The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) is an organization created to further a type of whole-school reform originally envisioned by founderTed Sizer in his book, Horace's Compromise. CES began in 1984 with twelve schools; it currently has 600 formal members. The Coalition was founded on nine "Common Principles" that were intended to codify Sizer's insights from Horace's Compromise and the views and beliefs of others in the organization. These original principles were:
- Learning to use one's mind well - The school should focus on helping young people learn to use their minds well.
- Less is More, depth over coverage - The school's goals should be simple: that each student master a limited number of essential skills and areas of knowledge. While these skills and areas will, to varying degrees, reflect the traditional academic disciplines, the program's design should be shaped by the intellectual and imaginative powers and competencies that the students need, rather than by "subjects" as conventionally defined.
- Goals apply to all students - The school's goals should apply to all students, while the means to these goals will vary as those students themselves vary.
- Personalization - Teaching and learning should be personalized to the maximum feasible extent. Efforts should be directed toward a goal that no teacher have direct responsibility for more than 80 students in the high school and middle school and no more than 20 in the elementary school.
- Student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach - The governing practical metaphor of the school should be student-as-worker, rather than the more familiar metaphor of teacher-as-deliverer-of-instructional-services. Accordingly, a prominent pedagogy will be coaching, to provoke students to learn how to learn and thus to teach themselves.
- Demonstration of mastery - Teaching and learning should be documented and assessed with tools based on student performance of real tasks. Students not yet at appropriate levels of competence should be provided intensive support and resources to assist them quickly to meet those standards. Multiple forms of evidence, ranging from ongoing observation of the learner to completion of specific projects, should be used to better understand the learner's strengths and needs, and to plan for further assistance. The emphasis is on the students' demonstration that they can do important things.
- A tone of decency and trust - The tone of the school should explicitly and self-consciously stress values of unanxious expectation ("I won't threaten you but I expect much of you"), of trust (until abused) and of decency (the values of fairness, generosity and tolerance). Incentives appropriate to the school's particular students and teachers should be emphasized. Parents should be key collaborators and vital members of the school community.
- Commitment to the entire school - The principal and teachers should perceive themselves as generalists first (teachers and scholars in general education) and specialists second (experts in but one particular discipline). Staff should expect multiple obligations (teacher-counselor-manager) and a sense of commitment to the entire school.
- Resources dedicated to teaching and learning - Ultimate administrative and budget targets should include student loads that promote personalization, substantial time for collective planning by teachers, competitive salaries for staff, and an ultimate per pupil cost not to exceed that at traditional schools by more than 10 percent.
- Democracy and equity (this principle was added later, in the mid-nineties) - The school should demonstrate non-discriminatory and inclusive policies, practices, and pedagogies. It should model democratic practices that involve all who are directly affected by the school. The school should honor diversity and build on the strength of its communities, deliberately and explicitly challenging all forms of inequity.
This was intended to make explicit the Coalition's views on race, class, and gender equality and democratic governance of schools. It is relatively unclear how wide or deep the adoption of the tenth principle is, particularly as regards "democracy", as the sorts of evaluations CES schools are likely to undergo are more oriented towards pedagogy and student performance, and many of the schools that are members of CES, especially those with partial affiliation, may not have had to demonstrate this younger principle rigorously.
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