Sizemore, Barbara A.

Called by her contemporaries “the complete educator,” Barbara Ann Sizemore (1927–2004) spent 57 years in education, from classroom teacher, high school principal, and professor to college dean. She was an activist, a practitioner, and an outspoken realist, challenging both Whites and Blacks with her passion and pursuit of what she believed to be the truth.

Dr. Sizemore was born in 1927 in Chicago, Illinois, and spent her early years in Terre Haute, Indiana. At 16, she graduated from high school and went to Northwestern University, where she studied Latin, graduating with a BA in classical languages in 1947 and an MA in elementary education in 1954. She worked in the Chicago Public Schools from 1947 through 1972 as a classroom teacher and high school principal. She earned her PhD in educational administration from the University of Chicago in 1979. When she was appointed to the superintendency of the Washington, D.C., public schools, she was the first African American woman to become the leader of that troubled school district. Her leadership there was tumultuous and lasted only from 1973 to 1975. Many believe that Dr. Sizemore's vision was far ahead of the times. As always, she displayed a commitment to community involvement and the establishment of high standards.

After leaving the nation's capitol, Dr. Sizemore became a professor at the University of Pittsburgh from 1977 to 1992, even serving as chair of her department. She specialized in performing research on highachieving schools serving mostly African American students, and she wrote about how they had accomplished their tasks when so many other schools were failing. In 1992, Dr. Sizemore became the inaugural dean of the School of Education at DePaul University, in Chicago. She continued her role as activist-scholar and assisting low-performing schools to become high performing. She was a keen observer of sociopolitical trends, and her final book, Walking in Circles: The Black Struggle for School Reform, documents how African Americans were turning back to some of the same remedies they had earlier abandoned. She has been portrayed as having a “take no prisoners voice” and exemplified “the power of the lived agenda.” Her idea that the change agent had to have a platform of power to confront power was based on her insight into social systems change, closely paralleling those of the great Chicago community activist Saul Alinsky.