Published: April 1, 2000

Horace's Compromise

THEODORE SIZER

(Houghton Mifflin, $14)

Few people feel at home in a hospital examination room, surrounded by sterile, sinister-looking equipment. Or in a courtroom, where the somber, whispered rituals and plodding procedures are impenetrable to all but the members of the strange sect who inhabit the place. Everyone, on the other hand, remembers their high school days, and that's why most people think they have a pretty good idea of what goes on in American classrooms. Often, they're wrong.

In Horace's Compromise, Ted Sizer takes this most familiar of institutions—the high school—and makes those who think they know what teachers do and how schools work see that the whole thing is a lot more complicated than they realize. He also argues that much of what goes on in high schools doesn't really make sense and needs to be changed—a message that rings as true today as it did 16 years ago when the book was first published. Despite years of "reform," high schools, especially those in urban areas, have changed little over the years, and improving them remains one of the toughest...