Coalition of Essential Schools

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The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is an organization created to further a type of whole-school reform originally envisioned by founder Ted Sizer in his book, Horace's Compromise. CES began in 1984 with twelve schools; it currently has 600 formal members.

1 Horace's Compromise
2 The Common Principles
3 Organization
4 Philosophy and politics
5 List of Members of the Coalition of Essential Schools
6 Further reading
7 See also
8 External links

[edit] Horace's Compromise

Horace's Compromise consists of Sizer's reflection on a five-year Study of High Schools in which a team of investigators toured high schools of various kinds (differing demographic composition, rural and urban, public, private, and parochial), interviewed teachers, students, and administrators, and spent considerable time observing classrooms and, especially, following students through their daily routines.

Sizer launches an attack on several of the ubiquitous features of an American high school, such as the standard 50-minute classroom block used in scheduling, which Sizer claimed limited the depth of teaching and learning, particularly when one took into account the time it took to get students into and out of their chairs and deal with administrative chores like attendance-taking and announcements, particularly announcements via PA. Sizer also objects strongly to the extensive system of electives, wherein students select from several optional courses of widely varying kind (e.g., photography, foreign languages, art, etc.) which potentially distract from the core curriculum and lead to breadth over depth. Sizer was also skeptical of sports, which occupy a position of high importance in the life of high schools.

Most central to his critique, however, were practices of teaching and learning. Like John Dewey (Sizer is an avowed Deweyan) and Paulo Freire, Sizer insisted that education must be dialogical, characterized by give-and-take interaction between teacher and student, rather than unidirectional lecturing. (Sizer primarily emphasized the teacher-student dialogical pairing, though he also admired lively whole-classroom and small-group discussion.) At its best, Sizer suggested that teaching should be thought of as coaching, on analogy to the work of a coach "coaching" athletes. Sizer's preferred teaching style involves a student submitting writing and then revising and re-revising in response to the critical feedback of the teacher.

But this, and, in Sizer's eyes, any good pedagogy will be difficult, particularly in the nonsupportive environment of the modern bureaucratized high school. So, instead, disengaged students and burnt-out teachers make an unspoken agreement (the eponymous compromise) to demand the least amount of work possible from the other while still fulfilling their basic responsibilities. "It's good enough" is the motto of this compromising education.

Sizer conveys all this in a dual form, alternating descriptions of his experiences at schools with fictional summaries and archetypal characters (producing an effect vaguely reminiscent of The Grapes of Wrath). "Horace" is Sizer's archetype teacher, qualified, capable, and committed, but dehumanized by his working conditions and willing to make the compromise, though painfully conscious of the cost in authenticity. Sizer concludes on a half-optimistic note of rekindling Horace's passion and revolutionary zeal and setting him out on the reformist task, the consequences of which are picked up in Sizer's later books, Horace's School (which applies the method of Horace's Compromise to Sizer's own CES schools, then relatively new on the scene) and Horace's Hope. (which reflects much more broadly on the condition of American education from around the time Sizer's retirement from large-scale reform work.)

[edit] The Common Principles

The Coalition was founded on nine "Common Principles" which were intended to codify Sizer's insights from Horace's Compromise and the views and beliefs of others in the organization. These original principles were:

Learning to use one's mind well
Less is More, depth over coverage
Goals apply to all students
Personalization
Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach
Demonstration of mastery
A tone of decency and trust
Commitment to the entire school
Resources dedicated to teaching and learning
Democracy and equity (this principle was added later, in the mid-nineties)

This was intended to make explicit the Coalition's views on race, class, and gender equality and democratic governance of schools. It is relatively unclear how wide or deep the adoption of the tenth principle is, particularly as regards "democracy", as the sorts of evaluations CES schools are likely to undergo are more oriented towards pedagogy and student performance, and many of the schools that are members of CES, especially those with partial affiliation, may not have had to demonstrate this younger principle rigorously.

[edit] Organization

Originally CES was run centrally out of Brown University. This meant that, functionally, the staff could only work closely with schools on the east coast, and particularly in New England. Later, as the movement gained popularity with progressive educators across the country, CES began encouraging reformers to create regional "Centers" to coordinate CES-style reforms, coach teachers and administrators on school change, and evaluate schools for membership in the coalition. Eventually the national organization became an entirely coordinatory body with relatively little direct interaction with schools, instead concerned mainly with coordinating between Centers, presenting a national public face for the organization, and organizing the annual CES convention, the Fall Forum. Since 1997, the Coalition of Essential Schools has been based in Oakland, California.

The transition from nationally centralized administration to regional administration has not drastically altered the relation of individual schools to the national entity in part because CES has always deliberately avoided prescriptive standards. This pluralistic and permissive attitude has helped the organization grow, but has also made it extremely difficult to evaluate.

[edit] Philosophy and politics

While CES, as an extremely diverse and complex phenomenon, cannot be authoritatively and unilaterally defined, its membership definitely tends towards political progressivism, meshing with their strongly Deweyan educational philosophies. As can be seen in its very strong emphasis on the child and Sizer's critique of the state's right to educate, the Coalition falls more to the Rousseouvian end of Dewey's thought rather than the Platonic.

[edit] List of Members of the Coalition of Essential Schools

[edit] Further reading

Sizer, Theodore R. Horace's Compromise.Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1984
Sizer, Theodore R. Horace's School : Redesigning the American High School. Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992
Sizer, Theodore R. "Horace's Hope: What Works for the American High School." Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1996.
Sizer, Theodore R. "The Red Pencil : Convictions from Experience in Education." New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Sizer, Theodore R., and Nancy Faust Sizer. "The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract." Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.
Sizer, Theodore R., Nancy Faust Sizer, and Deborah Meier. "Keeping School: Letters to Families from Principals of Two Small Schools." Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Ancess, Jacqueline. "Beating the Odds: High Schools As Communities of Commitment." New York: Teachers College Press, 2003.
Cushman, Kathleen, Adria Steinberg, and Robert Riordan. "Schooling for the Real World: the Essential Guide to Rigorous and Relevant Learning." San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Feldman, Jay, Lisette Lopez and Katherine G. Simon. "Choosing Small : The Essential Guide to Successful High School Conversion." San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.
Littky, Dennis. "The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone's Business." Washington D.C.: ASCD, 2004.
Meier, Deborah. "In Schools We Trust: Creating Communities of Learning in an Era of Testing and Standardization." Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.
Meier, Deborah. "Will Standards Save Public Education?" Boston: Beacon Press,2000.
Meier, Deborah. "Is Standardized Testing Good for Education?: A New Democracy Forum with Deborah Meier." ed. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.
Meier, Deborah. "The Power of Their Ideas: Lessons for America from a Small School in Harlem." Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Meier, Deborah, Kohn, Alfie, Darling-Hammond, Linda, Sizer, Theodore R., and Wood, George. "Many Children Left Behind : How the No Child Left Behind Act Is Damaging Our Children and Our Schools." Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.
Muncey and McQuillian. Reform and Resistance in Schools and Classrooms: An Ethnographic View of the Coalition of Essential Schools. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1996 (Provides a critical analysis of the early implementation of CES reforms at the first CES schools.)
Katherine G. Simon. "Moral Questions in the Classroom: How to Get Kids to Think Deeply about Real Life and their School Work." New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Weinbaum, Alexandra, David Allen, Tina Blythe, Steve Seidel, Katherine Simon, and Catherine Rubin. "Teaching as Inquiry: Asking Hard Questions to Improve Teacher Practice and Student Achievement." New York: Teachers College Press, 2004.