A Celebration of the Life and Work of Theodore R. Sizer

April 29 and 30, 1999 at Providence, Rhode Island

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ANNENBERG ......

INSTITUTE ...... for SCHOOL ...... REFORM The Brown University Education Department and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform

welcome you to

A Celebration of the Life and Work of Theodore R. Sizer

Reception Thursday, April 29 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm Maddock Alumni Center

Colloquium Friday, April 30 from 9:30 am to 4:00 pm Andrews Dining Hall

For directions to the locations, please refer to the enclosed map of the Brown University Campus Colloquium Program Friday, April 30

9:30 am Gathering

10:00 am Welcome Cynthia Garcia Coll, Education Department Warren Simmons, Annenberg Institute Arthur and Barbara Powell

10:30 am Defining Adolescence Moderator: Patricia Wasley, Bank Street College James Cullen, Carl Kaestle, Brown University John Thomas, Brown University Sheldon White, Harvard University

12:00 pm Buffet Luncheon

1:00 pm CelebratingTed Sizer Moderator: Joseph McDonald, New York University Kathleen Dalton and Anthony Rotundo,

2:00 pm Educating Adolescents Moderator: Paula Evans, Annenberg Institute David Cohen, University of Michigan James Comer, Robert Hampel, University of Delaware , Mission Hill School

3:30 pm Reflections from Ted Sizer

4:00 pm Closing The following essays prepared in honor of Theodore R. Sizer are to be published in a forthcoming volume.

Instructional Improvement and Educational Reform David K. Cohen, School of Education, University of Michigan

Societal Change, Educational Change, and the Continuity of Children's Needs James Comer, M.D., Yale Child Study Center, Yale University

Watching What Students Are Watching: The Teacher as Cultural Mediator James Cullen, Expository Writing Program, Harvard University

Sizer at Andover: An Egalitarian Vision of Private Education Kathleen M. Dalton and E. Anthony Rotundo, Department of History and Social Sciences, Phillips Academy

The Life and Work of Leonard Covello: A Reconsideration Joseph Featherstone, School of Education, Michigan State University

Assessment from Another Angle: Harvard Medical School, 1870-1930 Robert L. Hampel, School of Education, University of Delaware

The Prospects of American Youth Since 1950: Changing Conditions Facing Adolescents Carl Kaestle (with John Modell and John Tyler), Education Department, Brown University

The Educated Adolescent Deborah Meier, Mission Hill School, Boston

Academia and Social Crisis: Four Episodes John Thomas, History Department, Brown University

American Adolescences: Once More, With Feeling Sheldon H. White, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

Abstracts of the essays are enclosed with the program. Essays in Honor of Theodore R. Sizer

Preliminary Descriptions April 1999

Morning Panel: Defining Adolescence

WATCHING WHAT STUDENTS ARE WATCHING: THE TEACHER AS CULTURAL MEDIATOR James Cullen Expository Writing Program Harvard University

The relation between educators and popular culture has long been a tense one (longer, perhaps, than many educators realize). It is also true, however, that the advent of the mass media at the turn of the twentieth century-and their intensification at the turn of the twenty- first-pose a greater challenge than ever for those who seek to provide alternatives to the excesses of the media. Among the excesses are a tendency to inculcate docility and an uncritical perspective toward market capitalism. Educators should not deny or surrender to the power of mass media and popular culture. Rather, they should meet the challenge by inculcating a genuine cultural literacy that separates medium from message, and works with as well as against both to advance pedagogical aims of focus, simple goals, student-as- worker, and other principles associated with Ted Sizer's reform efforts. THE PROSPECTS OF AMERICAN YOUTH SINCE 1950: CHANGING CONDITIONS FACING ADOLESCENTS Carl F.Kaestle, John Modell, and John H. Tyler Department of Education, Brown University

An assessment of major changes facing American adolescents in the second half of the century, focusing on three periods: 1950-1965, 1965-1980, 1980-present. One strand will examine changing rates of participation in education (e.g., integration, gender equity) and changing notions of school reform (e.g., Conant and the large compre- hensive high school, contemporary school-by-school reform vs. standards-based reform). A second strand will consider changes in the adolescent life-course and how changes in social arrangements affected the way youth looked at their prospects (e.g., family struc- tures, timing and prevalence of various transitions to marriage, child- bearing, and the military). A third strand will address adolescents and the economy (e.g., the transition from school to work, changing economic returns to education, perceptions of these by youth, and the institutional and policy arrangements that flow from the connections between education and work).

ACADEMIA AND SOCIAL CRISIS: FOUR EPISODES John Thomas Department of History Brown University

The crises are ones of exclusion, and the profound impact of three of them on academia variously defined across 150 years. The antislavery crusade highlights a major crisis of exclusion involving highly motivated and hard-driving young college students who, in the years between 1825 and 1850, helped build, attend, and later staff a band of struggling small colleges extending from Maine to the Ohio Valley and beyond. These students and seminarians (average age about 25) became committed reformers and formed the vanguard of the antisla- very crusade which eventually educated a Northern public to the wrongs of slavery. The second episode of exclusion a half-century later energized and radicalized another young generation of college students. This was the generation of young women (predominantly at first) who actively sought and quickly discovered what to do with their lives after college, first by acquiring advanced training in the new American university or abroad, and then by returning and building the settlement house as an alternative educational and social institution. They, too, were intent on breaking through exclusionary boundaries by serving immigrant clients, learning from them as well as teaching them how to cope with the frightening anonymity of Big City America. In the next crisis of exclusion-the sixties protest movement-students and their educational institutions (many of them black at the outset) played a major role in identifying and then meeting a crisis of exclusion head-on. The fourth and possibly looming contemporary crisis of exclusion may be worldwide, but for the moment must be followed by a question mark, both as to its imminence and to today's student recognition of and reaction to it.

AMERICAN ADOLESCENCES: ONCE MORE, WITH FEEL- ING Sheldon H. White Department of Psychology Harvard University

It is generally understood that changes in American society near the turn of this century altered the traditional activities and life patterns of children, families, and teachers. A conspicuous aspect of the changes was the "invention" of adolescence that, as David Bakan has suggested, was marked out in the human life course by age bound- aries attached to compulsory education, the juvenile court system, and child labor laws. Given a degree of what Donald Campbell would call entatitivity, adolescence became a virtual object in public awareness. It was scientifically interpreted by Hall and others, and those scientific interpretations were the basis of suggestions about education, parenting, and social design. A century later, it may be time to reconsider some of the inventions and ideas of 1900: (1) What has emerged in twentieth century American life is not a new child- hood, but a number of old and new childhoods: (2) The social designs of this century have not served all these childhoods equally well: (3) A linear evolutionary psychology has again and again driven us toward linear conceptions of human development, human differ- ences, cultural differences, and the social order. A broader vision of human development might help us to achieve a broader, better social scheme. Luncheon: Celebrating Ted Sizer

SIZER AT ANDOVER: AN EGALITARIAN VISION OF PRIVATE EDUCATION Kathleen M. Dalton and E. Anthony Rotundo Department of History and Social Sciences Phillips Academy

When Ted Sizer began work as Phillips Academy's headmaster in 1973, America's oldest boarding school was remaking itself out of the conflicts of the sixties and its merger with one of the country's oldest girls' boarding schools, . He insisted on a redefinition of the goals of private education: private schools were simply another way to promote the public good. By rededicating the republican roots of the school and enlarging its mission to include energetic outreach programs, he applied private resources to serve public ends. He enlarged scholarship and recruiting efforts to make Andover one of the most diverse boarding schools in America and, along with his wife, Nancy, worked to make equal access the cornerstone of coedu- cation. He assumed that one of the developmental tasks of adoles- cence was coming to terms with inequality, whether defined as the social arrangements of the larger world or as personal privilege or disadvantage. He tried to build an educational culture resistant to unexamined privilege. The effort was to bring republicanism and egalitarianism into the private school world and resist the private school tendency to withdraw from public responsibility and engage- ment. Afternoon Panel: Educating Adolescents

INSTRUCTIONAL IMPROVEMENT AND EDUCATIONAL REFORM David K. Cohen School of Education University of Michigan

A wise argument about the organization of school reform emphasizes the centrality of teachers. In the last analysis, only teachers can repair teaching, just as only students can learn. But teachers are often resistant to change and unable to change. They may be deeply convinced that their students can only learn very limited things in limited ways, or may have very selectively and conservatively adopted reform ideas that seek to change their attitudes and practice. Like students, teachers must be respected as learners. But without vigorous and artful teaching, and without powerful incentives and extended opportunities to learn, their own learning is likely to continue to be thin and spotty. The central question in this essay is whether there are ways in which such incentives and opportunities for teachers can be incorporated into efforts to improve schools. My approach to the analysis of instructional improvement is instruc- tional. Instruction requires teachers, learners, and materials and tasks. Instruction is most likely to work when several conditions are satis- fied: (1) materials and tasks are designed to be usable by learners and teachers; (2) teachers and learners have incentives which stimulate and sustain engagement with the work; (3) learning and teaching are understood as complex practices, and learners and teachers have the information and other opportunities to deliberately (and otherwise) learn those practices; and (4) that there is a well-formed and executed curriculum and pedagogy of instructional change, which is sustained over time. The central problem with instructional improvement is not organizational or political-whether one begins with the bottom or top. The key issue is whether those who are trying to improve in- struction have an adequately specified and developed instructional enterprise in which they propose to enlist teachers and students, and whether they have an adequately specified and developed scheme for teaching and learning the proposed instruction. SOCIETAL CHANGE, EDUCATIONAL CHANGE, AND THE CONTINUITY OF CHILDREN'S NEEDS James Comer, M.D. Yale Child Study Center Yale University

Despite the massive scientific and technological developments that have changed the nature of the world economy, community, and family, the needs of children have not changed at all. They are born dependent and must interact with caring and meaningful adults to fully develop and gain the capacity to function ade-quately as chil- dren and adults in a complex society and world. Ted Sizer's focus on personalization, intimate interactions, and deep understanding is a recognition of the universal and enduring needs of children. His life work has been a veritable "how to" for changing education institu- tions that are now dysfunctional in their organization, processes, and practices so that they might better serve student needs. I will discuss the major changes that have occurred in societal structures and how they impact people, children, and education and some of the ways Sizer's work helps us think about the needed institutional adjust- ments.

ASSESSMENT FROM ANOTHER ANGLE: HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL, 1870-1930 Robert L. Hampel School of Education University of Delaware

The current enthusiasm for performance-based assessment in courses where students learn-by-doing can profit from historical perspective. What happened to testing in the past when there was a shift from lectures to hands-on work? This case study of Harvard Medical School from 1870 to 1930 reveals that testing practices changed very slowly in the years when instruction increasingly emphasized experi- ments, laboratory work, and hospital ward assignments. For decades instructors continued to give the same type of final exams--short- answer questions requiring recall rather than interpretation, synthe- sis, or problem solving. When "general exams" took hold in the 1910s, the shift was neither simple nor swift. Students held other THE EDUCATED ADOLESCENT Deborah Meier Mission Hill School, Boston

Is there, can there be, and should there be a single definition of what constitutes a well-educated eighteen-year-old? What are the criteria for making such decisions, what rationale requires it, what line of reasoning would suggest otherwise; and who should make these decisions? Should they be decided by voting majorities-nationally, locally, by school? What are the balances that need to be considered? Does it just depend on who is in power-the right, left, or center-or how popular the decisions are? What are the trade-offs? What are the rights of dissidents in any case-regardless of where the decisions are made? Regardless of where or how such decisions are made, how should we go about assessing levels of success or failure? Who should make such decisions, and by what right? Above all, what kind of conversation/argument needs to take place about the purpose, powers, and role of schooling in our public and private lives before we decide such matters? Finally, does the fact that public schooling in the takes place within the context of a democratic political polity affect our answers to any of the above? Should it? An additional planned essay is:

THE LIFE AND WORK OF LEONARD COVELLO: A RECONSIDERATION Joseph Featherstone Michigan State University

Leonard Covello was principal of Benjamin Franklin High School in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s. In his immigrant way, he represents some of the values that Ted Sizer has sought to bring to American high schools today. Covello, in effect, repudiated the entire world that the administrative progres-sives had built and whose historic legacy the Coalition and other recent progressive reform efforts have fought against. At one of the biggest schools.in the world's largest and most bureaucratic school system, Covello deliber- ately deconstructed the role of administrator and became a master of informal networks and face-to-face contacts. He rejected IQ tests that labeled masses of students stupid and rejected tracking into voca- tional education that relegated immigrant and poor kids into dumb jobs. He made the school into an organizing force in the neighbor- hoods and communities it served, a catalyst for redressing some of the imbalances of power in New York City politics. He was a pioneer in promoting bilingual and bicultural education (Italian studies), but he was also a pioneer in moving past the agenda of a single ethnic group toward education and politics aimed at building multicultural and multiracial constituencies in the city. In effect, he worked to create a successful model in education and municipal politics for Walt Whitman's dream of America as a "nation of nations." If democracy and decent educational values are to prevail in America, we will have to do some of the work that Covello and his generation did in build- ing true coalitions in politics. He saw that at some level educational problems are deeply political, at the same time that he never lost sight of the individual student.