watched by a virtually mute bigger boy, a particular friend, obviously, who grinned and nodded assent from time to time.

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In one corner, leaning against the wall, the tablet of her desk teetering, was a slight white girl, apart from the rest of the group but attending with care. She wore studiously unkempt clothes, jeans well ripped at the knees. She took her time to talk, but when she did her language was standard English, her references from a different part of town. Her language separated her even more than her race, but the others ignored her. She seemed oblivious of her isolation. By contrast, the group’s central figure was an older-looking tall boy, whose talk was carefully phrased, melodious with Caribbean intonations, and as precise as it was predictable. He seemed the class’s leader, an Eagle Scout in deportment, an ad for a college admissions brochure.

5 My impressions of these kids and my conversation with them immediately evoked stereotypes. I guessed from their appearances alone who they were. I knew that this mental sorting-out was happening; it happens to us all: we try to make sense of strangers, the quicker the better. Although one tries to rein in one’s judgments, one still makes them.

After a time, the students set to work on their essays, I traveled among them, peering over shoulders, reading the starts of their work. Different people — different stereotypes —emerged. Some could barely write simple prose but could whisper to me rich ideas they were struggling to put to paper. Others, like the isolated white girl, could write easily but could not tell me clearly what they wanted to express. This student of the kneeless jeans presented a tangle of notions. Whatever her technical writing skills, she lacked a coherent story to tell. She was childish, not so much naïve as living in a world of flat simplicities.

Some had no idea of what a narrative was. Others created tales about their brothers that would have dazzled Steven Spielberg. Some loved writing, seemingly losing themselves in concentration. Chicago Bulls whipped off a pageant of paragraphs, his bon mots¹ of the earlier discussion now finding their way to paper. His work was sloppy but wonderful. Others slouched, pencils relentlessly tapping, gazing around, a few words put down, not even a sentence, utterly unengaged. Only the Caribbean-American proved true to form. He whispered and wrote as he had talked publicly. He exuded assurance.

As their attention waned, I shifted the activity to a discussion of a historical incident that once raised and still raises some enduring issues of fundamental justice. As I go among schools, I like to use this particular exercise, because it gives consistency to my class watching. The merchant vessel Emily, out of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1819, dropped anchor in the harbor of Canton, China, to sell and buy goods. While the captain carried out the major transactions, several Chinese entrepreneurs tied their junks up to the ship and noisily hawked their wares to the men on board. One of the seamen, named Terranova, was swabbing the deck near the tethered boat of an especially persistent woman peddler. Somehow a large pottery jug on deck was loosened and fell onto the hawker’s junk. The peddler fell overboard and drowned. The Cantonese authorities demanded that the captain turn Terranova over for trial by a Chinese magistrate. The justice of Canton harbor was balanced, the captain knew, on different scales from those of Massachusetts. The question to the students: If you were the captain, would you turn Terranova over?

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The case can elicit all sorts of responses: fact gathering, weighing of alternatives, separation of the immediate situation from principle, empathy for a different cultural position, the need to understand trade, Salem, and Canton in the first part of the nineteenth century. And more. The kids jumped in, at first tentatively, then more vociferously. I served as a human encyclopedia, a fact giver; I expressed no opinion. The Cape Verdean girls took positions of principle; Chicago Bulls looked for a quick way out. Just pull anchor and sail away, he argued. Others protested. What about the Emily’s trade next year? What about the rights of the family of the drowned woman? And more. Some refused to make a decision, paralyzed. Again, patterns of response were different; now different stereotypes emerged. The quick portraits I had twice formed disappeared again. Eagle Scout, for example, was silent. He could not make a decision. What might be right for him was not only unclear but unfathomable. I was unfair to push for a decision. He and a few others angrily resented my final call for each student to put on a slip of paper his or her “answer” to the authorities about Terranova’s release to Cantonese law.

10 The complexity of young people was displayed in a ninety-minute spread in the restricted world of a high school classroom, even to a stranger who had had no briefing about these kids and who had his hands full simply maintaining order, no less being amateur ethnographer. My impressions changed several times. One “cut” at establishing what each youngster could or could not do, even with a test, carefully crafted, was not the answer. What kind of day was each student having? Where was his mind this morning? Could she understand what I was saying? Did a word I used mean something different to him from what I intended? Did my “style” smother one but provoke another to do what he was “unsupposed” to do? Beautifully complicated these students were, and to pretend otherwise would be to deny humanity.

How can teachers know the students, know them well enough to understand how their minds work, know where they come from, what pressures buffet them, what they are and are not disposed to do? A teacher cannot stimulate a child to learn without knowing that child’s mind any more than a physician can guide an ill patient to health without knowing that patient’s physical condition. Tendencies, patterns, likelihoods exist, but the course of action necessary for an individual requires an understanding of the particulars.

And so, what to do? Remedies are actually obvious. They promise, however, to challenge a clutch of traditional educational practices.

First, the number of students per teacher must be limited. Teachers, even the most experienced, can know well only a finite number of individual students, surely not more than eighty and in many situations probably fewer. The typical secondary school teacher today is assigned anywhere from 100 to over 180, coming at him, rapid fire, in groups of twenty to forty. Horace Smith daily sees five groups of some twenty-four students each for three quarters of an hour. Can he really know well how each youngster thinks, how each one is progressing and why, what each one cares about?

People, adolescents included, are complicated and changeable, and knowing them well is not something one can easily attain or hold on to forever. Kids seem different to different adults; they respond in different ways to different situations or when studying different disciplines. Few students open up to older people they do not know or trust; to know a youngster in order to teach her well means knowing her first as a person. Moreover, there are no perfect tests one can administer to get a permanent fix on a child, no matter how educators struggle to create such devices and to believe in them. Current research on learning and adolescent development is full of speculation, of conflicting findings and incomplete results, and it gives no simple answer to the nature of learning or growing up. In sum, teachers (like parents) are very much on their own, drawing on a mixture of signals from research, from experience, and from common sense as the basis for their decisions.

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15 Accordingly, and reflecting the ambiguous nature of each student’s progress or lack thereof, wise teachers, knowing that they must be diagnosticians of the youngster’s progress, take counsel regularly with their colleagues about the student, sharing impressions, hunches, and suggestions. Teachers confer with parents. And teachers make time to confer with the student himself, privately — formally or more likely informally — not only in the rush of class time. [. . .]

All this personalization can be taken too far, or worse yet can be bureaucratized with solemn Meetings called on a Schedule to examine Each Student’s Brain and Navel. Compromises and common sense and flexibility are always needed in schools, just as they are in good families. Adjustments must be made quickly and thoughtfully. The key ingredients here are time during the school day for people to meet, schedules that allow the teachers of particular youngsters to gather together, teachers committed to such gatherings, and a school program flexible enough to respond to adjustments recommended for each student. Schools should do no less for students than effective hospitals do for patients. Good hospitals allow time for staff consultations. They expect collaboration in the diagnosis of problems and the selection of remedies. Good hospitals consult patients carefully. Schools are not hospitals and school kids are not “sick,” yet the analogies in this case hold.

Finally, the mores of the school — the ways it goes about its business — must implicitly show respect for individual students, for the expectation that each can succeed, and for the belief that each deserves success. It is in this context that schools’ “dirty little secrets,” incendiary issues like race, can be addressed. A school faculty that knows its students has taken each beyond his or her race, has accepted each as a person. This is not to say that race or gender or ethnicity is not of consequence; it means only that other matters, such as a kid’s personality, his hopes, his friends, his passions, his family, his idiosyncrasies, count more. It is one thing to say, “Those three black kids and those two white kids over there are . . .”; it is better to say, “Bill, Amanda, Susan, Roger, and Ernest . . .” The person emerging from the caricature can help to dissolve the stereotype. A stereotype is one of the roots of prejudice, one readily confronted in good schools. The “dirty little secrets” will never be eliminated or go away: America’s prejudices run too deep for that. The tensions and wranglings they incite will always be with us, and schools must accept them — but always in the context of the reality that no two people, young or old, are ever quite alike, nor should they ever be treated precisely alike.

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A thoughtful school “culture” cannot be readily codified or structured. An advisory period merely offers the possibility of “advice” given and taken. What happens within that opportunity is the nub of it. Fuzzy but fundamental qualities of caring and honesty, attentiveness both to the immediate and to a young person’s future, empathy, patience, knowing when to draw the line, the expression of disappointment or anger or forgiveness when such is deserved — indeed, those qualities which characterize us as humans rather than programmed robots — mark the essence of a school that is at once compassionate, respectful, and efficient.

How do such schools come to be? Through the leadership of their adults, people who set and reset the standards, people who stay around a school long enough to give it a heart as well as a program, people who are ready to build a community that extends beyond any one classroom, people who know the potentials and limitations of technical expertise and of humane judgment. One does not “design” such schools.

20 Such schools, rather, grow, usually slowly and almost always painfully, as tough issues are met.

Horace’s committee seemed stumped about how to respect the differences among students and yet meet the need for some absolute academic standards. Comparisons to athletics were tried, but what kept cropping up was tracking — with academic varsities, junior varsities, and the rest.

The problem, committee members knew, was that the game of life was all played at the varsity level. In the use of their minds, if not their passing arms and kicking feet, all the young people had to be made as competitive as possible.

“Take your taxes,” Margaret suggested. “Everybody has to do his taxes. Taxophobes are not let off. Everyone must be able to play that game.”

There was laughter. “The Form 1040 is the test we all must pass . . .” More embarrassed laughter.

25 “Not everyone will be able to make sense of all that IRS gobbledygook.”

“Why not?” Margaret persisted. “It isn’t all that hard. It takes time, persistence, careful reading, good records, patience galore. Why can’t we set those ends as a standard for any Franklin graduate?”

“In the real world, lots of people do their taxes with others. In our house it’s a collective late March hassle. And if we don’t understand, we ask for help.”

“So, isn’t that OK?” Margaret again. “We can’t teach every student the tax code forever and ever, but we should be able to expect everyone of them to do some sort of tax return. If in collaboration, so much the better. It will give each young person the confidence that with help as needed he can complete the 1040.”

“Can we expect the same of the faculty?” More laughter. The committee was learning to like itself.

30 Green: “The 1040 is the Real World. Why isn’t that a good Exhibition?”

Again someone protested: “It will be too hard for some of the kids!”

Coach: “It can’t be. They have to be able to do it.”