Back to School

WHEN Ed School students and Faculty fled Cambridge and the summer heat last June, a lot of them weren't sure exactly what they'd be returning to in the fall. The death of Martin Luther King had set off what appeared to be a tidal wave of reform at the school of Education. The Faculty had voted to fund the studies of minority group students, fifty of whom were recruited by late May. Dean Theodore R. Sizer received a comprehensive mandate from the Faculty for reforming the Ed School's urban program, and with tradition everywhere in retreat, groups of dissidents from all programs began yelling for reforms, many totally unrelated to the revolution in the nation's streets.

This fall, many reformers are still waiting for the wave to break. In its own quiet way, the Ed School has begun a genuine program of change. But as Sizer puts it, "it's not revision, it's evolution." The Ed School's upheaval subsided in the face of some very old problems: the need to balance action programs with academic inquiry, and lack of money.

The movement for change received its first unified statement last May in a Report on a Study of Academic Programs at the Ed School, written at Sizer's request by Adam Curle, professor of Education and Development, and Phillip Whitten, newly-elected head of the Ed School Student Association. Curle and Whitten conducted extensive interviews throughout the School, and made 18 concrete proposals for change. These can be generalized to four key demands:

First, the report stated "immediately and firmly" that the school should have a "far higher proportion of Afro-American and other minority group students and that their specific need should be elicited and catered to.

Second, Curle and Whitten continued, many Ed School courses were lacking in "relevance" -- a dainty way of saying that the school was not paying enough attention to studying urban problems or preparing its graduates to teach in urban schools. The report recommended that an ad hoc committee begin formulating a new program of urban studies, and further, that the school establish a new "criterion of intellectual vigor." Specifically, the authors felt that students interested in field work should be encouraged to work with community educational agencies and other educational groups and should be given credit and supervision. Professors had long resisted this suggestion. They argued that stressing practical experience would turn the school into a "technical training factory." The report retorted that practical work is not mindless, and anyway, that the goal should be a balance between the academic and the active.

THIRD, Curle and Whitten called for the abolition of grades and traditional tenure requirements. Grading, they suggested, "is not only unreliable and subjective, but has an insidious effect on student-faculty relationships." As for tenure, if the School was going to redefine academic standards for students and admissions requirements for black students, it was only logical to extend the new criteria of "intellectual vigor" to faculty. Faculty members should also be allowed to amass "unorthodox educational or community experience" without putting their jobs on the line.

Finally, the Curle-Whitten report pointed out that the Ed School seriously neglected the teaching of pedagogy, a particular handicap for Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) students who each year graduate from Longfellow Hall into brutal urban classrooms.

When the Report began circulating in early June, most reformers hoped to see the majority of its suggestions made reality by the fall. So far, however, the record is mixed. The issue of admitting more minority-group students had been decided by the time the report appeared. Because of the Faculty's April vote on recruiting, the entering class of the Ed School this year is 17 percent black, and Sizer, while opposing quotas, expects the percentage to be at least that high in the future.

Most of the other changes, however, have come at the initiative of interested students and faculty rather than from the administration. MAT's have actively sought urban internships and the number of MAT's being trained in the core city schools jumped from four last year to twenty-nine this year. George B. Thomas, director of the Ed School's Center for Field Activities, is supervising a field-study course, which is placing 50 students in groups of six to eight in community agencies throughout Boston. An undetermined number of students are pursuing independent study in the field. According to a summer study by four MAT students (also at their own initiative) the number of courses in urban affairs at the School has jumped from four in 1966 to nine in 1967 to 25 this year.

All this activity has had the active encouragement of Sizer, but it remains a grass-roots effort without central coordination. The result has been a communication problem; with everybody doing his own thing, courses duplicate one another and often fail to fill the crucial gaps in the curriculum. The MAT summer study found the school very strong in the social sciences, but very weak in such areas as the study of teaching methods. Almost all the new courses fall into the category of social science.

IN AREAS where the administration had to take the initiative there has been little apparent progress. The Ed School's Faculty Committee on Academic Policy is now considering the report's grading proposal, with no sure indication of when it will make a decision. Sizer's position on tenure is cautious support for the Curle-Whitten report, but the Faculty has not got beyond "discussing" the matter.

Jumping on the Dean and the Faculty for these failures, however, is not quite fair. Sizer is aware of the lack of coordination in the reform movement but feels it's unavoidable. "You don't change universities from the top," says Sizer. "The head is -- to mix a metaphor -- a sort of catalytic traffic cop, giving the nod to some things, stopping others. It's always sloppy and irregular movement on a lot of fronts." Also, for all their shouting last spring, MAT's have been less than hungry for opportunities to work in the field and intern in the ghettos (25 out of 150 interns is not overwhelming). C-2, the field work course, had room for 60 students but got only 50 applications.

Equally important, financial problems have forced Sizer to choose between research projects and programs for training urban teachers. The Ed School has one of the lowest endowments in the University (less than two percent of the University's total), dependent on grants for two thirds of its funds. It runs a perpetual deficit, compounded in the past few years by an expensive project to construct a new library.

The only way to fill the curricular gap in teacher training, of course, is to hire more faculty. Sizer could throw out established or incipient research projects to raise the funds and hire faculty but he refuses. "There have been very few schools," says Sizer, "that have been able to stay with basic inquiry. The one's that don't, become trade schools. We can't keep putting band-aids on urban schools. We've got to have some long-range solutions." To get at the problem of training teachers Sizer has applied for a federal grant to fund two clinical training schools and the faculty to fill them. He hopes to get the money by June, but there is no certainty of its coming.

AND THE FACULTY intransigeance on grading is not what it seems. Two years ago, with Sizer's backing, the Faculty voted a laissez-faire policy on grading -- professors are completely free to decide whether or not they want to give finals or grades. Now, over half the Ed School's courses are ungraded, and the number increases yearly.

Sizer apparently expects change in urban curriculum to follow the example of grading policy -- a slow and persistent evolution. Whether his policy works will depend to a large degree on the students and faculty who are supposedly pushing for change.