Dr. Theodore Sizer, a prominent leader in American educational reform, spoke last night about the challenges of improving the American educational system.
Sizer gave his speech, "School Reform: Just Talk or the Real Thing?" to a packed crowd of students, professors and community members in 105 Dartmouth Hall.
Sizer, an education professor at Brown University, is director of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a group trying to change American schools by redesigning them according to principles Sizer developed.
"These are extraordinary times in American education," Sizer said. "I spend my time watching and learning, trying to make sense of education today."
Sizer offers a new approach to education that challenges what he labels the "shopping mall school," in which students attend 45 minute classes that are never connected in an interdisciplinary manner.
Redesigning schools into a more interdisciplinary system in which schools, rather than the federal government, decide what teachers should teach is one of Sizer's proposals to better the educational system.
Smaller class size and greater student/teacher interaction are also parts of Sizer's goals for education reform.
"How schools are run should involve teachers and parents, and have very little to do with the state and federal governments," Sizer said.
"We don't create good schools with a cookie-cutter," Sizer said. "We began the Coalition of Essential Schools with the assumption that good schools are inherently unique because they must draw from the individual students, parents and teachers."
One problem with the American educational system is that many educational programs are developed by policy makers who are too removed from the experience of teachers and students to make effective change, he said.
"Very rarely is the civic purpose of public education the end of public education," Sizer said. "The thoughtful citizen ideal is missing from the rhetoric of today's politicians."
Sizer said a paradox has developed in the management of public schools.
The federal government has tried to centralize authority by giving the state power to create goals, assessment and standards for individual schools, at the expense of local, county and city governments, he said.
The families and teachers of students, rather than the state, should decide the goals for public schools, Sizer said. Taking autonomy away from teachers and students is ultimately "taking away the heart of the school."
The impatience the public has with the rate of change in existing public schools is problematic, Sizer said. Teachers are blamed for failures of the education system, and there is a lack of community and federal support for public schools.
Sizer said another problem with the American educational system is that the federal government is disinterested in public education.
Standardized tests are an example of the danger in the government basing progress upon abstract numbers rather than educational experience and knowledge.
"It is a shallow rhetoric to say that good test scores equal good education," Sizer said. "By doing so, we are not looking into the future intellectual activity of that individual young person."