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Coalition schools do not work in isolation, they borrow from each other. The purpose of the collaboration is to spark a sustained conversation about what the commonly held ideas might mean and how a variety of communities might assist each other in finding their best practical expression.
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In 1984 Theodore R. Sizer and several colleagues published their findings from A Study of High Schools, a five year investigation of teaching, learning, and school history and design (see, also Hampel, 1986; Powell, Farrar, & Cohen, 1985). This study found that, despite their differences in location and demography, American high schools, by and large, were remarkably similar and simply inadequate. By offering an incredible array of courses from "consumer math" to calculus and from drivers' education to volleyball, schools often failed to focus on their ostensible central purpose -- helping students learn to use their minds well. Teachers, facing 150 or more students a day, regularly assigned work on the basis of what could be graded quickly rather than on the basis of what would push students to think deeply. Students, traveling from room to room and from teacher to teacher for unrelated fifty-minute classes, rarely had time to sink their teeth into any topic and passed their days with little sense of the connections between the various subjects they studied. The typical American high school, while perhaps a friendly enough place, promoted apathy and intellectual lethargy; the lesson it succeeded in teaching best, perhaps, was that becoming educated is deadly dull.
Sizer's Horace's Compromise (1984) describes how the typical structures of schools helped to make these inadequacies all but inevitable. So Sizer considered how schools might be more wisely designed. Given the dismal historical record of major "top-down" reform initiatives over the past 50 years, Sizer chose to approach reform not with a new and improved "model" to be imposed but rather with a general set of nine ideas or common principles which a school could fashion in ways that made sense to their community. In 1984, a group of twelve schools in seven states agreed to redesign themselves on the basis of Sizer's ideas and to form the Coalition of Essential Schools(CES). A team led by Sizer, based at Brown University, was then formed to support these "essential" schools in their efforts. The Common Principles soon caught on among scores of schools around the country, both public and private. After a decade, with hundreds of affiliated schools around the country, the national office of CES helped to arrange the founding of CES regional centers around the country. As of September, 2003, there are 19 regional centers, offering direct support to schools in the areas of school design, classroom practice, leadership, and community connections. CES National, which relocated to Oakland, California in 1998, continues to lead the movement by maintaining and strengthening the national network and conducting research and advocacy at the national level.
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CES Students |
National Average |
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Total Enter College |
84% |
63% |
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African American |
82% |
59% |
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Latino |
87% |
42% |
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White |
82% |
66% |
No two good schools are ever quite alike. No good school is exactly the same from one year to the next. Good schools sensitively reflect their communities - both the students and teachers within the school building, and the wider neighborhood it serves. A good school respectfully accommodates the best of its neighborhood, not abjectly - playing whatever tune any particular special interest group might demand - but sensibly, balancing the claims of national values with those of the immediate community.
A good school is a special creation of its own faculty - its teachers, counselors, and administrators. These are its "permanent" folk. Students and their parents come and go, but a good school's core of veteran teachers and administrators make the difference. A school has character if its key faculty feel collective responsibility for it, take its standards and its style seriously, and protect its reputation.
Such a commitment arises only when a faculty feels a sense of authority and control over its own school. Thus, just as a good school properly reflects its community, so too does it particularly show the convictions of its central staff, convictions that carry the authority of people who know that the school's reputation rests squarely on their judgment and strength.
If these conclusions about good schools hold - and they are widely shared among thoughtful school people and researchers who have looked carefully at successful schools - does this mean that there is no such thing as a good "model" school? The answer has to be yes: There is no such thing as a distinct, detailed blueprint for a fine school any more than there is such for a successful family.
But just as with families, while not exhibiting precisely similar configurations and traditions, good schools do share powerful guiding ideas, principles that are widely accepted even as they take different practical forms when a particular group of people in a particular setting shape them into day-to-day expectations and routines.
It is for this reason that the Coalition of Essential Schools has advanced its work as a set of commonly held principles rather than as a "model"; for schools to emulate. The Coalition is, in effect, a process, an unfolding among a widely diverse group of schools of structures, routines, and commitments appropriate to each which are consistent with our shared principles.
Coalition schools do not work in isolation, they borrow from each other. The purpose of the collaboration is to spark a sustained conversation about what the commonly held ideas might mean and how a variety of communities might assist each other in finding their best practical expression. Coalitions give strength in numbers and fortitude in times of pressure. For policy makers, a variety of schools provides a rich source from which ultimately to draw conclusions about the practical utility of the shared ideas.
Ten Common Principles of Essential Schools
The school should focus on helping young people learn to use their minds well.
The school’s goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge.
The school’s goals should apply to all students.
Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent.
The governing practical metaphor of the school should be student-as-worker. Accordingly, a prominent pedagogy will be coaching, to provoke students to learn how to learn and thus to teach themselves.
The diploma should be awarded upon a successful final demonstration of mastery for graduation.
The tone of the school should explicitly and self-consciously emphasize values of stress-free expectation, of trust, and decency. Parents should be key collaborators and vital members of the school community.
The principal and teachers should perceive themselves as generalists first and specialists second.
Budgets should reflect these priorities.
The school should emphasize democracy and equity.