What Ted Sizer Meant to Us

By Patrick J. McQuillan

The death this month of Theodore R. Sizer leaves an immense void in the American educational landscape. Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1964 to 1972 (and the youngest dean in Harvard history), headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., professor at Brown University, founder and chairperson of the Coalition of Essential Schools , founder and co-director (with his wife, Nancy) of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School. The list of accomplishments is long.

But the man himself was just as impressive.

Dressed in tweed with his omnipresent pocket watch and chain, Ted Sizer looked the quintessential New England academic. Cheery, confident, and caring, his attitude and demeanor seemed Kennedy-esque, in the best sense of the word. A product of privileged schooling, he worked tirelessly to improve education throughout the United States, including in some of our most underresourced urban schools. In his classic work Horace’s Compromise , he documented the attitudes, practices, and structures that engendered mediocrity throughout the country’s secondary school system. His subsequent professional work sought to...