By coincidence, I finished reading Sizer’s The Red Pencil at the same time this new “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education” statement was released.

Not by mere coincidence, Theodore Sizer is among the dozens of signatories to the statement. Reading his book, and then the proposals advanced in the new policy statement, I have a hard time untangling my thinking about each from the other. So what I have to offer here is the result of an accidental paired reading.

To begin with, Sizer’s ideas in The Red Pencil are probably bolder, broader, and more challenging to the status quo than what the Bold Approachers have to offer. But the Bold Approach group didn’t begin with Sizer. The genesis of this group was the 2006 reauthorization deadline for US DOE’s No Child Left Behind Law:

Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, convened a task force to consider the broader context of the law in the nation’s approach to education and youth development policy. Helen Ladd, a Duke University economist; Pedro Noguera, a noted education policy expert and New York University professor; and Tom Payzant, former Boston schools superintendent and U.S. assistant secretary of education, agreed to serve as co-chairs.

The task force…proceeded to draft a statement to articulate the theme that the nation’s education and youth development policy has erred by attempting to rely on school improvement alone to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children. Rather, school improvement, to be fully effective, must be complemented by a broader definition of schooling and by improvements in the social and economic circumstances of disadvantaged youth.

The “broader definition” of schooling they propose includes smaller class sizes, attracting and developing high-quality teachers, expanded pre-school opportunities, in-school health care services, longer school days, summer and after-school programs, and school-to-work programs with the aim of “weakening the link between socioeconomic background and achievement.”

In principle, I agree with all of these ideas, and with the more general idea that the link between socioeconomic status and achievement is not something that schools alone can remedy. But I also don’t see how this set of proposals is really broad enough, or bold enough, to accomplish the stated goal. They’re all still rooted in school-based reforms, and they don’t directly confront the larger social structures that contribute to the social class differences to begin with. In a sense, they contradict themselves by giving schools more responsibility for providing social services that could and should be broadly available.

Every one of these ideas has a huge price tag attached to it, and they don’t offer any immediate satisfaction to the everyday problems people deal with outside of school. A lot of the special needs kids have suffered various forms of domestic trauma, and they present unique challenges to teachers - which is different than assuming they arrive with a simple deficit of skills. What if, instead of expanding in-school health care, for example, we had universal health care? Everyone would benefit - not just kids in school - and perhaps some of the pressure on parents to work multiple jobs would be lifted. Maybe, then, we’d have fewer special needs kids in school. The Broader Approach does mention improving health insurance options for low-income families, but why not advocate for something that would benefit more people?

In his book, Sizer discussed the role that vouchers might play in a reformed educational environment. He distinguished his vision for them from the one that neoconservatives embrace.

I was disheartened by the willingness of these supposedly conservative, and thus likely “small government” advocates, to encourage political authorities far from the classrooms to decide what will be taught…To leave the resolution of that dispute to people far from those directly affected strikes me as excessive centralization in a democracy.

Sizer’s vision is of a community-based approach to education in which a wide variety of schools would present a range of true options to families. In a locked-down standardized system, those options can never be explored, and true choices, except the choice to segregate kids according to race or social class - through mechanisms of “choice” - will never be available. In an environment in which innovation is encouraged, merit pay for teachers would not be necessary. In an environment in which true choices are allowed to flourish, motivation for students would not stand as a major challenge.

Sizer explored three “silences” that need to be broken in discussions about education reform. The first was the silence about structures that limit opportunities for students, as exemplified in our belief that education is confined to buildings. He also examined the need for order, which we see in support for the standards movement, curriculum development, and testing which places the teacher in the role of “deliverer’ of content and turns time into an educational commodity. Certainly, order is necessary on a local level. But at what point does its imposition on a system interfere with the operation of the various parts?

The most interesting of the three silences, for me, was Sizer’s analysis of the nature of authority. There may be other ways to think about this, but I found it useful for understanding the forms of social glue that hold the system together. He sees authority as coming from the exercise of institutional power, the development of scholarly inquiry and getting to know students individually, and the exhibition of character “…where ‘authority’ represents the power of one to influence others on the basis of their confidence in his or her judgment.” Importantly, he sees authority as a negotiated process of treaty-making with interested parties working toward a state of balanced authority and shared responsibility. It’s helpful, especially if we want to encourage democratic participation, to think about authority more broadly than simply as a set of rules and consequences.

“Democracy,” Sizer said, “is not about mindless obedience. Democracy depends on informed, imaginative, engaged, independent people who know when to act and when to show restraint.”

I believe the BoldApproach.org statement is a good point of departure from the current policy mire. But we’ll ultimately need to move beyond that. Sizer’s book maps some of the possibilities.