For a man tackling such a monumental task as reforming American education, Dr. Theodore Sizer speaks with impressive calm.
"It's not that I'm optimistic or pessimistic, it's just that I don't know any alternative but to try," Sizer said yesterday, leaning leisurely on a sofa at the Hanover Inn.
Despite the difficulty in trying to salvage American schools, Sizer, dubbed the "godfather of educational reform" by The Boston Globe, said his job is getting progressively easier.
"Now, finally, it's easier now than it was five years ago. It was easier five years ago than three years before that," Sizer said.
"Every year is easier for two reasons. There are some of these schools out front where I don't have to make the argument any more. I can say, 'Don't listen to me, go look at those schools and look at what's happening to those kids.'"
"And secondly, that public impatience with schools as they are and with resistance to change is growing," he said.
Sizer said government has dealt inadequately with school reform, where students get turned off, drop out, and where "you can graduate semi-literates, and nobody cares."
"It's pretty depressing, the willingness of the political leadership to deal with these issues in such a superficial way. It's probably a reason to weep," Sizer said. "But the alternative, I mean, you can't walk away from this."
Sizer said he hopes in the future, every person will be capable and able to go to a good university.
But Sizer said low income students do not have that option.
"I'm just saying the playing field is not level, not by a long shot." Currently, more than 800 private and public schools use Sizer's nine "Common Principles" of education, which challenge "assembly-line" learning by stressing development of active thinking instead of learning by rote.
Sizer said the results of an independent study commissioned by his Coalition for Essential Schools on the ease with which reform can be implemented presented him with "sobering results."
"Because the resistance to serious change, even when the change is a common sense change, is ferocious because people are going to have to work hard, people are going to have to do things differently," he said.
Sizer said inner city communities are more open to his ideas.
"The reason is that those communities know that staying the same is suicide," he said.
Sizer, who served as Andover's headmaster between 1972 and 1981, said students at privileged schools should be far more advanced than they are.
"The question to ask them ... is , 'Why aren't the kids better? With all the advantages, why aren't they so much more powerful?'" he said. "It's a hard question to ask. You can ask it of graduates of Brown and Dartmouth too."
But an increasing number of wealthier schools have also implemented Sizer's philosophies. Often these schools are new schools just starting out.
Sizer dismissed critics who say not enough communities have the resources to initiate his ideas.
"What a forlorn conclusion about democracy. It essentially is giving up on democracy, saying those poor slobs they don't have the judgment. If you believe that you don't believe in democracy," he said.
"Now people say that's a romantic notion. My response is, alright, but what's the option."
"Having said all that, people say, 'Oh, you're naive and romantic.' I say, 'No I'm not. I'm brutally realistic,'" he said.
