Coalition of Essential Schools

A network of schools joined by a common cur-ricular vision, the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) grew out of a decisive moment in U.S. educational history. Reports such as the 1983 A Nation at Risk sounded the alarm that U.S. students and workers were dangerously unprepared to compete in the global economy. For curriculum studies, it was a time of radical rethinking and comprehensive reform. It was against this backdrop that Theodore (Ted) Sizer and colleagues undertook “The Study of High Schools.” A history teacher and headmaster turned educational researcher, Sizer set out to observe a broad range of high schools and fundamentally reexamine the institution. The result was Horace's Compromise, Sizer's influential portrait of the problems and possibilities of the U.S. high school published in 1984. In that same year, he launched the coalition to help realize his vision of reform.

Sizer found that high schools had become more system driven than people driven, with underpaid, overworked teachers presiding over large classrooms filled with unmotivated students. Schools were attempting to do too much, Sizer concluded, and had lost sight of their essential mission. To articulate that mission, Sizer drew on Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal. Adler advocated a shift from thinking in terms of grades and subjects to focusing on a set of core skills cultivated throughout schooling (reading, writing, speaking, listening, measuring, estimating, and calculating). This change in focus entails further shifts in pedagogy, administration, and evaluation. To cultivate thinking and communication skills, teachers would need to add modeling, questioning, and coaching to traditional, didactic methods. To support such personalized instruction, administrators would need to provide smaller classes and longer periods. To enlist students in this process, evaluation should take the form of exhibitions demonstrating [Page 116]students' mastery of key skills. Sizer even suggested that schooling should cease to be compulsory once students had demonstrated their proficiency in such essential areas as literacy, numeracy, and civic understanding.

CES distilled Sizer's analysis into 10 principles. The school should (1) prioritize depth over coverage in order to concentrate on (2) its central mission of helping students learn to use their minds well, a goal that (3) must apply to all students. Teachers should be supported (4) to offer personalized instruction and expected (5) to put the school and its mission first. (6) The budget should be primarily devoted to supporting teachers and students to achieve this goal. (7) Students will be seen as workers and teachers as coaches, as students work toward the goal of (8) demonstrated mastery. The school should evince (9) an ethos of decency and trust and (10) a commitment to democracy and equity.

It is these principles that unite and inspire a diverse group of schools across the country. Beginning with just 12 secondary schools, CES now boasts approximately 1,000 schools and affiliate centers. Coalition schools are both public and private, primary and secondary, comprehensive and specialized, and urban, suburban, and rural. CES demonstrates its commitment to equity by recruiting schools serving a wide range of communities.

Far from replacing one bureaucratic system of school control with another, CES encourages its members to cultivate their distinctiveness and expects them to develop local interpretations of the common principles. Although coalition schools are autonomous, they are not isolated. CES supports its members to discuss their common aims and different approaches in regional and national workshops and in an annual Fall Forum. The central office shares best practices through its online journal, Horace, and offers mentoring and evaluation to its affiliates.

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