Internationally known educator, longtime Harvard resident
Ted Sizer, teaching at Brown University in the mid-1980s. (Courtesy photo by John Foraste, Brown University)
Theodore Ryland Sizer, 77, an internationally known educator whose life and work changed the world of schooling, died October 21, at home with his family on Sheehan Road, of colon cancer. With his wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, he had been a Harvard resident for 45 years; the lives of four Sizer children and ten grandchildren unfolded on their 24 acres at the end of a steeply winding mile of dirt road behind the Shaker Village.
Throughout his long career, Ted moved between the university world of teacher education and research and the hands-on work of schooling. In 1964, at the age of 31, he became Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, and for seven years the family used their hilltop Harvard home as a country retreat from the demands of Cambridge life. In 1971, the Sizers moved to Sheehan Road full time: Nancy taught English at Bromfield, and all four children attended Harvard schools. The distinction of being the youngest dean ever appointed by Harvard was then superseded, Ted joked, by his being “the only Harvard dean who rode a sled to work.”
In 1972, Ted accepted the position of Headmaster at Phillips Academy, and the Sizer family moved to that school’s campus in Andover, Massachusetts. For the next nine years, their Harvard home was occupied by the family of Edward Miller and Kathleen Cushman, who in 1973 began the Harvard Post at its kitchen counter. The Sizers read the Post faithfully, and their unflagging generosity made possible the growth of the upstart newspaper, despite its unlikely and often snowbound first home, into a 30-year weekly record of life in the small town they loved. In the years to follow, Ted and Nancy never missed Harvard’s Memorial Day and Fourth of July parades, and supported many local causes.
A new vision of school
Ted Sizer left Andover in 1981, to commence “A Study of High Schools,” a three-year research effort concerning the nation’s secondary schools. From that work came his most influential book, Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (1984). Its composite main character Horace Smith, a teacher in a typical high school, brought to life the organizational choices that result in curriculum “coverage” without depth and the complicit alienation of students and teachers who have insufficient time to work together. The book ended with Sizer’s manifesto for change: nine principles that would simplify secondary schools so teachers might center their work on knowing and teaching students as individuals.
By 1983, Ted Sizer was teaching at Brown University, which in 1984 appointed him chairman of its Education Department. His new university position gave him the chance to put his principles into action, and in 1984 he founded the Coalition of Essential Schools. Beginning as “a conversation among friends” with a dozen secondary schools involved around the country, the Coalition grew to a reform movement with international stature. Its work in hundreds of schools, based on what later grew to “ten common principles,” has since shaped the thinking and the language of educators in important and long-lasting ways.
Brown elected Theodore Sizer a University Professor in 1994, and that same year he also became the director of its Walter H. Annenberg Institute for School Reform. When in 1996 he retired from Brown, Ted and Nancy moved full time back to their beloved home on Sheehan Road in Harvard. Though he remained emeritus at Brown, he and Nancy would teach part time in the years that followed as visiting professors at both Harvard University and Brandeis University.
A steady stream of intrepid educational luminaries and former students made the trip up Sheehan Road in those years, trying out their ideas. They took away with them Ted’s consistent counsel: Stay away from “applying” top-down “models” to a situation, and instead tailor each school to the uniqueness of its community. At the center of that vision was the idea of the student as an active learner, along with the necessity for multiple kinds of rigorous, creative, and individualized assessments of student learning and student work. “No two students are exactly alike,” he would say, in his frequent visits to schools. “It’s terribly inconvenient, but there it is.”
That philosophy faced significant opposition in the top-down political climate of the era. Yet Sizer’s ideas spread even to small towns like Harvard: Lois Haslam and Mihran Keoseian both sought his counsel and his involvement when they were superintendents here, as did school leaders in Acton, Hudson, Groton and other surrounding districts. Then, just after Massachusetts passed its charter school legislation, a few local citizens approached Ted with the idea to shape a small public charter school around Essential School principles, and he lent his unqualified support.
Ted and Nancy Sizer were among the founding trustees of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, which opened at Fort Devens in September 1995, just as the military base was closing. The Sizers actively participated throughout Parker’s start-up years, serving in 1998–99 as its co-principals. School-based teacher education and outreach, long a tenet of Ted Sizer’s philosophy, were fundamental to Parker’s vision. In 2005, Parker formally dedicated the Theodore R. Sizer Teachers Center, which includes a regional school-based collaborative to certify new teachers, and which also welcomes teachers from around the world to visit and learn at Parker.
A life about learning
Theodore R. Sizer was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on June 23rd, 1932, the youngest of six children of Theodore Sizer and Caroline Foster Sizer, of Bethany, Connecticut. He attended Pomfret School in Pomfret, Connecticut, before moving on to earn a B.A. in English Literature at Yale University in 1953. He then enlisted in the United States Army, rising to the rank of Captain. In July 1955, Sizer married Nancy Ellen Faust of Hartford, Connecticut. In his first years of teaching, Sizer taught English and mathematics at the Roxbury Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then history and geography at the Melbourne Grammar School in Australia. With the help of the G.I. Bill, Sizer attended Harvard University, earning an M.A.T. and Ph.D. in education and history in 1961.
Ted Sizer won many awards for his work in education, including numerous honorary degrees and citations. Most recently, he was one of the original conveners of the Forum for Education and Democracy, which works to replace today’s punitive, memorization-based learning environment with one in which children learn to use their minds well in order to become more effective citizens in a democracy.
In addition to teaching, Sizer wrote a series of books based on his research into the history and functioning of high schools in the United States. His Harvard dissertation became Secondary Schools at the Turn of the Century (1964). He edited three books of essays: The Age of the Academies (1964), Religion and Public Education (1967), and, with Nancy Faust Sizer, Moral Education: Five Lectures (1970). In 1971, Sizer spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Bristol in England on a Guggenheim award, resulting in Places for Learning, Places for Joy. Later, Ted followed his well-received book Horace’s Compromise with two more that continued its themes: Horace’s School: Redesigning the American High School (1992)and Horace’s Hope: What Works for the American High School (1996). With Nancy, he wrote The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract (1999); the two also collected their writings from Parker, along with that of fellow principal Deborah Meier, in Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools (2004). Sizer’s most autobiographical work is The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education (2004), which mixed reflections on learning and teaching with analyses of continuing challenges in education. Ted’s fascination with those subjects, his respect for his readers, and his desire to communicate never left him; throughout the years of his illness, he and Nancy continued to write about and discuss the most compelling issues facing today’s schools with university students, teachers, high school students, and educators from around the country and the world.
A lasting legacy
“Ted Sizer stands out among American educators of the last half century,” said Howard Gardner, a professor at Harvard and a fellow school reformer. “He was a brilliant leader of educational institutions, large and small, famous and little known; the creator of original and important ideas about schools; and a powerful, evocative, and influential writer. Most important, in his own life, he embodied the educational ideas that he advocated, dealing respectfully even with, and perhaps especially with, those of a different perspective. He will be missed by educators all over the world.”
Theodore Ryland Sizer is survived by his wife of 54 years, Nancy Faust Sizer, and by four children: Theodore Sizer II of Stuttgart, Germany; Judith Ryland Sizer of Cambridge, Massachusetts; Harold Faust Sizer of Simsbury, Connecticut; Lyde Ellen Cullen Sizer of Hastings-on-Hudson, New York; by three children-in-law: Rebecca Rudd Sizer, Susan Budd Sizer, and James Patrick Cullen; and by ten grandchildren; Caroline Foster Sizer, Lyde Catherine Sizer, and Theodore Rudd Sizer; Julie Ruberts Sizer, Nicholas Budd Sizer and David Faust Sizer; James Faust Cullen, Grayson Sterling Sizer Cullen, Ryland Bailey Sizer Cullen, and Nancy Anis Faust Cullen; by two sisters, Hilda Sizer Warner, of Washington, D.C. and Elizabeth Sizer Allen of Redding, Connecticut; and by brother-in-law Caleb Warner, of Bedford, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law Constance Ecklund, of Woodbridge, Connecticut.
The burial was private, in New Haven, Connecticut. A memorial service will be held at Harvard University’s Memorial Church, on Saturday, November 21, at 2 p.m. The family requests that instead of flowers, donations in Ted’s name be made to the Theodore R. Sizer Memorial Fund, Office of the Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 13 Appian Way, Longfellow Hall 101, Cambridge MA 02138.
