Theodore R. Sizer

A Celebration of the Life and Work of Theodore R. Sizer April 29 and 30, 1999 at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island ................................ 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, Harvard University 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, Phillips Academy 2:00 pm Educating Adolescents Moderator: Paula Evans, Annenberg Institute David Cohen, University of Michigan James Comer, Yale University Robert Hampel, University of Delaware Deborah Meier, 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 antislavery 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 boundaries 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 differences, 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, Abbot Academy. 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 adolescence 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

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