Dana M. Cotton, secretary of the Graduate School of Education and Director of Placement, takes over today as acting dean of the Ed School during Dean Theodore Sizer's seven-month sabbatical.

The Ed School's faculty has recently voted major curricular and organizational reform and consolidation, primarily on the recommendations of the Committee on Academic Policy, chaired by Sizer. It will be Cotton's responsibility to see that the reforms are well underway by Sizer's return next Fall.

"I have great respect for Ted Sizer," Cotton said last week. "It is my intention to see that what he has accomplished is in no way diminished. I'm going to hold the fort for him."

Cotton added that he has "no aspirations to the job permanently" since he is due to retire in June of 1972.

As assistant chairman of the undergraduate Admissions and Scholarships Committee and as a Freshman Adviser, Cotton, who has been at Harvard since 1944, has maintained a dual affiliation with the College and the Ed School. "It's useful to have someone at the Ed School," he said, "wading up to his neck in the secondary schools all across the country. I'm proud of that."

Cotton said that he expects Derek Bok, Harvard's next President, to be sympathetic toward the Ed School. "In the past, because the Ed School is more or less at the bottom of the totem pole of reputation around here, it hasn't received the sort of support it could have used," Cotton said. "But Bok appears very interested in what the Ed School is about and what it can do."

Sizer will resume his office next September. He will spend the spring as visiting professor at the University of Bristol in England, devoting most of his time to a book about the process of change in American public schools.