Ed School Faculty Faces Major Reform of Programs

The Ed School faculty yesterday began formal debate on a proposal for massive regrouping and reorientation of the school's resources.

The proposal, which the faculty's Committee on Academic Policy released last week after a 15-month study, attempts to consolidate the school's two dozen doctoral and master's programs within a framework of newly emerging priorities and declining federal support.

Theodore R. Sizer, dean of the Ed School and chairman of the committee, acknowledged that the proposal had not been able to go into finances "in a detailed way."

He added, however, that the committee had assumed the School could enact the proposed reforms without outside funding.

"We intend to play things conservatively," he said, explaining that the school hopes nonetheless to receive substantial outside aid.

Such conservative planning, at its most extreme, would force several professors, most of them non-tenured, to be dropped from the school. The present 8-1 student-faculty ratio would grow as high as 14-1.

Ten years ago the Ed School was mainly a place to train teachers. More than two-thirds of the students were working for a Master of Teaching Arts in a specific subject area such as math or science.

Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legislation was a financial windfall for the school. Its budget soared from $2 million in 1960 to an $8.2 million peak in 1968, 57 per cent of which was supplied by the government. Men like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Nathan Glazer, Christopher Jencks, and David Cohen rode in on the harvest.

The school celebrated its good fortune by mounting a $6 million drive to build the finest education library in the country, with extensive research and teaching facilities in addition to book space.

During this time the school met new trends and needs in education by simply growing, mainly in the number of research associates and associate professors.

But the Nixon administration's failure to continue vigorous federal support to education has forced the Ed School to reassess its process of change and clearly delineate its priorities.

Introducing the reform proposal to the Faculty yesterday, Sizer said that "the halcyon days of change by addition are gone. The committee, in making its proposals, had to assume that new programs would have to take place of old ones."

The greatest resistance to the proposed changes appears to come from faculty members- primarily those in subject-oriented areas- whose positions would be jeopardized by them.

Fletcher Watson, professor of Science Education, said at yesterday's meeting that "a piece of pie can only be sliced in so many ways, and this is a small piece. According to this report the teaching area vanishes."

But Sizer said last week that financial difficulties have had a "definitely secondary" influence on the proposed reforms. He said that major changes in the organization of instruction have been contemplated for years.

In his 1969 Dean's Report, Sizer wrote: "At the School of Education, we criticize academic standardization in schools- yet too often we engage in it ourselves. We not only organize ourselves conventionally; we prescribe, with little justification, a set number of courses of similar length taught in relatively similar patterns for all students. The eight-half-course/two-term model, which individual faculty strive mightily to subvert, is clearly inadequate to our needs and inconsistent with our rhetoric."

Moreover, the proliferation of separate degree programs that occurred during the School's dramatic growth has resulted in both duplicated efforts and instability and a lack of cohesion among splinter programs staffed by as few as one or two faculty and vulnerable to shifts in faculty interest and availability.

In his 1969 Report. Sizer added, "When we contemplate changing courses and the grading system, we cannot proceed incrementally. A single radical change is needed, for all the various pieces fit inextricably together."

Last week's policy committee report emphasizes the need for a "division of labor" among the various ed. schools in the country, "since the educational needs of this society far exceed any one institution's capacity to deal with all of them."

The report recommends "a set of priorities for the next years, based on a judgment of what the country needs and what this school can do well . . . given its location, traditions, and existing commitments to faculty members and students."

The report also advocates "a small number of well-staffed programs" organized, as current programs are, around "shops"- which Sizer describes as "a small group of faculty and students with its own general area and direction of inquiry, its own office space, and its own coffee pot and bag lunches."

The proposed shops are in Humanities, Human Development, Childhood Education, Learning Environments, Public Psychology, and Administration and Social Policy.

The policy committee hopes the reorganization into fewer shops will reassert the School's aim of producing "educational clinicians" skilled in both theoretical and practical approaches to education. "A clinician," Sizer said, "is a master craftsman, but in a setting which is itself in a state of change.

"But he must be close to the 'problems of the craft' and constantly questioning that setting itself," he explained.

While focusing on general goals, the Ed School report also urges an increase in student freedom to develop individual study plans.

The Learning Environments shop would primarily concern itself with the total effects of the educational setting on a child's ability to learn. It is meant to develop ways to make those settings, whether classrooms or storefront schools, more conducive to learning.

The report urges that the study of curriculum content be subordinated to investigations of, and the training of students to deal with, the impact of a school's social structure- the so-called "hidden curriculum."

This move away from subject-matter shops will lead to a one-year moratorium on admissions to doctoral programs in Social Studies, Education, Language and Literature Education, Science Education, Mathematical Education, and Curriculum and Supervision if the report passes. These are the major fields hit by the recommended reduction in Ed School programs and the source of the greatest controversy.

The Learning Environments shop also provides a broader recognition of "what students and teachers bring to the setting in the form of values, attitudes, and psychological stages of development," and takes all these factors into account in constructing new curriculum materials.

Learning Environments, together with the newly proposed Childhood Education shop, would become a home for faculty and students interested primarily in curriculum planning and implementation. At the same time, Learning Environments directs the greatest shift away from the subject-matter oriented shops, like math and English teacher training programs, where these students and faculty were previously the most involved.

The Ed School currently runs "on-site" teaching programs in Newton, Cambridge, and Boston. Although these would continue to serve the interests of the entire school, the CAP expects the Learning Environments area to oversee many of these programs.

The proposed Human Development shop consolidates at least three present programs, one of which already does extensive research in early childhood development. But the report recommends that there be a greater commitment to intervention programs "for children ranging roughly from the period of infancy through the early elementary years."

This greater commitment means a substantial allocation of money from the School's core budget- income from tuition and endowment- in order to avoid the instability of dependence on outside funds from the federal government.

The CAP's recommendation for the development of a new shop in Childhood Education illustrates clearly the guiding tenets of Ed School reforms.

"THE NATIONAL need seems clear enough," the report says. "Early education is failing to provide millions of children, particularly poor children, with the personal and cognitive resources they need to surmount the social circumstances in which they find themselves. Educational reform, especially educational reform for the less affluent, must deal concretely with very young children; for the pattern of failure and withdrawal established for many children by the middle elementary grades is very difficult to reverse.

"We do not believe that this problem is adequately or creatively addressed elsewhere," the report continues, "and we are convinced that there are special advantages in creating a group of faculty to address it here."

The Ed School operates two master's programs in education: its own Ed. M. and a joint M. A. T. program with the GSAS. These programs involve about half the School's students.

The report recommends that both programs be continued, but also that both be submitted to further discussions of aims and methods. It criticizes the isolation of master's students from the rest of the School.

Ideally, these students would also benefit from training in the skills and perspective of the two new shops concerned most with on-site investigation and application of new ideas, Learning Environments and Childhood Education.

The two-year-old Clinical Psychology and Public Practice program is a collaboration of the Ed School with the GSAS, the Divinity School, and the Med School. The report recommends that the Ed School's Public Psychology shop realize the "tremendous" potential for collaboration among CPPP, Learning Environments, and the Childhood Education program. Although the point of departure for the Clinical Psychology and Public Practice program is mental health, the report recognizes the similarity of its general approach to that of the two new shops.

"There are clearly many 'services' CPPP should provide the School outside its own program, thereby avoiding duplication of effort, and there are services in turn that other programs should provide CPPP."

There are now three shops which fall within the area of Administration and Social Policy: one concerned with educational planning, one with edu-

cation and social policy, and one with administrative careers. The CAP considers the viability and desirability of three separate shops a moot issue, but hints that the separate degree programs might be better merged.

Such a merger would be consistent, says the report, with its own "bias toward the training of 'problem-solvers'- individuals with a mixture of clinical and analytical training who will work on problems in on-going educational settings."

At an open meeting last Monday, called to discuss the new CAP report, Steve Goldberg, a doctoral student at the Ed School, briefly raised the question of legitimacy of the reform process as perceived and understood by the students. He questioned whether there can be an "informed response" to the CAP report after such short notice on its release.

Sizer pointed out that "the substantive recommendations of the working committees have been available for several months," adding there would be another open meeting soon.

Sizer said the faculty will "hopefully make some decisions on the CAP report before Christmas, difficult though they may be."

But that will not be the end of the CAP's work. The CAP and the school as a whole will have to ask "what faculty do we need to implement the new priorities," said Arthur G. Powell, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. The CAP will then establish search committees drawn from the whole school, with final recommendations on new faculty made by the senior faculty.

And there is the perennial problem of resource allocation to the various shops. "We will strive for equity within the formula of resource allocation according to service load in the school," said Sizer.

In any event, the present CAP report is clearly the product of a school "committed," in the words of the report itself, "to flexibility and continuous reassessment."

Out of this will hopefully come "a more powerful vehicle for educational reform."