Theodore Ryland Sizer was a leader of educational reform in the United States, the founder of the Essential school movement and was known for challenging longstanding practices and assumptions about the functioning of American secondary schools. Beginning in the late 1970s, he had worked with hundreds of high schools, studying the development and design of the American educational system, leading to his major work Horace's Compromise in 1984. In the same year, he founded the Coalition of Essential Schools based on the principles espoused in Horace's Compromise.
Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything.
A good education teaches you how to ask a question. It’s knowing what you don’t know; the skills of critical thought.
The schools schedule is a series of units of time; the clock is king.
Writing is the litmus paper of thoughtthe very center of schooling.
Every student, without exception,
should be able to succeed well
at something consequential.
I cannot teach a child I do not know
The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily.
You can't motivate a student you don't know.
Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.
In the history of education, the most striking phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a ferment of genius, in a succeeding generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine.
... the kids do what no one expects them to do. That's progress.