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23 JUNE 1932 * 21 OCTOBER 2009
IT HAS OFTEN BEEN SAID that pragmatism is the one genuinely American philosophy. It could equally be said that progres. sive education is the one genuinely American set of educational ideas and practices. The roots of progressive education can be found in the villages of New England over a century ago, in the writings of philosophers like John Dewey, and in the practices of educators like Francis W. Parker and Lucy Sprague Mitchell. In our time, Theodore (Ted) Sizer was the embodiment of progressive education, American style. And, even more than his predecessors, he stood out as a thinker, a practitioner, and a leader of educational organizations and educational movements.
Coming from a venerable New England family, with roots in the academy (his father taught art history at Yale), Ted Sizer was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1932. He attended the Pomfret School and Yale College, where he studied English literature. Following college, he served in the army and taught English and mathematics in secondary schools in Boston and Melbourne before receiving a doctorate in education and history at Harvard. Already at this time, he was revealing his wide interests and talents in educational scholarship and practice.
In 1964, at the tender age of thirty-one, Ted Sizer was chosen by President Nathan Pusey to become dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Under Ted's predecessor, Francis Keppel, the school had become a center of social science (particularly psychological) research with a focus on education. Ted retained the social science emphasis in the school, but shifted its focus from discipline-centered inquiry toward educational policy and practice. He strongly supported the flagship MAT program, which (like Teach for America in a later era) inducted many talented students into a teaching career. Under his auspices, important and influential seminars were launched. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Frederick Mosteller led an analysis of the Coleman Report, a controversial study of the limited effects of schools on student achievement. Future influential scholars and practitioners, like Gordon Ambach, David Cohen, Christopher Jencks, and Marshall (Mike) Smith cut their educational teeth in these seminars. Sizer also brought to the faculty such leading thinkers as Lawrence Kohlberg, a scholar of moral development, and Gerald...