HOW WE'VE MADE OUR CLASSROOMS

TEACHER PROOF

What is a school for?
The debate over standards, teaching
and students' habits of mind

Essay by Donald Sevener
Photographs by Judy Spencer

Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School
by Theodore R. Sizer

The Schools We Need: Why We Don't Have Them
by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future
Report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future

"The heart of schooling
is found in relationships
between student, teacher
and ideas."

Theodore R. Sizer, Horace's Hope

Horace Smith is the best teacher your kids never had. He's a veteran high school English teacher who is respected by colleagues, revered by students and "compulsive in his love of his trade," says Ted Sizer.

It is thus sadly disconcerting — not to mention instructive — to discover that Horace Smith does not exist. He is Sizer's invention, a composite portrait of the "best of the teaching force," first sketched 13 years ago in Horace's Compromise. A pity. Horace is just the sort of teacher you want to entrust with your son's or daughter's schooling, the sort most kids love to have. Here is how Sizer describes Horace: "He's proud, respected, and committed to his practice. He'd do nothing else. Teaching is too much fun, too rewarding, to yield to another line of work." Horace has high standards. "He cares about his teaching and feels that he should take a half-hour to prepare for each class meeting, particularly for his classes with older students, who are swiftly moving over quite abstract and unfamiliar material, and his class of ninth-graders, which requires teaching that is highly individualized." He is popular: Some students drop by after class "just to come by"; one student who works on the stage crew for the school play Horace oversees calls him frequently at home; and more than 50 students ask him to write recommendation letters for college admission.

Horace Smith is the ideal teacher, but he is not an ideal. He represents what we want all teachers to be.

Or so we say. The reality — the huge breach separating our rhetoric and our classrooms — is much different. This reality forces the Horace Smiths, the real ones, to compromise their standards, their convictions, their commitment.

Since America learned its schools had placed the nation at risk more than a dozen years ago, wave after wave of school reforms have washed ashore — greater standardization, greater decentralization, vouchers, school choice, charter schools, curriculum standards, now school uniforms.

Today, Sizer and E.D. Hirsch stand at the crossroads of the school reform debate. To their credit, both have looked inside classrooms. To our dismay, each points us in a different direction — Sizer to pedagogy, Hirsch to curriculum — to overcome the vexing inertia of school reform in America. To our continued frustration, both give us less a blueprint for change than lessons in why virtually none of the reforms has reached, on any widespread basis, inside the one place where change is most needed and most neglected: the classroom. No single venue is more central to improving schooling or more capable of thwarting meaningful reform.

The National Commission on Teaching and America's Future notes, "On the whole, the school reform movement has ignored the obvious: What teachers know and can do makes the crucial difference in what children learn. After a decade of reform, we have finally learned in hindsight what

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Theodore R. Sizer, the author of Horace's Hope, believes schooling should go
beyond knowledge of the basics to understanding and beyond
understanding to the habits of mind that mark an educated person.
For him, proof of school reform is to be found in the students.

should have been clear from the start: Most schools and teachers cannot produce the kind of learning demanded by the new reforms — not because they do not want to, but because they do not know how, and the systems in which they work do not support them in doing so."

Best known as the author of Cultural Literacy, the controversial treatise advocating mastery of a core of knowledge as the basis of literacy, E. D. Hirsch is a professor at the University of Virginia and president of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which has devised a grade-by-grade curriculum for schools. Sizer is professor emeritus at Brown University, author of several books on school reform and chairman of the Essential Schools Coalition, which he founded as a way to rethink schooling and redefine school reform and which he outlined in Horace's School: Redesigning the American High School.

For Sizer, "the proof of school reform is to be found in the students.

"What I personally care about is fostering thoughtful and decent young adults, people who have an informed imagination and the restraint to use it wisely. I want them to be respectful skeptics, accustomed to asking 'Why' and being satisfied only with an answer that has as solid a base of evidence as possible. I care about how they use their minds, and all that they have learned, when no one is looking — that is, beyond any formal testing situation, in which they know that they are on the line. I care about their habits of mind."

Sure, he says, there are subjects and skills that need to be mastered — and tested. "Can the child read? Can he write? Can he cipher? Can he do his percents? Does he know where Seattle and Singapore are? Has he read Hamlet? Of course such 'basics' are important and should be respected. They can be measured and should be measured."

But just as surely, he says, schooling should go beyond knowledge of such basics to understanding and beyond understanding to the habits of mind that mark an educated person.

As explained in Horace's Hope, schools that embody the mission of Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools share common principles. Among them: The school should focus on helping adolescents use their minds well; students should master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge (this "less is more" conviction that depth of knowledge is superior to comprehensive but superficial treatment of vast amounts of subject matter is, Sizer notes, one of the coalition's more controversial ideals); that the school's goals apply to all students (a belief that all students can learn, which is not typically an operational tenet in most American classrooms); that teaching and learning should be personalized (an ambition Hirsch believes is impossible); that students, not teachers, are the primary workers of the classroom

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Hirsch calls formalism and naturalism pernicious "half-truths." Formalism fails to establish skills that are universally useful, he says, because "an ability to think critically about chess does not translate into an ability to think critically about sailing. An ability to read or write effectively about the Civil War does not translate into an ability to read or write effectively about agriculture." What leads to effective reading or writing about the Civil War, he says, is knowledge — facts, dates, names, battles, generals, content — about the Civil War.

He acknowledges that certain learning instincts are "natural" to children — the language instinct is one, play is another. But other types of learning do not fit the "naturalistic scheme of automatic development," such as reading, writing, the base-ten system of counting, multicolumn addition and subtraction, carrying and borrowing, multiplication and division. These skills, he says, "do not develop at all unless they are taught." Furthermore, knowledge snowballs upon knowledge — learning to add single-digit columns prepares one to add double-digit columns. The failure to teach content rather than tools, he says, accounts for the widening gap that separates the "haves" — youngsters who have attained a solid base of knowledge in early grades — and the have-nots who see themselves fall further and further behind as they "progress" through their schooling.

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On this basis, Hirsch embraces the core curriculum standards movement now in fashion. Focusing primarily on the K-8 grades, he urges a national standardized curriculum to be mastered grade by grade and monitored by "fair and incorruptible tests."

Although Hirsch presents his case intelligently, sometimes eloquently, the idea of a national core curriculum would sustain the principle flaws of the schools we have, which have succeeded to an astounding degree in making classrooms teacher proof. The chief irony of the standards movement is that the curriculum standards painstakingly set by vast committees of educators, parents, business people and such will be circumvented in at least two major respects. First, it will be textbook publishers and standardized test manufacturers who set the real standards as practiced in the classroom. Second, Hirsch underestimates the power — and propensity — of the schools we have to obstruct any reforms that threaten their hegemony.

Notes Sizer, "Systemic reform, even if exquisitely designed, can founder on the unwillingness or incompetence of teachers. Top-down plans are easy to sabotage: Teachers can close their doors and do what they want. Any sort of national reform — a raising of standards, as this is commonly put — will therefore require more than grudging cooperation from professional staffs and parents, one by one, teacher by teacher, parent by parent."

Moreover, Sizer points out that leaders of "top-down" reforms — those imposed on schools from above — can foil their own good intentions. He cites the example of writing standards Oregon has adopted for all of its students, among them the ability to convey a clear, focused idea or message with relevant supporting details appropriate to the audience; to demonstrate organization, sentence fluency and command of writing conventions, including spelling, grammar, usage, punctuation, paragraphing and capitalization; and to use specific, precise words. A sensible, laudable standard, Sizer concludes. But in most school districts, in Oregon and elsewhere, teachers have 130 to 180 students per day, preventing even the most creative, diligent teachers from giving the hands-on time and attention required to help students fulfill such a standard of writing achievement. "The ways in which high schools are organized and resources are distributed make serious teaching virtually impossible even for devoted and experienced teachers like Horace Smith," says Sizer. "The 'world-class standard,' so easily set, is utterly unattainable in schools as they are currently structured."

"Schools only rarely hold themselves responsible for the success of every student," according to the Report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

This is precisely what the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future discovered.

After a two-year study, the commission issued its report last September. It found few things right with teaching and teachers. It concluded that the circumstances of teaching (class sizes, planning time, the school schedule, absence of collegial relationships) conspired to impede creative instruction and effective learning. The commission's report also criticized teacher training programs in university schools of education and said the haphazard means by which most new teachers are recruited and hired leave most of them grossly unprepared when they enter the classroom. The report noted that teachers generally suffer a low status, the low value that society places on their work reflected in the pay scales that rank them below other professional occupations such as sales representatives, scientists, accountants, registered nurses, artists, social workers, even writers. By basing compensation on seniority, the school rewards longevity over competence, demeans knowledge and offers few incentives for the gifted teacher to remain in the classroom. And in its most damning declaration, the commission concluded: "Schools only rarely hold themselves responsible for the success of every student. And most are structured in ways that make it impossible."

The picture that emerges from the national commission report, from the works of Sizer and Hirsch and from other sources is dispiriting. It is the

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portrait of a profession not just held in low esteem, but perhaps deservedly so. It seems not to even take itself seriously.

For example, the commission points out that parents and the public often presume that teachers, like other professionals, experience similar patterns of training, acquire common knowledge and meet common standards before being allowed in a classroom. "You would be incorrect much of the time," the commission's report says, "if you assumed that any teacher to whom your child was assigned had a degree in his or her subject; had studied child development, learning and teaching methods; and had passed tests of teaching knowledge and skill. In fact, well under 75 percent of teachers meet this standard."

Two out of five math teachers and a third of science teachers are not fully qualified for their assignments, the commission found. According to the Illinois State Board of Education, 26 percent of prospective teachers in general science last year failed the exam required of teacher candidates before they can enter the classroom. Ten percent of teacher candidates in mathematics, 13 percent in biological science and in history, 12 percent in social science and 10 percent in reading failed the exams in their respective subjects.

School administrators compound the problem of incompetence in the classroom, the commission says. Faced with the late-summer scramble to fill vacancies, "some districts choose unqualified teachers without a second's hesitation."

Noting the high attrition rate among teachers leaving the profession, the commission asserts that many students become education majors not from a commitment to teaching or to young people "but because getting a teaching credential seems like good job insurance."

Pay scales for teachers reward the incompetent and the proficient alike. Novices take on the same assignments as proven veterans, regardless of expertise. And the commission concludes, "All these incentives maintain a status quo in which ability has little currency, and highly capable people are as likely to be discouraged from entering teaching as they are encouraged to enter and remain."

So, where lies Horace's hope? Perhaps in E.D. Hirsch's core of knowledge. He contends that if grade schools followed the early education principles advanced in The Schools We Need, "American high schools would change perforce for the better."

Perhaps in the comprehensive, generally sensible and tough-minded plan envisioned by the national commission. It has recommended a number of reforms to enforce rigorous standards on teachers, reinvent the training of teachers and their continuing development as professionals, repair the chaotic process of teacher recruitment to ensure a qualified teacher in every classroom, revamp the reward structure so knowledge and skill are valued and restructure the school so it fosters success of student and teacher.

Most schools cannot produce the kind of learning demanded by new reforms because they don't know how.

Perhaps in the turmoil of the moment — the rising frustration of the public, politicians, even educators. Sizer believes (or hopes) that exasperation with the schools we have "has legitimized a searching rethinking of what schooling is all about."

He suggests that "out of such turbulence can come better schools — or worse, Horace knows, if we blow the opportunity the times are providing us."

Perhaps. But it's hard to be hopeful. Experience teaches us that we are more likely to blow the opportunity than seize it. We say we value education, say we want good schools, say we want high standards for students, say we want caring, knowledgeable teachers. Yet, there is scant evidence that we mean what we say. Sizer: "What we have found — to our continuing dismay, if not surprise — is that change in schools, ultimately raising their standards, is exceedingly difficult, and the incentives to undertake such change in most communities are very weak."

What is needed, he suggests, are standards "for educators and politicians as well as for students. To hold students accountable for high-quality scholarship in a school system that is inadequately funded, roiling with political wars and suffering from highly unstable leadership is not fair. Then, too, there are Horace's compromises. How must the routines of the school be reformed if we are to achieve high standards for all children? Put negatively, can a high school be considered of high standard if it saddles each teacher with 135 students?"

If there is cause for Horace to hope, it lies in the fact that the school reform movement has at last begun to reach inside the classroom.

The commission's broad-based agenda proposes far-reaching changes that could, over the next decade, transform virtually every classroom, teacher- training program, faculty pay scale and school schedule.

If the scale of that agenda is cause for skepticism, hope lies in the recognition that small currents of change are taking place throughout the country. Little by little, school by school, even teacher by teacher, fresh ideas, changed attitudes, new values, different structures are taking root in classrooms. More than 200 schools in 37 states have adopted the grade-by-grade curriculum developed by Hirsch's Core Knowledge Foundation. Sizer's coalition has grown to more than 1,000 schools (including 20 in Illinois from DuSable High School in Chicago to Broadmoor Junior High in Pekin to Anna-Jonesboro High School in Anna) engaged in transforming themselves into Essential schools.

It's a guerrilla force fighting huge odds: an apathetic public, politicians who look for the cheapest way out, institutions set up for failure. So for most children, teachers like Horace Smith remain a distant hope.

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