Ted Sizer

I'm so late in writing about this, but I recently read on Deborah Meier's website that education-reform advocate and founder of the Essential Schools movement, Ted Sizer, died this past October. While I was in graduate school and encountering my first inklings of educational resistance, I hungrily inhaled anything written by Sizer. His position that schools should discard one-size-fits-all models of educating children seemed like basic common sense to me; I was always a bit surprised when someone critiqued him as "radical". I mean what is radical about collaboration, democracy, trust, and depth of understanding?

His death is an unmeasurable loss. I'll leave you with the inspiration of his words:

“Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we educational planners can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.”