The Students are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract
By Nancy Faust Sizer

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In this groundbreaking book, Theodore and Nancy Sizer insist that students learn not just from their classes but from their school's routines and rituals, especially about matters of character. They convince us once again of what we may have forgotten: that we need to create schools that constantly demonstrate a belief in their students.

Written by Theodore and Nancy Sizer, coprincipals of a high school and veterans in the field of education (he was named dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education at age 32, she trains teachers in the same program), The Students Are Watching is a gentle but tough-minded plea for resetting the moral compass of American education and creating academic institutions "which will nurture our humanity." In high schools, which the authors call "one of America's most ubiquitous intentional communities," teachers and administrations can choose to model values they believe in, or they can slip into the same lazy strategies used by their students to avoid work and responsibility. "They watch us all the time," warn the Sizers, who believe in the profound power of the school system to change children's lives, and offer a wealth of ideas for educators and other adults to create the culture of trust and respect that will change their charges for the better. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly
Teachers play a vital role in shaping the morality of young people, contends Ted Sizer (Horace's School, etc.), founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, and co-principal with his wife, Nancy Sizer (Making Decisions), of the Francis W. Parker Charter School in Ayer, Mass. In their first endeavor as co-writers, the Sizers maintain that teachers model ways to approach knotty problems and, because they have emotional distance from students, can help them keep their thinking balanced in difficult situations. Acknowledging that some people are concerned by the notion that educators have the right to shape students' minds, they assert that high schools have long had three core tasks: to prepare young people for the world of work, to prepare them to think deeply and in an informed way and to help them become decent human beings. Yet, though schools exist for the benefit of children and adolescents, the Sizers point out that the students are often seen as the school's "clients," as its powerless peopleAthough the authors believe that is a costly, patronizing pretense. Instead, the Sizers call for adults to put stock in the suggestions of children, since they watch and listen to adults all the time and have learned more than we realize. Clearly sympathetic to educators, the Sizers recognize that "serious teaching does not carry an eight-to-four expectation whatever any contract says." For educators and parents concerned about raising thoughtful citizens, this slim book offers the surprisingly weighty insight that if we wish to shape our children's valuesAhow as a matter of habit they treat others and how self-aware they areAwe must first look into the mirror.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A passionate argument that moral education should be seen as an intrinsic part of high school life suffers from the very abstraction the authors seek to avoid. Sizer, noted author of a trio of school-reform books (Horace's Hope, 1996, etc.) and his wife, who trains teachers at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, believe that most educators view character education as an extracurricular activity designed around a series of absolute nouns: respect, integrity, honesty, and so forth. The authors, on the other hand, insist that the routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matters of character and that becoming an ethical person ought to be an active struggle that engages students' minds as much as calculus does. For even as the typical high school preaches a civil religion intended to turn out young people of good character, the Sizers point out, the sights and sounds of a typical school day may undermine these same values. Students who walk into broken-down school buildings learn that their education is not a priority. Teachers who come to school ill-prepared also teach their students how to cut corners. Schools with predominantly white honors classes teach that academic winners and losers break down along racial and class lines. Though the Sizers do a wonderful job of highlighting the hypocrisy that students see all too clearly, the authors frequently use real-life situations as springboards for airy theorizing. Rather than discussing the frightening rise in student violence, for example, the chapter on Shoving contemplates pushing in the hallways, dirty jokes, and rudeness, before redefining shoving past the point of absurdity to mean breaking new intellectual ground. This book makes an eloquent case that schools need to practice what they preach. But because the authors define their moral categories so broadly, the values they champion lose their power. When words mean too much, they ultimately mean too little. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.