Barbara Sizemore: An insider reports on the decades-long fight to teach our children.
Walking in Circles: The Black Struggle for School Reform, by Barbara A. Sizemore, Third World Press, $19.95 (February 2008), ISBN-10: 0883782529, ISBN-13: 978-0883782521, pp. 370.
Barbara Sizemore boasted that when she taught elementary school on Chicago’s West Side, parents would say, “Mrs. Sizemore can teach a brick to read.”
While that is certainly hyperbole, if she could not, it was not for want of trying, based on the record she left in this posthumously published account of her life in education.
Her colleagues, Dr. Safisha L. Madhubuti and the late Dr. Asa G. Hilliard III, who recall her work in the foreword and afterword, portray her as a fearless reformer and children’s crusader who skillfully marshaled data as her weapon of choice. She was also an advocate for the scholarship and practice of teaching methods, administrative structures and educational policies that produce results.
After 27 years as a classroom teacher and administrator, Sizemore, who died in July 2004 at age 79, became the first Black woman to be superintendent of a major city school system (Washington, D.C.) in 1973 and later served as dean of the School of Education at DePaul University.
