Committee Urges Revision Of Ed School Curriculum

In a report made public Friday the Committee on Academic Policy of the Graduate School of Education proposed an almost total revision of the School's curriculum. The Ed School faculty will begin consideration of the report next Wednesday.

Under the new plan the curriculum would be grouped into five "shops," combining clinical and research work and concentrating in broad problem areas.

According to Theodore R. Sizer, dean of the Ed School, the intent of the new curriculum is to draw on existing resources to "do what Harvard can do best," or to avoid duplication of effort with other schools of education and competition for very limited funds.

The number of students enrolled in the one-year MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching) program would remain approximately the same, but a one-year moratorium would be called on the enrollment of new doctoral students. The Faculty-student ratio, now 1:7, would become 1:14.

Faculty Continuity

Courses dealing with the teaching of a particular subject would be dropped. As a result, changes would occur in the composition of the Faculty. "We can't admit people to the doctoral program unless we can guarantee them Faculty continuity over their four years," Sizer said last night. "We know what Faculty will be here next year, so there's no problem with the MAT's."

"Many people will interpret this report as an attempt to shut down the MAT program, as Yale and Johns Hopkins have had to do with theirs," Sizer added. "We're most emphatically not shutting the program down, we're trying to make it better."

Sizer stated that financial reasons for the proposed changes were "secondary, but important." He said that the Ed School's financial crisis prevented the addition of new programs, and that therefore the only solution to the present "disfunctional and ineffective" curriculum was re-grouping.

The "shops" will overcome the present division in the curriculum between clinical and academic work, and will deal with such problems as education in the urban setting. The problems of particular subjects and classroom skills will be de-emphasized.

'A New Thrust'

One new "shop," to be called Childhood Education, will initiate "a new thrust" in the development of "intervention." or action-oriented, programs in children's education, according to the CAP report. Presently most work in this area at the Ed School is research-oriented.

Other "shops" are Philosophy of Education, Human Development, Learning Environments, and Administration and Social Policy.

Several major Ed School programs, such as the Clinical Psychology and Public Practice program, are unaffected by the proposed re-organization, mostly because they are too new to be evaluated.

By Christmas

However, for the programs which are slated for change, many crucial decisions, such as the admission of next year's students, are in the balance. "Therefore," Sizer said, "we're hoping that the Faculty will act and everything will be cleared up by Christmas."

The Faculty last April authorized the CAP to conduct the study, setting up eight working sub-committees which reported their findings November 1. Since then the CAP has conducted a series of open hearings on curriculum reform.