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The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education
This engaging and important book is a critique of American education wrapped in a memoir. Drawing on his fifty years as teacher, principal, researcher, professor, and dean, Theodore R. Sizer identifies three crucial areas in which policy discussion about public education has been dangerously silent. He argues that we must break that silence and rethink how to educate our youth.
Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines—guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child’s educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.
Sizer discusses our failure to differentiate between teaching and learning, noting that formal schooling must adapt to and confront the powerful influences found outside traditional classrooms. He examines the practical as well as philosophical necessity for sharing policy-making authority among families, schools, and centralized governments. And he denounces our fetish with order, our belief that the familiar routines that have existed for generations are the only way to bring learning to children. Sizer provides alternatives to these failed routines—guidelines for creating a new educational system that would, among other things, break with wasteful traditional practice, utilize agencies and arrangements beyond the school building, and design each child’s educational program around his or her particular needs and potential.
- GenresEducation
160 pages, Hardcover
First published August 11, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 29, 2020
"That pencil became my torturer. It was unrelenting in its impersonality." p.xi
"Most of it is not only recognizable; it is still fully accepted and honored today as a representation of what we call secondary school: *a class* of twenty or so adolescents gathered by age into *grades* to learn *together* a *subject* both for its *content* and for the *skills* embedded in that content taught by a *single teacher* who is responsible for *delivering* that material, assigning *homework* and *assessing* each student's performance in a uniform manner, all this proceeding in sequential *blocks of time* of forty to sixty minutes each in a specialized *school building* primarily made up of a succession of identical rooms that are used for six hours for fewer than half the days in a year...This is what *school* is." p.xi-xii
"The best predictor of a child's educational success always has been and still is the economic and social class of his family rather than the school that he or she happens to attend." p.xii
"It is not that we do not talk about them, research them, and exhort "leaders" to address them. It is that we largely fail to marshal the honesty and intensity that reform requires." p.xiii
"No word is more quickly-silently-accepted, for example, than *system*, implying in this context that learning can be shaped into predictable behavior and thus predictable, equitable, and efficient performance as long as we have a well-defined and imposable scheme to direct our activities...The danger is that they narrow our imagination. At worse, they cripple our work." p.xiv
Professional education's silences: p.xv-xvii
1. the difference between teaching and learning
2. what is authority and who has the right to wield it
3. our belief that imposed systems of order will bring education to the people (To shake up the system that fills the time of children and adolescents, thus keeping them out of the home and the labor market, apparently is too dangerous to contemplates. Silence reigns.)
"If education is defined as the expressed intelligence of the people, one gets to a different place than if education is defined as what government provides to deliver ideas, skills, and attitudes to the people." p.5
"Effectiveness [in the Equal Educational Opportunity Report] lay not in what a community offered as school but in what the students displayed as a result of attending the school that mattered."
Danger in.. "what mattered was social class" p.10-11
"What counts is with whom a young person consorts and what images invade his world." p.15
"The policy implications of these findings are so necessarily startling, so challenging to status quo thinking, inevitably so disruptive of the systems already "in place," that they must be quickly put out of mind." p.19
"The young people cannot avoid these forces any more than can their elders; indeed, many teenagers do not want to hide, as they find the allure of the media exciting, "grown up," and engaging, far more engaging than classes in drab, underfinanced schools. Virtually all of the media intrusion is attached to commerce. Much of it is advertising, and advertising, if not be definition then by demonstrable practice, marches at the edges of deceit, teaching a dubious moral message. The worldly configurations within which an American teenager lies are an excitement, alluring in their manipulation, thereby serving as both a boon and a threat." p.23
"Prescribing an education that addresses all the aspects of a child's life and deliberately connects formal school with its larger surround will require a grand leap of imagination. Indeed, the very way I describe the project-'connecting formal school with its surround'-is constricting in that my picture implies a 'place' with satellites. That will no longer do. The traditional ways of perceiving adolescents' learning must be held in check, the governing metaphors and familiar practices diligently challenged, and no idea peremptorily dismissed because of its presumed impracticality or perceived ideological roots; and all must be addressed at once. There should be no convenient silence here behind which to hide." p.24
"Define ultimate 'performance' as more than the short-term regurgitation of matters 'covered' in classes, and extend that 'performance' to a student's demonstrated habit of the use of essential knowledge and skills in unfamiliar but realistic situations over time, all this assessed by various means. Develop more avenues for learning both within and beyond the schoolhouse, including the existing media channels." p.25
"There can be far more to demonstration of performance than intellectually shriveling paper-and-pencil tests. Many counter by pointing out that there are no crisp, singular 'results' in most of these examples. Without authoritative-appearing, exquisite precision, they ask, how can we rank and rate students? Precise gradations are part of existing school culture-valedictorian, rank in class, and all that-and many believe that the system absolutely expects such precision. The fact that there is little scholarly evidence supporting the validity of the practice is steadfastly avoided (itself an irony). Nonetheless, the drum beats on. Who is Number One? There has to be a Number One! The insistence is silly; most understand that fact, but few articulate the understanding, much less figure out how to act upon it. A more general, generous, and respectful system seems out of reach." p.27
"Knowing the kids well is not sentimentality...but a tool to entice students into greater academic engagement than would otherwise not have occurred..." p.42
"Most of us like being around people who demonstrably know what they are doing, who don't lose their cool unnecessarily, who are resourceful in coping with the unfamiliar." p.42
"What was that authority? I never knew Phil well enough to know for certain, I have hunches, however. He told the truth to everyone in any setting. This gained him the respect not only of the students but also of the superintendent. He was easy, good natured, open, seemingly without fear or guile, but he clearly was no doormat. He moved in on kids who were out of order, risking thereby an embarrassing confrontation in the presence of a visitor. The students knew that he was a Grown-Up, not just an older guy who wanted to be one of the boys. He knew everybody, or faked it well. He could tell in an instant who were the kids who were not supposed to be in the building. I asked him how he knew. 'By how they looked at me.'
"Although the problems at West Philadelphia High School in 1964 extended far beyond the reach of a single school administrator, Phil kept the peace, pushed for what learning could then take place, and all the time retained the respect and even affection of a large student body, portions of which were close to explosion.
"Was it a matter of personality? Yes, in part. He was confident. He genuinely like adolescents, and they saw him as a person who could get good things done. He was not hung up on matters of prestige; he was not called "Doctor Jones" or its relevant equivalent. Just "Mister," like his faculty and staff peers. But not just a nickname like his students.
"Was it something he had learned somewhere? Perhaps, in part. He knew what the ecology of a big city school might be and thus could manage it. Such knowledge rarely arises out of common sense alone.
"Phil was around his school, not locked in an office behind a counter or in a conference room 'downtown.' He was visible to his flock and comfortable with them. He was a person, not an office. This struck me as a paradox. He used only lightly his systemic Authority to gain *authority*. "
p.44-45
"...Over the subsequent thirty years I have met many school people who had that fragile but powerful quality of personal authority. I have visited the schools of many o fthem and can quickly sense it power, whether within a single classroom or , as with Phil, in a school writ large. Sometimes you do not have actually to watch such a person in action in a school. If you know what to look for, you can sense it anywhere.
"So it was for me with Michele Forman, the 2001 National Teacher of the Year.
"*I am a teacher* she began. And teaching, she asserted, is a glorious craft." p.45
"There were tables, not individual desks. She chose to cluster them, making classes into conversations not only between her and her pupils but also among the pupils themselves." p.46
"Michele clearly had authority, authority in the sense that she had substantial control over her work and workplace...It was control born of respect by others-school authorities, colleagues, parents, and students-for Michele's particular, personal professionalism.
"She had her own classroom that she cold equip and adorn in ways that reflected her expectations. She could get the books she wanted for her particular students. Although she was influenced by state curricular frameworks, she was not their slave, and the 'higher' authorities apparently did not object when she devoted substantial periods of time to local history...
"Such authority arises inevitably from powerful personal idiosyncrasy-constructive individualism-and idiosyncrasy is the enemy of bureaucratic systems that require predictable behavior. Michele handles her students in one way; another equally successful teacher may have a sharply differing style." p.48
"In practicing, however at times idiosyncratic, she gained the support, affection, and protection of her peers, bosses, and students. She was respected because she understood her obligations, approaches, and style; and she did her complex job very well, and in a way that reflected the best of herself." p.49
"Most of us who have lived in schools know, however that such and appearance of order is a means, and often not the best means, to the end of orderly minds.
"There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything in quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back-if we have the opportunity-again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings. The order that we seek to find in a school is a means to the end of order in each student's mind." p.57
Assumptions that are deeply imbedded in the way that Americans think about and thus craft their secondary schools.
1. metaphor of schools as the *deliverer of skills and knowledge* (what might be needed for students to use knowledge when confronted by new situations?)
2. *time* as the coinage of school (classes are descried in terms of minutes and packaged as 'periods')
"Timed tests were a poor demonstration of what in fact I could do."
3. A third residue in our thinking about schooling that arises in considerable part from the Report of the Committee of Ten has to do with what we have come to call *subjects*. p.58-64
Order & Authority p.87-89
"Horace could not meet the standard that he had set for himself. He was forced to compromise. It ate at him.
"Good people are asked to do important things in settings ill designed for that purpose.
"GOOD PEOPLE ARE ASKED TO DO IMPORTANT THINGS IN SETTINGS ILL DESIGNED FOR THAT PURPOSE." P.94
"I often speak with school system administrators of Horace's compromises, and almost always do they mention, with pride, the Horaces on their faculties. They do not mention his job obligations, however, those 120 kids he sees in snippets of time most days in class.
"Horace cannon teach well the 120 students the system assigns him, I tell my administrator friends, particularly if those 120 are shuffled at the end of each semester. Horace can 'deliver' stuff. But teach it, in any deep sense? No, my friends sheepishly reply." p.100
"We know that the rich get the better scores and the poor get the compromises. When we once admit to ourselves that reality, the fear sets in. Have we lost the Dream? If so, what should we do? What, as a practical and political matter, *can* we do?" p.106
"Most of it is not only recognizable; it is still fully accepted and honored today as a representation of what we call secondary school: *a class* of twenty or so adolescents gathered by age into *grades* to learn *together* a *subject* both for its *content* and for the *skills* embedded in that content taught by a *single teacher* who is responsible for *delivering* that material, assigning *homework* and *assessing* each student's performance in a uniform manner, all this proceeding in sequential *blocks of time* of forty to sixty minutes each in a specialized *school building* primarily made up of a succession of identical rooms that are used for six hours for fewer than half the days in a year...This is what *school* is." p.xi-xii
"The best predictor of a child's educational success always has been and still is the economic and social class of his family rather than the school that he or she happens to attend." p.xii
"It is not that we do not talk about them, research them, and exhort "leaders" to address them. It is that we largely fail to marshal the honesty and intensity that reform requires." p.xiii
"No word is more quickly-silently-accepted, for example, than *system*, implying in this context that learning can be shaped into predictable behavior and thus predictable, equitable, and efficient performance as long as we have a well-defined and imposable scheme to direct our activities...The danger is that they narrow our imagination. At worse, they cripple our work." p.xiv
Professional education's silences: p.xv-xvii
1. the difference between teaching and learning
2. what is authority and who has the right to wield it
3. our belief that imposed systems of order will bring education to the people (To shake up the system that fills the time of children and adolescents, thus keeping them out of the home and the labor market, apparently is too dangerous to contemplates. Silence reigns.)
"If education is defined as the expressed intelligence of the people, one gets to a different place than if education is defined as what government provides to deliver ideas, skills, and attitudes to the people." p.5
"Effectiveness [in the Equal Educational Opportunity Report] lay not in what a community offered as school but in what the students displayed as a result of attending the school that mattered."
Danger in.. "what mattered was social class" p.10-11
"What counts is with whom a young person consorts and what images invade his world." p.15
"The policy implications of these findings are so necessarily startling, so challenging to status quo thinking, inevitably so disruptive of the systems already "in place," that they must be quickly put out of mind." p.19
"The young people cannot avoid these forces any more than can their elders; indeed, many teenagers do not want to hide, as they find the allure of the media exciting, "grown up," and engaging, far more engaging than classes in drab, underfinanced schools. Virtually all of the media intrusion is attached to commerce. Much of it is advertising, and advertising, if not be definition then by demonstrable practice, marches at the edges of deceit, teaching a dubious moral message. The worldly configurations within which an American teenager lies are an excitement, alluring in their manipulation, thereby serving as both a boon and a threat." p.23
"Prescribing an education that addresses all the aspects of a child's life and deliberately connects formal school with its larger surround will require a grand leap of imagination. Indeed, the very way I describe the project-'connecting formal school with its surround'-is constricting in that my picture implies a 'place' with satellites. That will no longer do. The traditional ways of perceiving adolescents' learning must be held in check, the governing metaphors and familiar practices diligently challenged, and no idea peremptorily dismissed because of its presumed impracticality or perceived ideological roots; and all must be addressed at once. There should be no convenient silence here behind which to hide." p.24
"Define ultimate 'performance' as more than the short-term regurgitation of matters 'covered' in classes, and extend that 'performance' to a student's demonstrated habit of the use of essential knowledge and skills in unfamiliar but realistic situations over time, all this assessed by various means. Develop more avenues for learning both within and beyond the schoolhouse, including the existing media channels." p.25
"There can be far more to demonstration of performance than intellectually shriveling paper-and-pencil tests. Many counter by pointing out that there are no crisp, singular 'results' in most of these examples. Without authoritative-appearing, exquisite precision, they ask, how can we rank and rate students? Precise gradations are part of existing school culture-valedictorian, rank in class, and all that-and many believe that the system absolutely expects such precision. The fact that there is little scholarly evidence supporting the validity of the practice is steadfastly avoided (itself an irony). Nonetheless, the drum beats on. Who is Number One? There has to be a Number One! The insistence is silly; most understand that fact, but few articulate the understanding, much less figure out how to act upon it. A more general, generous, and respectful system seems out of reach." p.27
"Knowing the kids well is not sentimentality...but a tool to entice students into greater academic engagement than would otherwise not have occurred..." p.42
"Most of us like being around people who demonstrably know what they are doing, who don't lose their cool unnecessarily, who are resourceful in coping with the unfamiliar." p.42
"What was that authority? I never knew Phil well enough to know for certain, I have hunches, however. He told the truth to everyone in any setting. This gained him the respect not only of the students but also of the superintendent. He was easy, good natured, open, seemingly without fear or guile, but he clearly was no doormat. He moved in on kids who were out of order, risking thereby an embarrassing confrontation in the presence of a visitor. The students knew that he was a Grown-Up, not just an older guy who wanted to be one of the boys. He knew everybody, or faked it well. He could tell in an instant who were the kids who were not supposed to be in the building. I asked him how he knew. 'By how they looked at me.'
"Although the problems at West Philadelphia High School in 1964 extended far beyond the reach of a single school administrator, Phil kept the peace, pushed for what learning could then take place, and all the time retained the respect and even affection of a large student body, portions of which were close to explosion.
"Was it a matter of personality? Yes, in part. He was confident. He genuinely like adolescents, and they saw him as a person who could get good things done. He was not hung up on matters of prestige; he was not called "Doctor Jones" or its relevant equivalent. Just "Mister," like his faculty and staff peers. But not just a nickname like his students.
"Was it something he had learned somewhere? Perhaps, in part. He knew what the ecology of a big city school might be and thus could manage it. Such knowledge rarely arises out of common sense alone.
"Phil was around his school, not locked in an office behind a counter or in a conference room 'downtown.' He was visible to his flock and comfortable with them. He was a person, not an office. This struck me as a paradox. He used only lightly his systemic Authority to gain *authority*. "
p.44-45
"...Over the subsequent thirty years I have met many school people who had that fragile but powerful quality of personal authority. I have visited the schools of many o fthem and can quickly sense it power, whether within a single classroom or , as with Phil, in a school writ large. Sometimes you do not have actually to watch such a person in action in a school. If you know what to look for, you can sense it anywhere.
"So it was for me with Michele Forman, the 2001 National Teacher of the Year.
"*I am a teacher* she began. And teaching, she asserted, is a glorious craft." p.45
"There were tables, not individual desks. She chose to cluster them, making classes into conversations not only between her and her pupils but also among the pupils themselves." p.46
"Michele clearly had authority, authority in the sense that she had substantial control over her work and workplace...It was control born of respect by others-school authorities, colleagues, parents, and students-for Michele's particular, personal professionalism.
"She had her own classroom that she cold equip and adorn in ways that reflected her expectations. She could get the books she wanted for her particular students. Although she was influenced by state curricular frameworks, she was not their slave, and the 'higher' authorities apparently did not object when she devoted substantial periods of time to local history...
"Such authority arises inevitably from powerful personal idiosyncrasy-constructive individualism-and idiosyncrasy is the enemy of bureaucratic systems that require predictable behavior. Michele handles her students in one way; another equally successful teacher may have a sharply differing style." p.48
"In practicing, however at times idiosyncratic, she gained the support, affection, and protection of her peers, bosses, and students. She was respected because she understood her obligations, approaches, and style; and she did her complex job very well, and in a way that reflected the best of herself." p.49
"Most of us who have lived in schools know, however that such and appearance of order is a means, and often not the best means, to the end of orderly minds.
"There is plenty of noise these days about the necessity of order in schools and a frightening silence about what it takes to help shape orderly minds. The hard, familiar reality is that learning is both idiosyncratic (you and I do not learn everything in quite the same way and pace) and messy. Most serious learning is not nicely sequential; rather, it often spirals, with each of us circling back-if we have the opportunity-again to where we thought we were but, ideally, now better informed and thereby finding ourselves at a deeper place. It is situational, depending on immediate conditions for each of us as individuals and the appropriateness of our surroundings. The order that we seek to find in a school is a means to the end of order in each student's mind." p.57
Assumptions that are deeply imbedded in the way that Americans think about and thus craft their secondary schools.
1. metaphor of schools as the *deliverer of skills and knowledge* (what might be needed for students to use knowledge when confronted by new situations?)
2. *time* as the coinage of school (classes are descried in terms of minutes and packaged as 'periods')
"Timed tests were a poor demonstration of what in fact I could do."
3. A third residue in our thinking about schooling that arises in considerable part from the Report of the Committee of Ten has to do with what we have come to call *subjects*. p.58-64
Order & Authority p.87-89
"Horace could not meet the standard that he had set for himself. He was forced to compromise. It ate at him.
"Good people are asked to do important things in settings ill designed for that purpose.
"GOOD PEOPLE ARE ASKED TO DO IMPORTANT THINGS IN SETTINGS ILL DESIGNED FOR THAT PURPOSE." P.94
"I often speak with school system administrators of Horace's compromises, and almost always do they mention, with pride, the Horaces on their faculties. They do not mention his job obligations, however, those 120 kids he sees in snippets of time most days in class.
"Horace cannon teach well the 120 students the system assigns him, I tell my administrator friends, particularly if those 120 are shuffled at the end of each semester. Horace can 'deliver' stuff. But teach it, in any deep sense? No, my friends sheepishly reply." p.100
"We know that the rich get the better scores and the poor get the compromises. When we once admit to ourselves that reality, the fear sets in. Have we lost the Dream? If so, what should we do? What, as a practical and political matter, *can* we do?" p.106
August 14, 2012
The Red Pencil" is another excellent example of Ted Sizer's incisive, no BS approach to what we as a county need to do if we are to reform education. The intellectual architect of the Coalition of Essential Schools is as clear as ever about the need to understand the challenges facing education. They are: a deep and persistent misunderstanding of the nature of teaching and learning; concerns about the nature of authority and who wields power and last how America's "fetishizing of order" creates systems that make managing the work of education easier while diminishing the actual education that takes place within the school.
June 23, 2018
Outstanding and concise look at where we are in US K12 education. Excellent summary of the issues (institutional inertia, the fact that those who hold the levers of power and funding are content with THEIR opportunities, etc.).
Adding more Sizer books to my summer reading list; I wish I could look forward to more of his insights (he died about 10 years ago)
Adding more Sizer books to my summer reading list; I wish I could look forward to more of his insights (he died about 10 years ago)
February 13, 2020
This book is part memoir and partly a call for educational restructuring. Sizer uses the telling of his personal history in school reform to outline his critique of our current educational system and what he thinks should be done to improve it. He calls not for a tinkering of the system but a radical restructuring. His writes in an informal and engaging style.
May 16, 2023
There is a chance that when this was written it had a lot of insight. But the educational landscape has shifted drastically in the last three years. So in 2023 this book reads as the complaints of an out of touch
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