(00:00:01) A new international study comparing school children around the world shows that us students are performing below the world average in math and science the study which was funded by the US Department of Education and the National Science Foundation concluded that students in countries where more is demanded of them do better than American children. We're going to talk about education during this hour my guest in Li Minnesota Public Radio Studios is dr. Theodor Sizer for the last eight years. He's been chairman of something called the Coalition of essential schools. He is also a professor of education at Brown University. Dr. Sizer wrote a critique of American high schools in 1984 called horace's compromise about a fictional English teacher who was frustrated by the system status quo and red tape to incisors now written a sequel if you will called horace's School redesigning the American High School to incisor. Welcome nice to have you in Minnesota today pleasure to be here. There's been a lot of talk about redesigning the school. Reforming education and so on. What are you proposing something fairly radical or more a Band-Aid approach? Well, it's somewhere in between the plan which my fictional friend Horace Smith and his colleagues come up with accepts very familiar things about American high schools such as that, they are run by public authorities that they they assume that all American adolescents will attend. It's quite familiar in that respect. In other respects particularly in the way that students and teachers are asked to think about their education. Some people will call it if not radical romantic. What do you think on an overall basis we need to do about American schools right now and what can be done right now as opposed to 5 10 20 years from now. Well we can get we can get serious about schools and the just issued. Port which you mentioned at the beginning is an example of why we should get serious even I haven't read the full report. I want to read the newspaper accounts and I have substantial reservations about what we can learn from paper and pencil test that kids take for an hour. But even with all of that anyway of sounding off the alarm and getting American serious about schools is going to help so far. We have a lot of political rhetoric and some very simplistic ideas about how to improve the situation and that's we need to do far better than that. The question is what do we do? And and the answer is to go to the insides of those schools and ask Common Sense questions. Are they set up right are the incentives right? So kids work hard. If not, let's change them and what my own experience as a high school teacher and principal and the research which a group of us have done since the late 70s shows is that well-intentioned though. They be schools are Frankly set up wrong and it's very difficult. Even for devoted teachers like my fictional friend Herr Smith to do the job. They know the needs to be done kind of an interesting story on National Public Radio last week which dealt with the essentially the Vietnamese boat people the kids of Vietnamese boat people which showed that those kids even in what would be considered bad schools did far better than their American counterparts and the larger the family the better the kids did and they looked into it and found that what was happening in those families. Was it the parents and the kids and everybody was sitting around the dinner table after their evening meal and all working on the school assignments together and the big kids were teaching the little kids. What does that tell you about the whole education system and tells us a great deal and a reminds me of the old saw that I learned from a high school principal who said I'll give you a perfect school if I can pick the parents. All right, and show me a show me a home where where there are books where Mum and Dad and both are there in many cases not in all necessarily ask the youngsters what was learned today in school have opinions and a sense model in their own lives. What? What the schools and the society values in what these kids should be doing. It's the it's the parents who it's the it's the homes of the communities that are Mindless would simply assume that a little journey or a little Julie or not. So little Johnny leaves high school and then spend the next six days six hours being a paid bagger at the local at the local market. Come home at 9:00, maybe to pick up a bit of supper without anybody else around with nobody saying what happened in school today. And do you have any homework? It's those kinds of homes as very tough to deal with. So, I wonder if the emphasis on the school's is misplaced at least to a degree that to a degree it is I think if we're worried about the quality of the education America adult America's got to start by looking in the mirror and it starts with politicians and business leaders many of whom I'm sorry to say are full of self-righteousness. We need a little less less self-righteousness and a little more acceptance. These are very complicated problems and everything is incentives get the incentives, right? I'll teach anybody anything and if the incentives for serious education are very weak if people mock those who do well and in school, then we've got we've got a problem which transcends what teachers can do. Horace your fictional High School teacher was frustrated by the status quo in the red tape tell us about the red tape what can be done to remove it who makes the red tape and who are the people that are responsible for it? The red tape really comes from tradition when you ask questions gee, why do you do things that way the usual answer is for silence and then because we've always done it that way. I mean a common sense thing like all the periods in the school day are 52 minutes long and then there's a bell and then there's four minutes and then another bail and then the next 52-minute thing starts and you ask the question how many of us do serious imaginative or intellectual activity and little 52-minute Snippets where we probably pay attention to maybe 35 of those minutes with different subject of concern the previous period of time and the following period of time the answer is we don't that's not the way we learned very well, that's not the way we do serious work then you say well gee why our school set up that way why High School set up that way and then again there is this pause and it's a genius. That's the way it's been since the 1890s. What is Info for school person like me is to slowly realize that things that I accepted without thinking are in fact the beginning of the problem. We have to follow some common sense. Alright, so rather than having those 52 minute periods, five or six of them throughout the day what works better what works better is to realize that some some kinds of serious work require a two hours and other kinds of serious work require 20 minutes repeated every day or twice a day and that in the real world things aren't sliced up into nice neat even little boxes and then the real world not everybody learns in exactly the same way takes the same amount of time which is to say we have to make schools much more complicated in the sense. We have to take account of how people learn and the nature of the disciplines which they're supposed to be learning. In the real world of schools, we're learning that means that most high schools have to make some choices. They're being asked to do too much and as a result, they offer everything shopping mall style and are incapable of real depth in any one thing so that American kids have a superficial exposure to a lot of a lot of topics many of them most of them interesting but thorough work in very few and the results are all around us. Ted signs are with us during this hour and we talk about education number of folks in the line with questions. We'll go to our first caller. Thanks for waiting. You're on the air. (00:08:40) Hello. I'm wondering I'll try to phrase this cohesively. I graduated from high school some 15 years ago. The classes were in a Time slice of what 45 minutes 50 minutes 55, whatever whatever. As a student I didn't have any particular tutelage, etc, etc from my parents or peers and yet today would seem the kids getting out of school. Don't seem to have what I had. I didn't consider myself particularly motivated for my class, you know compared to my classmates, etc. Etc. And I'm wondering is it the family in the youth or has the curriculum changed all that much I'll hang up so I can (00:09:25) listen. Thanks. The curriculum hasn't changed that much nor the routines you'd be quite at home with the Bell System in the school's today. If anything has changed and I can only speak in sort of cosmic terms. I don't have much experience immediate experience with schools in this region. But if anything it is changed is is a drift away from really serious attention to two schooling that the society honors different things. What what well what sports you may have seen a red a damning book called a Friday Night Lights about Permian High School Odessa Texas which not to pick on that particular high school, but which is if you will a metaphor that is everything in that school turns around as football team. And I've nothing against football as a high school principal. I loved going to the games. It's just that things have to be kept in Balance another example, a lot of politicians to everybody has to get test scores up but they don't ever look at the tests and the tests are in fact asking trivial questions. And so the teachers in the school who were being judged by test scores get the kids focused on preparing to answer trivia questions with a result that school gets more boring and when you ask kids serious questions, they have no experience in answering them. So but going back to your original question, I don't think you and I would find schools all that different. It may be that 15 years later you and and I've been out of school a good deal longer than that when we look back through the more experienced lenses of our glasses now we find more fault than we Realized at the time another listener with a question for Ted Sizer. You're on the air. (00:11:27) Yes some regard to the we deliver. Yes, and with the teacher was the only one who was for these students success because their parents certainly wouldn't they were against them go even continuing scored or well, we have continually school and the school itself the administrators and staff of the school except this one teacher expected that expected them to be losers, but he did not and he inspired them to be talks in calculus in the state of California. Now, this is regard them to teachers the quality of teachers. I would like to hear discussed the effects of teacher education on the classroom successes, but also the teachers unions, I think that that has a big effect on how the teachers, you know, (00:12:29) okay teacher training and teacher Instead sighs around those to let me start with Garfield High School and The Stand and Deliver Story. The movie of course is a fictionalized account. But the message is quite clear that that inspiring demanding teachers can Galvanize youngsters, even when the incentives outside of the school of very weak. I admire schools whether the teachers not alone and I'm happy to have been been associated with a number of these schools where that kind of high expectation and and assertion to the kids now pull up your socks. Here we go. You're all going to make it that kind of quality even in as I say again in communities where there isn't an awful lot of support it can work. It does work now my my experience and I've been the the dean of the school of education so I can be critical because I'm one of the one of the trade there's very little much Little in teacher education which goes to the heart of the problem the problem being the craft of teaching. I think you learn how to teach by teaching you think you learn how to teach the way you learn how to write that is you write and have a good editor. The superior teacher education is is in among the children with very good veterans counseling provoking questioning all along the line very few public schools are private schools for that matter are set up for veteran teachers to have the time to do this kind of editorial if you will or mentoring work nor is there much incentive to do it as soon as teacher education starts with being in there with the kids being working alongside veterans who have time to talk and to discuss children and scholarship unless that happens. We're not going to have good teacher education. Now as far as unions are concerned my experience across the country, is that you Generalize that on a national level both the major unions that is American Federation of teachers and National Education Association have been supportive of the kind of work that the Coalition of essential schools is doing where you have great support or great opposition is at the almost at the building level. How does the building rep how does the local building the local elected Union leadership respond to ideas coming from some of their members members for very radical changes in the nature of the work place. And in our experience, we've had dramatic successes in some places where in fact the Union's Led Led the reform in another's lamentably the opposite. How much of the problem is money? Well in some places it is it is a serious problem. I've been in schools with roofs that leaked with libraries with few books with textbooks that were 10 years old with not an eve even enough money for a paper for the kids to write on and I leave those schools. Both embarrassed to be an American to think that happens in this richest of all countries and Furious at the political establishment was tolerates this kind of neglect of our youth furthermore the differences in per-pupil expenditure from Community to community in many states are dramatic as Jonathan kozol prepared demonstrated in his his recent book called Savage inequalities. Again, it's an embarrassment for an American to realize that we that we do not take care of all of our children in some minimal way. Said that it is true that America makes collectively a very large investment in in public elementary and secondary education. And if you take the gross number of dollars and apply it to the number of children as some national political leaders are wont to do you say there's enough money in the system and at a very gross level that is accurate. The problem is how to take the existing resources and so redeploy them as to get a fair Shake across all communities and to get many many more of those dollars into the school buildings and we're in fact those dollars are brought to bear on behalf of kids. Where's that money going now right now it is going and in many communities again one generalize has it ones Peril to the administration of the blizzard of programs, which state legislatures are local districts. Have put on the schools where each program has to have its own reporting office where mountains of paper move back and forth where nobody trusts every anybody else. So any any new initiative anything has to have its outside inspectorate where a great deal of time is spent in in the management of these large bureaucracies again, as I say with nobody trusting anybody else so you have to have a paper trail for everything with a result that in some communities Finance experts whom I respect would say when you really get down to it fewer than half the dollars actually reached the school. Twenty-five minutes past the artist move on to the listener question. Dr. Ted sizers with us. Horace's School redesigning the American High School is his newest book you're on the air. (00:18:08) Yes. You said that life is not broken up into 45 and 50 and 52 minutes segments and there's an individual spent 40 years in the field of education at both high school and college level. I quite agree. There are days that I would have liked to have spent an entire day on a single subject. Are you suggesting that we extend the Montessori system into the high schools for as a better approach to the education (00:18:41) in many ways. I certainly would agree that Maria Montessori is ideas Focus so much on smaller children should be should be pushed upward for the larger. I admire increasingly schools in our project who have decided to break themselves into Little smaller units 456 teachers 8250 youngsters where that small group controls the time and if that group decides we want all day on Spanish they can do it and they of course they they take wire clippers and cut the wires to the school-wide Bell System. That is it is possible in a small unit to have the kind of control over time. Which Madame Montessori would have expected in which which you imply and and state you would have liked as a teacher and it's happening in some schools and with good result back to the phones and more questions from listeners your next two. Are you calling from today? Yes, go ahead. (00:19:44) Thanks. I have an open-ended question for dr. Sizer regarding outcome-based Education Minnesota and perhaps other states are pending High Hopes on outcome-based education to solve the perceived education crisis. Could the doctors size or share his views on the pros and cons of outcome-based Education? (00:20:07) I'd be delighted to the outline presented in my book talks about exhibitions that is performances that and demonstrations which students must deliver publicly in order to deserve their ultimate diploma. And in the sense of being clear about what the kids should be able to do in and what standard is the necessary first step in designing or redesigning schools. Now my own experience in this regard suggest that you have to start not with the theory of outcome-based education and a lot of talk about procedures and processes. But rather the actual substance my experience with schools in our in our group that were a faculty sat down and argued out from very specific examples what acceptable expository prose was that if the if the students in order to get the diploma had to show that they could Right at a particular level and a particular standard then the faculty had to decide what that level in standard was the very process of reaching a standard on some felt something very specific the quality of nonfiction Pros. If you will forced into the open a whole set of problems having to do with the priorities of the school that is if kids were supposed to meet a standard to this level. Then you had to change everything or not. Everything had to change many things down the line in this example insisting on much more writing and insisting that the teachers had a light enough load in other areas in order to be able to read that writing and comment upon it put another way. I find it very difficult to talk about outcome-based education without getting very specific about writing and science and math and history and the extent to which you here in this state are able to move quickly to the Very specific forms that these outcomes might take the better you will you will succeed now having said that let me say something else as soon as you get to these specifics you find that youngsters display their strengths and different ways. We all have known students who can explain things orally a bit better than they can and writing and vice versa. We all sometimes have enjoyed the youngster who somehow has a way of expressing himself through through painting or drawing or in some weather of the Communicating Arts and we wish to and when we allow that youngster to communicate with us in that way, we see something in that child. We didn't see before which is to say the outcomes of the assessments at the outcomes have to be rich they have to be open. They have to allow kids to show themselves off in their most powerful ways. Furthermore the Judgment of Standards cannot be driven down some Icy number is that the kinds of things we really value at the upper reaches of high school are often very difficult to measure in some precise way. We have to accept in some the wonderfully rich and possibly powerful differences among youngsters. And secondly, we have to recognize that many of the things such as habits of mind that we most respect will defy the kind of precise mathematical measurements with which Americans seem to have a special special feeling for should there be some kind of national testing of high school and younger students for that matter. My view is that that would be a very bad idea. Why because the kind if you were going to have a standardized test put across the country almost surely all my friends in the testing Community will say that test will have necessary to store. Russian built into its like these International comparisons. What we're doing is comparing what kids can do when they're asked to spend an hour filling out a certain kind of multiple choice test, right and that favors kids who are good at filling out multiple choice tests. Furthermore. We can drill kids to pass that kinds of tests. I think our standard should be much higher. I want to be able to insist on a standard where the I ask a question the kids gives me an answer and I can come back and push that kid the real world the standards in the real world are not I asked the question you give me one answer the real world demands people who can get who have their heads so clearly around something that they can withstand questions about it. The notion of a standardized tests across the country would not allow for this kind of dialectic which I think are absolutely is absolutely important for high standards. I've other objections to but let's just let it rest there. All right, there is a kind of a national test in the college entrance exams in the a CTS. And so And the value of those things they do in fact seem to predict the higher the score the better the kid is going to do in college. Well, they SAT and ACT predict. Well freshman score freshman grades. They also predict the very well the income level of the parent you want to get a high as a t-score statistically go out and pick Rich parents. So right back to parents and families again. Well, you're back to your back to and again, these are these are kind of because the numbers are large. These are kind of crude. Give me a home where there's a lot of reading material around. Give me a home where there is talk using different using broad vocabularies. Give me a home where we're a family takes a kid on travel. That is the youngster is exposed to Rich language richer language then if the youngsters growing up in a relatively circumscribed area the SAT and ACT our language tests in in very significant degree. Certainly, the verbal portion is obviously a bar even the mathematical portions. And so you skew the test in favor of the talents of kids who have the advantage of growing up in language-rich homes. And as a result we miss the talents of kids who whom he may be as they say very smart, but who cannot display their talents in multiple choice or you know fill in the blank kinds of tests, which large started standardized assessment systems require so they're very limited. And as of now is again as a college teacher, there are a lot of youngsters in freshmen and sophomores that I have come to us with very high test scores, but who in fact are not in the habit of using knowledge very well much less in the habit of explaining their ideas in clear prose or even more importantly in orally horses School redesigning the American High School is Theodore sizers new book. He's with us this hour more With questions your turn now. (00:27:08) Hello. Hello, go ahead, please. Yeah, I'd like to correct the error that you made when you were recounting the boat people story. You said that after supper the parents and everybody sit around the table and do homework and the story said that the children sit around the table and do homework and the parents tend to the household chores. In a lot of these families both parents work and so the household chores get done when the work is finished. So in the so they explained how the larger family seem to do better. Okay that's thing that the older children are available to help the younger (00:27:47) kids, right? Well, you see that's the nice thing about ready. There's always somebody out there who's a carrot more careful listener than than one is do you have a specific question for Ted sighs or here? (00:27:56) I guess I just like he answered a lot of the questions. I might have asked when he didn't he just talked (00:28:01) about but let me pick up on the point. You're making what you're describing is wonderful conversation on serious matters, whether it's with mum and dad or whether it was with sisters and brothers or whether it's in school. We learned so much from each other. We often fail to recognize how important that is good schools in my experience are places where kids and adults are talking all the time about serious things. Let's take another listener question here. Hi, you're on with Ted Sizer. Go ahead, please (00:28:31) thank you. My question concerns television in the fact that so many kids that are doing so poorly in school seemed to come home and just gravitate to that television screen. Do you agree with this and do see an alternative? How do we get the kids away from the (00:28:44) tube? Well, I think the way we get well first of all, it's a very good question. I have a number of observations one way to get the kids away for the tube is for Mom and Dad not to watch it so much unless the research evidence has changed in the last few years no age group watched fewer hours of Television, then adolescence and most of the television watched in homes. The researchers showed at that time in the 80s the control of the knob was or of the you know, what was watched. It was by one of the parents that awfully important crude image monkey see monkey do if Mom and Dad don't read books and watch dumb. Television programs the kid gets the idea. That's what the real world is. Why should I read Shakespeare's Hamlet when when obviously nobody really cares in the in the adult world the second Point as a as a social studies teacher of long-standing my teaching career started in the 50s. I think there's a tremendous advantage that I now have a teaching kids who have seen a lot of Television a lot of good television, then the kids in the mid-50s that is one could teach the Gulf War or teach something about the Gulf War far more powerfully a year ago last January, then I could have taught the or tried to teach the Korean war in the 50s simply because the kids were exposed to first-class visual representations. Not perfect God knows but there is a level of awareness that A powerful communicating media brings in which has to be given its do the trick is to is to increase the amount of first-rate material that is available to kids and secondly to make it a habit in the home that that first-rate material has an important place during the course of the week. And further that there is a good deal of time where the set is off. Back to the phones and more questions for dr. Theodore Sizer. You're on the air. Now. Who are you calling from today? (00:31:03) Rochester Minnesota? Yes, please. Go ahead. I have a two-part question, please and involves junior high schools, you mentioned redesigning the high schools because of scheduling is not a good idea that short periods in the junior high. I find this to be a greater problem. Could you address that? Are you going to do proposed changes similar to the high school in the Junior High's as well? (00:31:27) Absolutely and one of the this fictional high school committee that Horace Smith chairs concludes third away through the book that they simply can't talk about high school without the middle school. And if you push it harder to applies right down to the elementary school, but in in in in the book, we start with 11 or 12 year olds, I agree. There's nothing do you see the youngster come from a relatively complex focused elementary school and then is thrown into usually what is usually a much. Your school with lots of kids bouncing off the walls with us with the room change every 52 minutes and a lot of those youngsters are so confused that it is that it's very upsetting now all she had a second question, but I guess you didn't get through. That's all right. We'll move on to our next caller. Hello. You're on the air. (00:32:17) All right. I'm calling for st. Paul. It doesn't take a wise man to understand that if Americans go to school a hundred eighty days per year while the rest of the industrial world is in school 222 250 days per year Americans won't learn as much that's a quotation Lester. Thurow in 1990. This is a simple variable to introduce into the equation and it I wonder to what extent one can attribute our poor performance in international competition to this very simple, but of course difficult to do in terms of behavior of studying more studying. (00:32:58) Intently. Yeah, I'm interested you mentioned unless you throw and I was on a panel with him just recently on this issue and we agreed to agree and disagree in the following respect Point. Number one. My impression is that much of the existing time in school is well intentioned, but but largely wasted my view was until we can find a much more powerful way of using the existing time resource. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense just to add more days with so much wasted time. That's Point. Number one point. Number two. I absolutely agree that the kids should be going to school and we should be teaching them many more days a year and the recommendation in the book is substantially to increase that time with a precondition that we figure out how to waste fewer hours in the in the routines, which we currently exists Point number three, which is so often neglected in which I tweaked the dean of the Sloan School of Management. Mr. Throw with is of all major in Astral nations with which we compete where the only one that allow our kids to have jobs for substantial number of hours each week on top of school Unthinkable in Germany Unthinkable in Japan, but over 60% of American High School kids have jobs on the average of 15 hours a week. And as long as high school serious high school work as a part-time job for Americans. I think there's a signal going out that if it's a part-time job. It's only a part-time concern. So I would let's have a longer school year. Let's have a longer school day. Let's put serious work in school at the front of the of the train for all kids and before all of that. Let's make sure that the hours we now invest are better spent on they are now how important is competition between the schools and among the schools for the ultimate customers. That is the kids assuming that you then give parents the choice of where they're going to send their kids. I think it is of some importance but not as but not necessarily. Crucial importance. I've seen many schools where which were the only show in town where because of the of the culture of those schools the kind of expectations the faculty and the parents put on them that there was a happy Edge not a corrupt edge of competition a happy competition at the same time. I've been in schools of choice which are sloppy mindless places where the only important thing was how many athletic trophies were added to the collection behind the principal's desk. So to me the notion that that unless you have a choice of school, you won't get the kind of rigor involved oversimplifies. The problem having said that when push comes to shove I favor systems of choice rather than systems of compulsion. It's about 18 minutes before the hours we continue with dr. Ted Sizer on the topic of Education. Horace's School redesigning the American High School is his latest book. And you're next go ahead, please. (00:36:00) Oh, I joined the program a late. You may have answered the question, but two quick questions, how would you characterize an ideal teacher and the second question be what can we do to radically change or revolutionize the present educational system. I'll hang up and listen. (00:36:20) Oh my goodness good questions. Number one and the answer is necessarily A glib three things. My ideal teacher is informed richly about the world. You can ask that teacher questions from any quarter half the time the teacher will say that's a good question. Let's find out the answer. I don't know what the other half of the time the teacher will have the answer. Secondly the teacher is a wonderful if you will diagnostician the teacher wonderful teacher can spot the spark in any kid and if the spark isn't there can figure out the teachers who bring kids alive and it's you know, it's hard to describe it when you and I see it. We know we know it and finally it's inspiring people on the topic of how to revolutionize the school's we've kind of we've kind of been talking about that the whole hour yes indeed. And is it necessary to revolutionize the schools are there some things that we were doing right 20 and 40 years ago that we ought to start doing right again today. Well as all have to be new not it doesn't all have to be no indeed. Most of the ideas that are embedded in horrors of school. Go back a long way. Some of them all away to Plato. The I guess the thing to do is we have to get serious in many communities. We know how to do some things very well. There are many things that we do they don't make any sense. We should shape up the ladder and get on again with a former but really get serious another listener question calling from where today (00:37:51) I'm calling from Houghton, Michigan. Yes, ma'am. I wonder if there's anything that interested concerned parents can do to encourage teachers and administrators to increase their expectations of our kids. (00:38:04) My suggestion would be to find out from your youngsters who their favorite teachers are who the ones who really seemed to have the neck invite those teachers to dinner and over coffee say what could we do what's going on here? How can we be helpful? Should I run for school board? And I my hunch is that after the initial formalities break down. You will find some people with some very strong ideas of how to headed in the right direction in your community and again and again and again across this and the across the country in the in the efforts that I've had the privilege of watching It's that kind of Alliance of concerned thoughtful parents and very concerned and thoughtful enable teachers that the beginning of the reform starts 15 minutes before the hour talking about education today on Minnesota Public Radio with dr. Theodore Sizer your next hello. (00:39:02) Hello. I'm in st. Paul. Mr. Sizer. There are many organizations that run volunteer tutoring programs for education for elementary and secondary students. I know you can't make any generalizations, but could you please comment? And whether you see these tutoring programs as an effective way of enhancing student skills and even maybe helping them to better their conversational skills with people or are are they a waste of time what what factors are involved if they are going to be beneficial to the students? (00:39:43) I think they're wonderful as a general thing. I think they are often can be misused tutoring programs really tutors coming and volunteers should be part of a team of whom the teachers and the kids and the parents are are the other members one thing about many schools particularly schools that are have are in some trouble is that not enough adults on the around really to get to know the kids? Well, and here's where that volunteer can be an immediate colleague of an overworked. Sure, where it doesn't work is where the teacher is going One Direction and then the tutor has no idea really of that direction and and does what he or she can do and you don't get the force that day on behalf of the kid which emerged for emerges from an alliance volunteer programs mentoring programs, which I'm familiar really work. If in fact they are alliances one of the things I'd like you to talk about before you leave Ted Sizer is your idea of organizing the school day around three basic curriculum units Math and Science the arts history and philosophy. Why well, the one of the things which one is reminded of about school is is when one Shadows a kid and you start off an English class and then you the Bell Rings there you go to math class and then the Bell Rings you go to French class and each one of these subjects may be well organized in a good school vertically that is French one relates to To was flights to French three, but they don't make any sense across the subjects and is across the subjects. That in fact is the kids World which is to say even a good schools. The curriculum is incoherent by reshaping the subject matters and the and the central disciplines into into larger configurations and clearing up some of the ambiguity in the subject matters such as relating mathematics and science and profound ways such as bringing all the Arts to Bear not just the language arts at as the queen and the other arts on the edges and in trying to make some Focus sense out of the gargantuan mess called social studies put it I can use those words because I'm a social studies teacher. I'm attempting to to increase the code their likelihood of coherence for the student. We always have to look at schools from the angle of the student too often. We look at schools for the convenience of the faculty. And back to the phones and more questions here for Ted sighs or you're on the air now. Hello? (00:42:24) Hello. I wonder if you don't think there might be some thought given to censorship. I'm referring to the Bland and poorly written books that young children are given to read that includes in my opinion the output of dr. Seuss. There's a place for nonsense, but that should be kept in its place as children, especially beginning readers are to be exposed to good writing if they if they don't expose when they're very young then they're going to be so bored by the time they get older they're going to associate reading with boredom and just something they that they can get through the Curiosity. (00:42:58) All right. Yeah, I agree. I think that that at a very young age kids should be exposed to wonderful literature in wonderful art now reasonable people can disagree about what whether dr. Seuss is a positive or A negative influence. That's why because of the nature of that honest and well-intentioned disagreement the Or that the decisions are reside about those things reside at the local level of better than I like it the notion that some curriculum committee miles from my school will decide the text books which are loaded onto my kids. I find offensive and even though that even though if the decisions are made at the local level, there will be stress and strain. I'd rather have the stress and strain there rather than having the decisions. If you will the censorship decisions made by some distant committee, which is subject to pressure groups of great intensity over which I the parent have no control. Our next question comes from you. Thanks for waiting. You're on with Ted (00:44:01) Sizer. Hi Ted. I have a question. That's that's pretty practical. I'm a mother of girls and I find in our school district. It's real traditional where Athletics are are really focused on. How can we how can we help the administrators and the teachers to focus more on the Excellence of in the participation of girls in the school (00:44:24) and takes consciousness-raising it takes it takes examples. It takes bringing to the attention of school boards and faculties and administrators report such as one just about to come out from the American Association of University women bringing together the research evidence the on matters of you described that is how in many areas girls and young women are discriminated against in school. It's really educating educating us old folks. Having said that I hope that as in some schools girls Athletics development develop. I hope they don't simply mirror the bad practices many boys athletics programs to have to have some of those values simply transposed from males and two females would be I think just at just the wrong way to go. But I said, it's a matter of Consciousness raising and I know that's an old-fashioned kind of hackneyed phrase but it's descriptive. Why don't schools celebrate academic achievement the way they do atletic achievement some do and it shows the ones that bother me the most though are the ones who think that that academic achievement is only that which comes out in test scores without ever looking at the tests and some of this tests frankly a trivial schools. I most admire are the ones who get behind. Truly Rich kinds of academic or intellectual excellence and who trumpet those schools that I have real problems with are those who try to reduce every student to a number and then rank order the kids is though number 32 in the senior class is better than number 64 that is of course. The Distortion of evidence is also it also in it in that Distortion teaches kids the value of hypocrisy which is to say good schools good schools really show find ways of giving public value to Serious academic success and do not trivialize academic success by making more of little numbers than they deserve. We have about five or six minutes left with today's guest. Dr. Ted sizers. We talk education on Minnesota Public Radio. And it's your turn to put a question. Where you calling from (00:46:56) calling from Alexandria, Minnesota. We had please yes. I'd like to hear a comment on community sponsored student at Senate programs such as the Renaissance program kids got a gold card if they get good grades or red card or whatever and they can use it for discounts free movies bowling. What is the effect that does that work? Have you heard anything? I've heard both sides of which comment on that. (00:47:20) Basically it maybe it is the the kind of idealist into me. I in me, I hate to see the incentives for doing good work with your mind be incentives only of money or free trips or that sort of thing. Having said that in I've seen schools set up along an incentive model. All George Richmond for instance has done some very interesting work with elementary schools. And it clearly is not all bad for a school district to focus on that as a way of getting kids attention to pay to give more Focus to their work. I think is a rather forlorn notion is that if kids are not paying attention the if a lot of kids aren't paying attention the problems are more fundamental than merely what can be proven pushed from the outside now having said all that the efforts of local booster clubs to find ways of supporting and strengthening the ascent of kids certainly are not completely wrong headed. Here's our next question. You're on the air with Ted sighs are go ahead please (00:48:43) good afternoon. Thanks for the opportunity to talk here. I'd like to know why just a basic curriculum of like Reading Writing and math Camp. He offered to students given the fact that so many students after studying so many different subject areas really don't have knowledge in those areas in are deficient in a basic skills. They need to get (00:49:01) along. I agree. I but I Define the more broadly and I attempted to do so in the book. I think that we well one reason why we call ourselves a coalition of essential schools is our belief that there are there are a few essential areas for all kids and we should we working with those youngsters until they really Master them there many other nice things that we'd like to offer young sisters. But until we get on with the essentials broadly defined deeply defined we end up with a shopping mall high schools where wonderful things are offered none in Enough depth for any kid to really be often a master of them. So I think we've got to make some priority decisions and focus and we can do that in ways that aren't dull and aren't constricting that are in fact ones that free the kids you suggested earlier getting rid of the standard 52-minute class period or whatever it might be do. We also need to think about getting rid of the standard grade different? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, we know from our own children and just from Common Sense observation that people learn at different rates at different times in different ways and just because you're 13 and doesn't mean that you should be expected to do X Y or Z. The age grading is one of the is one of the bureaucratic impositions of the late 19th century, which constantly gets in the way and we get all tangled up in words like promotion or retention and thus the were the the language of sorting kids out wrong. Of then taking a youngster where she is and moving with her school as I say as I said before we have to recognize that individual people are very complicated and the schools in my view have to be quite simple in their design in order to have the flexibility to deed to deal with the complexity of kids. And one of the things we have to get away from is categorizing people simply by their their ages and taking them as the complicated human beings. They are and really working within that context. I think we have time for one maybe two more listener questions will put you on next with dr. Ted Sizer. Hello. (00:51:15) Thank you. I'm calling from Apple Valley recently moved from the Boston area. And the reason I ask the question I have has to do with the difficulties of the Arts curriculum particularly in the elementary and Junior High areas in the area of where I used to live where those programs have been decimated by Financial cutbacks and other constraints does dr. Size are have some suggestions for Asserting the value and the actual programs themselves into the curriculum (00:51:44) by and large American schools lose a lot by their failure to concentrate in the Arts. Of course, one of the Arts gets all the attention and that's called English and the language the the aesthetic domain in literature the society communicates and gains Rich enjoyment by the interconnected Arts. We have to ReDiscover ancient Greece. That's why in my in my fictional school here horrors of school English disappears a separate subject and something called the Arts which necessarily A Lie together in the old Greek style the visual arts the musical arts the Arts of language both oral and written the kinetic Arts are brought together powerfully as this whole culture in fact operates until we until we bring the the Arts outside of the literary Arts into the center of the Cool, we're continually going to have them lopped off as is the case in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in its current to agonies over budget problems displays. We have less than a minute left Ted Sizer. My final question to you is how do you think we're doing are we making some progress? Are we still slipping backward? Are we holding even I'm an incurable Optimist maybe because I spend so much of my time in schools and with school people and in communities that are on the move that have got you are getting their acts together who are getting serious. I hope these are not the exceptions and I certainly I certainly think we're headed in the right direction. Now, how can we spread this kind of commitment a nationwide? That's the question and let's hope that everything including the upcoming presidential campaign will help us all As Americans raise our sights. Well now there's a truly optimistic statement. Thank you for coming in today. We appreciate it. Dr. Ted Sizer his latest. Book is called horace's School redesigning the American High School.