Horace's+Compromise

 **//Horace's Compromise //**Sizer Houghton-Mifflin, NYC. 1984 From Wikki //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 <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|classrooms] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> and, especially, following students through their daily routines. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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 <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|PA] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">. Sizer also objects strongly to the extensive system of <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|electives] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, 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 <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|sports] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, which occupy a position of high importance in the life of high schools. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Most central to his critique, however, were practices of teaching and learning. Like <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|John Dewey] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> (Sizer is an avowed Deweyan). **Sizer insisted that education must be** [|**dialogical**]**<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, 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, an analogy to the work of a **[|**coach**]**<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> "coaching" athletes. **<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">But this, and, in Sizer's eyes, any good <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|pedagogy] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 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. <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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//]<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">). "Horace" is Sizer's <span style="color: windowtext; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt; text-decoration: none;">[|archetype] <span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> 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.) <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; border-color: -moz-use-text-color -moz-use-text-color #ebebeb; border-style: none none solid; border-width: medium medium 1pt; display: block; padding: 0in;"> <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; border: medium none; margin: 12pt 0in; padding: 0in;">**<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 15pt;">The Common Principles **<span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 15pt;"> <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The Coalition was founded on nine "Common Principles" that 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: <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">1. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Learning to use one's mind well <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">2. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Less is More, depth over coverage <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">3. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Goals apply to all students <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">4. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Personalization <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">5. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">6. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Demonstration of mastery <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">7. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">A tone of decency and trust <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">8. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Commitment to the entire school <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">9. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Resources dedicated to teaching and learning <span style="background: none repeat scroll 0% 0% white; line-height: normal; margin-left: 59.85pt; text-indent: -0.25in;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">10. <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Democracy and equity (this principle was added later, in the mid-nineties) <span style="color: #333333; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 12pt;">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.