Want fewer ads?

Theodore Ryland Sizer (June 23, 1932 — October 21, 2009) was a leader of educational reform in the United States and the founder of the Essential school movement. Beginning in the late 1970s, he had worked with hundreds of high schools, studying the development and design of the American educational system, leading to his seminal work Horace's Compromise in 1984. In the same year, he founded the Coalition of Essential Schools based on the principles espoused in Horace's Compromise.

Sizer was born in New Haven, Connecticut to Theodore Sizer (1892—1967), an art history professor at Yale University. He received his B.A. in English from Yale in 1953 and subsequently served in the Army as an artillery officer. He later described his experience leading soldiers in a democratic and egalitarian fashion as a formative influence on his ideas about education. After a stint teaching in high schools, Sizer earned his masters and doctorate in education from Harvard University in 1957 and 1961, respectively. He was a faculty member and later dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a position he held during the 1969 Harvard student strike.

Sizer left Harvard to serve as headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 1972 to 1981, leaving to lead a study of American high schools sponsored by the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the National Association of Independent Schools. From 1983 to 1997, Sizer worked at Brown University as a professor and chair of the education department, and in 1993, he became the Founding Director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform.

After retiring from Brown, Professor Sizer took a one-year position during the 1998—99 school year as co-principal (with his wife Nancy Sizer) of the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, of which he was a Trustee Emeritus and helped to found. His wife, Nancy Faust Sizer, whom he married in 1955, was also an educator, and they had four children. He died at age 77 on October 21, 2009, at his home in Harvard, Massachusetts, due to colon cancer.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ted Sizer", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0