The Red Pencil: Convictions from Experience in Education
Theodore R. Sizer, 2004
Life may provide us with few certainties, but education reformer Ted Sizer is firm about at least one: The U.S. school system is broken and in serious need of replacement.
Sizer speaks as an insider in education's public arena, where he has served as dean of Harvard's education school, Phillips Andover headmaster, education professor at Brown, and founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools. The Red Pencil is a memoir, and the reader enjoys a “you were there” perspective as Sizer relates behind-the-scene details that bring to life important historical developments in education. We see the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a recently hired professor at Harvard in 1966, striding into Dean Sizer's office and mischievously flinging down the Equal Education Opportunity Report on his desk, daring him to do something about it. Even Charles William Eliot, the grand old man of blue-ribbon education commissions who was the honcho of the Committee of Ten, makes a cameo appearance riding his bicycle around Cambridge.
In The Red Pencil, Sizer offers a kind of archaeology of education issues that have led him to his own vision of U.S. education truly reformed. He readily admits that the ideas he champions spread across a wide ideological spectrum, “from the radical Left to the arch Right.” For example, he advocates performance-based assessments; bundling education, housing, and job training funds to serve students and their families; and taxing the media giants to pay for noncommercial educational TV. He also envisions the state setting only general guidelines for public education; educators being entrusted to design and operate the various programs; and families choosing among providers, with financial support following the child.
However radical Sizer's vision for reform, his lifetime of work at the forefront of education reform gives credibility to his view that “we must start anew, very carefully, with an education system—schools and much, much more—that reflects modern realities of the America of our time.”
Published by Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut; 800-405-1619;http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/. 131 pages. Price: $23 hardcover.
—Reviewed by Rick Allen, writer and editor, ASCD Newsletters and Special Publications Unit
