The Concord Review - Will's Blog

RARE COLLEGE HISTORY SCHOLARSHIP

2012-02-15T10:33:00.007-05:00

Begin forwarded message:
From: Matthew Schweitzer
Date: February 13, 2012 9:25:46 PM EST
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Comments

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your article about the "similarities" between dentists and history teachers. Although I have not often felt that way at my own school, I believe that is the exception, unfortunately, not the rule. Your comments are, as always, extraordinarily on-point.

However, I do not want to be the harbinger of complete despair. Recently, I was honored with the Dean's Fellowship for Undergraduate Research at the University of Chicago, a scholarship of $15,000 per year all four years to essentially conduct research with historians and leaders at any University of Chicago institute and research center—I couldn't believe that a school would "draft" a student to study history, and not to play sports! In my letter, written by Professor Sparrow of the History Department, he noted that what makes a wonderful student is someone "who take[s] the life of the mind seriously, and direct[s] his talents and energies accordingly." If only we could all be taught the importance of the "life of the mind."

Thank you again for your incisive and important commentary on the state of history education in this country.

All the best,

Matthew Schweitzer
Oakland, California
[his history research paper was published in The Concord Review, Fall 2011]

Please consider a subscription to The Concord Review, the only journal in the world to publish history research by secondary school students: www.tcr.org.

The Concord Review has been praised in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. It has received endorsements from a cross-section of prominent historians such as David McCullough, Eugene Genovese, Diane Ravitch, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who said: “there should be a copy in every high school.”

Teachers Are Not Dentists

2012-02-13T10:26:00.003-05:00

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

TEACHERS ARE NOT DENTISTS
(and students are not patients)

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
13 February 2012

If I were to attend a convention of dentists, I would expect to see a lot of panels and presentations on what dentists do. New veneer techniques, the best compounds for fillings, root canal methods, successful implant procedures and the like. Of course, there would be little to no attention to what patients do, other than whether they seem to be following the recommendations to brush, floss and use the rubber tip at home. After all, the dentists are the trained paid professionals and it is what they do that is important.

Conventions of history teachers, one might guess, would be different. Of course there would be panels and presentations on class management methods, grading practices, the best history slide shows and films, the recommended history textbooks, the most effective lecture techniques, and interesting field trips, perhaps.

However, as at the dentists’ convention, surprisingly there would usually be almost nothing on what the patients (that is, the students) are doing in history. After all, the teachers are the trained and paid professionals and what they do is the most important thing.

Or is it? Remember, a dental patient’s job is to shut up, sit there, and take it. Is this really what we want from students? In too many history classes, it is. A dental patient could, if it were practicable, leave her brain at home. A history student always has his brain with him in the classroom, ready for employment.

If someone were to propose a revolution in history instruction, it might be one that would accept the fact that students are not passive vessels, with cavities of ignorance for the teacher to drill into and fill with the necessary knowledge, but rather active, thinking, curious, growing young people with brains and a capacity for serious academic work.

But this is very hard for teachers to do in practice. When it is suggested that students might benefit from reading a complete history book on their own, and from working on a serious history research papers, objections are raised. Many history educators will claim that high school students are not able (can’t?, won’t?, never been asked?) to read a history book, and the universal argument is that serious research papers take too much of a teacher’s time (the teacher’s, not the student’s time—when students are spending 53 hours a week with electronic entertainment media).

History teachers say they cannot afford to assign, guide, monitor, read and grade serious research papers by their students. So our students now, almost without exception, go off to college, to face the term papers and nonfiction books at that level, and thanks to us they have never read one complete nonfiction book or written one serious history research paper. They don’t know how to do those things, because we have decided they couldn’t do them and have not asked them to do such academic work.

Nothing of the sort happens in sports. “Scholar-Athletes” (so often celebrated for their athletic accomplishments in the local paper) are not sent off to play college basketball never having been taught to dribble, pass, and shoot the basketball, or to play football, never having been asked to block and tackle. That would be irresponsible of us, right?

I notice that, while high school chemistry classes require lab work, and biology classes require lab work (and laboratories cost money), the science teachers do not claim that students are incapable of such work or that they do not have the time to assign, guide, monitor, read and grade lab reports.

I do realize that these days, STEM is imagined to be more important than the ROOTS of history and academic literacy—the ability to read nonfiction books and write research papers—but perhaps if we were to stop and think that our students are not passive dental patients, but young people with brains on board, fully capable of actually “doing” history, through reading books and writing papers, rather than just submitting to whatever presentation we have developed to keep them in their seats, then the day may come when a convention of history teachers will even include teachers talking about the academic work their students are doing in history, and even—imagine the day!—it might feature presentations by students on the papers they have written, and, in some cases, had published in The Concord Review. There have been 989 of such exemplary history papers now, by students from 46 states and 38 other countries since 1987, and on the few Emerson Prize occasions when the students were indeed allowed to talk at a meeting about their research, the teachers in attendance were well and truly interested to hear what they had to say.

NO BOOKS, PLEASE

2012-01-28T09:39:00.006-05:00

No Books, Please
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 January 2012

In the most recent Quality Counts report from Education Week, Catherine Gewertz was kind enough to describe not only the high school student reading requirements from the U.S. Common Core Standards, but from the standards of several other countries as well. I quote from her report for its shock value to anyone who might still imagine that our secondary students could still be reading one complete nonfiction book during their four years:

-----

“Global Readings: Nations vary widely in the selection of readings and other language arts material that finds a home in the curriculum. In some cases, these are required texts [but evidently never complete history books for some odd reason—WHF]; others show up on lists of recommended titles; and still others are offered as examples of literature [no history wanted—WHF] that can satisfy academic standards and curricula.

In the United States, students in states that have adopted the Common Core State Standards are required to read The Declaration of Independence, the preamble to The Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address [that should take them the entire afternoon—WHF]. Readings suggested for 11th and 12th grade include As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner; The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell; and “A Raisin in the Sun,” by Lorraine Hansberry.

In Ontario, Canada, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is on the list of approved readings for grade 11 English classes.

New South Wales, Australia, requires 9th graders to read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, a poem based on Arthurian legend, and at least one work by William Shakespeare [one of the Sonnets, perhaps?—WHF]

In Hong Kong, students taking the English-literature section of a required secondary school exam must pick from an eclectic basket of selections, from Shakespeare’s Othello and short stories by James Joyce and Edith Wharton to the iconic 1974 Hollywood film “Chinatown” and poems by Sylvia Plath and Langston Hughes.

In England, required readings for the national English-literature exam taken by many 16-year-olds include Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck; To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; and Lord of the Flies by William Golding.”

-----

It may be premature, and eccentric, to celebrate the dumbed-down reading standards of other countries when compared with our own, but perhaps on their non-Literature standards, if any, other countries do require the reading of complete history books, but this report doesn’t say.

For our own students, it would be hard to come up with a livelier set of low expectations for reading at the high school level. As I suggested, the “texts” [we don’t talk about books any more] are all short enough to be read together by most secondary students in an afternoon.

I don’t believe that sort of workload would be found in the standards for their Latin, physics, chemistry or calculus courses, and even in United States Literature classes at the secondary level, most students read actual books, as in novels, don’t they? Or has that now gone by the board, ignored as they seem to be by the Common Core Standards?

In history classes, of course, in the absence of the rare teacher with demanding academic standards of his or her own, the assignment of complete real history books, even by popular historians such as David McCullough, has long ago vanished.

In the 2010 NAEP test of high school history students, 55 percent of Seniors scored Below Basic, which would be impossible to do if they had opened one history book or listened in one history class. Our students do worse in history than in any other subject, but our new Common Core Standards seem very likely to ensure that such a level of achievement is not disturbed in the slightest degree.

The Common Core academic expository writing standards, it should be noted in passing, are even more vague and superficial...

So let our Literature students get ready for their Common Core Standards requirements, just make sure they never read a complete nonfiction book, so that when they, and of course our History students, encounter such books at the college level, it will be a nice surprise for which they are completely unprepared.

END OF FAILURE

2012-01-18T10:31:00.001-05:00

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

The End of Failure

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
January 18, 2012

Time magazine this week has an article about the failure of No Child Left Behind, and it highlights the failure of the Rachel Carson Middle School in Herndon, Virginia, to get the last 5% of its student body to achieve grade-level competence in math and reading. This outcome stems from the failure of the teachers, the principal, the counselors, the special needs teachers, the curriculum coordinators, the reading specialists, the math specialists, the superintendent, the state department of education and its staff, the governor, and, of course, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Virginia. While others, such as the federal government, publishers, professional development specialists and the like might share some of the blame, the first group is to be held mainly responsible for the failure of that 5% of the students at the school in question.

Is anyone left out of this analysis, which is the current analytic wisdom available for all school failures in the United States at present? Some might suggest some responsibility on the part of parents, but there is one group which always is, it seems, held blameless and harmless. The students.

I have heard of a time in this country, and even in some other countries, when, if a student failed in school, the failure was the student’s. Indeed, even now in Japan, according to Marc Tucker’s Surpassing Shanghai, there is the view that if a student fails academically, it is because he has not worked hard enough.

However, it is no longer possible to entertain the idea that a student is responsible for his or her own learning and academic progress in the United States. We like to think of a student in our schools as if under anesthesia on a classroom operating table, being operated on by our surgeon-teachers who are wholly responsible for the success or failure of the operation. Our passive students can not be held responsible for any part of their own education, because if failure occurs, it cannot be theirs. Our children cannot fail at anything, so if there is failure, as, apparently, there is, it must be ours—that is an axiom of our educational philosophy.

There are consequences that flow from this axiom, of course. Students who fail (my mistake)—students whose academic work is failing, understandably come to believe that the school and the teacher are supposed to “do” education to them, and that they have no responsibility for the outcome—whether they learn anything or not is not their problem.

Of course it is their problem, as they will discover when they go to community college or try to find a job, but we feel it is our duty to keep them from knowing that as long as we can.

Naturally, there is a sense of power and control for educators in accepting all the responsibility for student learning, and a noble sort of martyrdom when, in spite of all our efforts, students fail anyway. But in the process students are deprived of ownership of their own education and their own learning.

It was probably Alfred North Whitehead who wrote that “For an education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.” How quaint that idea seems to us, that the student must study or the failure will be his, not ours. How we, as legislators, educational leaders, teachers, etc., would hate to have to give up any of "our" territory of study and learning to mere students. What do they know?

Perhaps this folly will soon run its course. One is permitted to hope. Perhaps we will take another look and see that it is the student who decides whether to come to school or not, whether to pay attention or not, whether to do the homework or not, whether, finally, to take his education seriously or not.

You can tell a born teacher by the earnest way he or she turns to a serious student who has a question, and, yes, “a teacher affects eternity.” But as Buddha pointed out 2,500 years ago, the student who makes the most progress “must be anxious to learn.” He was a good teacher and affected lots of people, but he knew better than to try to outlaw failure by removing all responsibility for learning from the students themselves, as we have seemed so dumbly determined to try to do in recent years.

SCIENCE ENVY

2012-01-10T10:53:00.001-05:00

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
10 January 2012

Historian David McCullough was asked by a reporter recently if he started writing any of his books with a theme. He said that when he became interested in a subject he started reading to see what he could find out about it, but he had no advance idea of what would result.

Even those of our teachers who do work with students on research papers too frequently indulge in the science envy of requiring them to have a thesis. Students are asked to have some prior notion of the history they will read which they will test to see whether it is falsifiable or not.

Science is rich, famous and powerful, so it is not surprising that it is envied in our culture, but it should be remembered that its practice is to reduce, as much as possible, reality to numbers.

History does not lend itself well to a reduction to numbers, as it is about human beings, who also cannot very well be competently encompassed by numerical descriptions.

Words are the numbers of history, and words connote as much as they denote, they contain and evoke possibility and ambiguity in ways that the number users of science sometimes find annoyingly imprecise and quite uncomfortable.

The study of history should begin with curiosity about people and events: What was that person really like? How did that event come to happen and what resulted from it? These are the sort of non-thesis questions that our students of history should be asking, instead of fitting themselves out for their journey of learning about the past hampered with the straitjacket of a thesis.

Serious history students are often curious over something they have read about. They want to know more, and, when they have learned quite a bit, they frequently want to tell others what they have discovered. Like scientists, they are curious, but unlike them, they are willing to live with the uncertainties that are the essential ingredients of human experience.

Science has earned our admiration, but its methods are not suitable to all inquiries and we should not let envy of the success of science mislead us into trying to shrink-wrap history to fit some thesis with which students would have to begin their study of history.

David McCullough has reported that when he speaks to groups very often he is asked how much time he spends doing research and how much time he spends writing. He said he is never asked how much time he spends thinking.

The secondary students of history published in The Concord Review do not generally begin their work with a thesis to prove or disprove, but rather with wonder about something in history. The quality of their papers reveals that not only have they done a good deal of reading and research—if there is any difference there—but that they also have spent some serious time thinking about what they have learned, as well as how to tell someone else about it.

They have inevitably encountered the complex causes of historical events (no control groups there) and the variety of forces and inclinations both within and without the historical figures they have studied.

Some of these students are very good in calculus, science, and so forth, but they realize that history is a different form of inquiry and provides a non-reductionist view of the truth of human life, but one that may be instructive or inspiring in several ways.

So I urge teachers of students of history, who are asking them to write serious research papers, to let them choose their own topics, based on their own wonder and curiosity about the past, and to relieve them of the science envy of a thesis requirement. Let them embark on their own study of some part of the immense and mysterious ocean of history, and help them return with a story and an understanding they can call their own and can share, through serious research papers, with other students of history.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

2012-01-04T11:57:00.005-05:00

Date: January 3, 2012 10:35:07 PM EST
To: fitzhugh@tcr.org
Subject: Elementary Academics

Good Evening Mr. Fitzhugh,

I read your article in American Educator, “Meaningful Work” with great interest. As I was reading the article, I felt myself cheering quietly inside as I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions. I teach 4th grade reading and writing and have high expectations for my students. Your suggestion that a student be assigned a research paper, one page per grade level with the same number of resources, should be a requirement in every elementary through junior high classroom.

In the article, you also state K-12 teachers have been focusing on reading comprehension strategies—main ideas and audience—without texts which build knowledge and vocabulary. I too tire of the endless rhetoric from our ISD curriculum advisers telling us that we should be constantly utilizing summarizing, character traits, and so on in fiction short stories which are part of “diversity” education. Teachers must center on learning objectives being certain the students “get” what is trying to be taught, and “turn and talk,” “best practices,” and other pedagogy which have overtaken discussion and reason. If a teacher digresses from the supposed best practices and objectives, we are marked as unwilling supporters toward pursuing measurable goals for “achievement.” Thus, as you well know, the student is left behind in the foray of verbiage, rankings, and “performance” levels.

We need to get back to the basics. Yes, the social media and technology have severely changed students’ attention levels which in turn affects performance, like it or not. Do we as educators need to give in to media-tizing, or do we educate as perhaps we have learned by hard work and dedication to learning for learning’s sake?

Therefore, I have a question for you. I want to enable my 4th graders to read and write at a level which would aid them to eventually be college ready. I want to lay the necessary foundation for them to build their knowledge and vocabulary. Instead of practicing reading comprehension strategies for main idea and audience, what can I do? Where do I begin as far as life-long comprehension skills to teach my 4th graders? I need them to be reading more nonfiction and serious fiction, but our district has tight guidelines we must follow. How can I impart love for learning along with true life skills? I have always made it a practice to tell my students why we are learning/doing a skill and how it relates to the real world. Where else do I start?

Have you heard of the Core Knowledge Curriculum by E.D. Hirsch, Jr.? What do you think about it? My feelings are it is a great method of learning sequence, but department heads in our ISD have not even heard of Core Knowledge.

I would really appreciate your feedback as I would like to be the best possible teacher for my students. Thank you and have a blessed day—

High School Flight from Reading and Writing

2011-12-23T13:33:00.005-05:00

from Academic Questions
10/11/2011

Will Fitzhugh

As concerns mount over the costs and benefits of higher education, it may
be worthwhile to glance at the benefits of high school education at present as
well. Of course, high school costs, while high, are borne by the taxpayers in
general, but it is reasonable to hope that there are sufficient benefits for such
an outlay...

Read the full article

Meaningful Work

2011-12-17T13:26:00.009-05:00

The American Federation of Teachers
American Educator's Winter issue includes an article on:

"Meaningful Work: How the History Research Paper Prepares Students for College and Life"

http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/

While there is lively new concern for our neglect of promising STEM students, there continues to be almost no interest in encouraging serious high school students who are reading history books and writing history research papers on their own (because their schools, for the most part, don't care if they do stuff like that). We may perhaps see some improvement in our STEM performance, but the vital ROOTS of knowledge of history and skill in academic expository writing will continue to shrivel, and we may have even more inarticulate and aliterate engineers, and scientists (as well as other members of the voting public) as ignorant of history as ever. Let us reconsider our inattention to the ROOTS (academic reading and writing) of a sound liberal education while we still can, if possible.

Will Fitzhugh

No Time For Homework (including term papers)

2011-12-09T14:35:00.003-05:00

Thomas L. Friedman
Michael Mandelbaum
That Used To Be Us
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011, pp. 128-129

...We wish the figure of 27,000 texts a month [by a 14-year-old girl] came out of Ripley’s Believe it or Not. In fact, it is the new normal. On January 10, 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation released the results of a lengthy study entitled Daily Media Use Among American Children and Teens Up Dramatically from Five Years Ago:

“With technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth, according to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Today, 8-18-year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time “media multitasking,” (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7 1/2 hours. The amount of time spent with media increased by an hour and seventeen minutes a day over the past five years, from 6:21 in 2004 to 7:38 today...While the study cannot establish a cause and effect relationship between media use and grades, there are differences between heavy and light media users in this regard. About half (47%) of heavy media users say they usually get fair or poor grades (mostly Cs or lower), compared to about a quarter (23%) of light users...Over the past 5 years, time spent reading books [Twilight series? WF] remained steady at about :25 a day, but time with magazines and newspapers dropped (from :14 to :09 for magazines, and from :06 to :03 for newspapers). The proportion of young people who read a newspaper on a typical day dropped from 42% in 1999 to 23% in 2009.”

One quotation in the study captured the trend: “The amount of time young people spend with electronic media has grown to where it’s even more than a full-time workweek,” said Drew Altman, Ph.D., the president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

At precisely the moment when we need more education to bring the bottom up to the average and the American average up to the global peaks, our students are spending more time texting and gaming and less time than ever studying and doing homework. Unless we get them to spend the time needed to master a subject, all the teacher training in the world will go for naught.

http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/bookshelf/that-used-to-be-us

Our Enemy: The Book

2011-12-07T09:35:00.005-05:00

OUR ENEMY, THE BOOK
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
EducationViews Contributor
December 7, 2011

Fellow members of the Electronic Educational Entertainment Association. My remarks will be brief, as I realize you all have texts to read, messages to tweet, and you will of course want to take photos of those around you to post on your blog.

I only want to remind you that the book is our enemy. Every minute a student spends reading a book is time taken away from purchasing and using the software and hardware the sale of which we depend on for our livelihoods.

You should keep in mind the story C.S. Lewis told of Wormwood, the sales rep for his uncle Screwtape, a district manager Below, who was panicked when his target client joined a church. What was he to do? Did this mean a lost account? Screwtape reassured him with a story from his own early days. One of his accounts went into a library, and Screwtape was not worried, but then the client picked up a book and began reading. However, then he began to think! And, in an instant, the Enemy Above was at his elbow. But Screwtape did not panic—fortunately it was lunchtime, and he managed to get his prospect up and at the door of the library. There was traffic and busyness, and the client thought to himself, “This is real life!” And Screwtape was able to close the account.

In the early days, Progressive Educators would sometimes say to students, in effect, “step away from those books and no one gets hurt!” because they wanted students to put down their books, go out, work for social justice, and otherwise take part in “real life” rather than get into those dangerous books and start thinking for themselves, for goodness’ sake!

But now we have more effective means of keeping our children in school and at home away from those books. We have Grand Theft Auto and hundreds of other games for them to play at escaping all moral codes. We have smartphones, with which they can while away the hours and the days texting and talking about themselves with their friends.

We even have “educational software” and lots of gear, like video recorders, so that students can maintain their focus on themselves, and stay away from the risks posed by books, which could very possibly lead them to think about something besides themselves. And remember, people who read books and think about something besides themselves do not make good customers.

And more than anything, we want and need good customers, young people who buy our hardware and software, and who can be encouraged to stay away from the books in libraries, which are not only free, for goodness’s sake, but may even lead them to think. And that will be no help at all to our bottom line. Andrew Carnegie may have been a philanthropist, but by providing free libraries he did nothing to help us sell electronic entertainment products. We must never let down our guard or reduce our advertising. Just remember every young person reading a book is a lost customer! Verbum Sap.

Middle School Readers

2011-12-01T11:43:00.007-05:00

Begin forwarded message:
From: "Nell"
Date: December 1, 2011 12:43:16 PM EST
To: ohiogift@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Subject: RE: Concord reading
Reply-To: ohiogift@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu

Art, I used The Concord Review with my middle school students as a way for them to have better reading and writing skills. Not an easy go but it worked. The topics were of interest to the students (topics were self-chosen) and their capacity to read non-fiction increased. Their writing skills needed much more work due to their previous encounter with research having been limited to power point presentations with information pulled from various sources on the internet. That was a much harder habit for them to break. If we are to develop the minds and abilities of our students in academic writing we must adopt Will's suggestion of having students write a papers beginning in first grade with a one-page paper and continuing through high school where a 12-page paper would be required. This is Will's one page per grade idea [The Page Per Year Plan©]. We need to have support systems for students like writing labs where they can get the assistance they need. When I was teaching college classes the students in the sixteen-week courses had 15 weeks to write their papers with many submissions and comments from me regarding their resources, their rhetoric, etc. If writing is thinking written down, we have to go beyond the typical creative writing experiences that are based on feelings and emotional responses (nothing wrong with this but often it is the only writing experiences students have) to have students understand the purpose of research and non-fiction writing. It would also help if we were to re-introduce rhetoric as well.

Once you read the articles by the HS students [published in The Concord Review] you will be so impressed with their capacities and intellectually stimulated by the essays’ content.

Nell
[Nell Petry, Ph.D.]

------------------------

From: owner-ohiogift@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
On Behalf Of Art Snyder
Sent: Wednesday, November 30, 2011 6:03 PM
To: ohiogift@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Concord reading

Thanks to Nell and Will on the matter of reading those Concord Review articles. As I read the list of article titles earlier today, I knew right away that they'd provide good intellectual stimulation. I won't discount them because the authors are high-schoolers; excellence is excellence.

--Art Snyder

WORK OF THEIR PEERS

2011-11-04T08:46:00.005-04:00

“The Concord Review is an amazing publication (www.tcr.org)—a real labor of love by Will Fitzhugh. It is the only journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students. [with serious history research papers by students from 39 countries since 1987]

I highly recommend The Concord Review to teachers for:

(1) exemplary models of student writing,
(2) a motivation to encourage students to write, and
(3) a fantastic activity to do in class—read published essays by fellow high school students.”

Rick Bisset
History Teacher
Singapore American School
November 3, 2011 10:38:44 AM EDT

Engineers Need History

2011-09-26T09:27:00.006-04:00

I recommend this article from the Wall Street Journal by the former CEO of Lockheed Martin:

"It’s the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today’s economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level....Now is a time to re-establish history’s importance in American education."

"In my position as CEO of a firm employing over 80,000 engineers, I can testify that most were excellent engineers—but the factor that most distinguished those who advanced in the organization was the ability to think broadly and read and write clearly.

Wall Street Journal; Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Education Our Economy Needs

We lag in science, but students’ historical illiteracy hurts our politics and our businesses.

By NORM AUGUSTINE

In the spirit of the new school year, here’s a quiz for readers: In which of the following subjects is the performance of American 12th-graders the worst? a) science, b) economics, c) history, or d) math?

With all the talk of America’s very real weaknesses in the STEM subjects (science, technology, English and math), you might be surprised to learn that the answer—according to the federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress—is neither science nor math. And despite what might be suggested by the number of underwater home loans, high-school seniors actually fare best in economics.

Which leaves history as the answer, the subject in which students perform the most poorly. It’s a result that puts American employers and America’s freedoms in a worrisome spot.

But why should a C grade in history matter to the C-suite? After all, if a leader can make the numbers, does it really matter if he or she can recite the birthdates of all the presidents?

Well, it’s not primarily the memorized facts that have current and former CEOs like me concerned. It’s the other things that subjects like history impart: critical thinking, research skills, and the ability to communicate clearly and cogently. Such skills are certainly important for those at the top, but in today’s economy they are fundamental to performance at nearly every level. A failing grade in history suggests that students are not only failing to comprehend our nation’s story and that of our world, but also failing to develop skills that are crucial to employment across sectors. Having traveled in 109 countries in this global economy, I have developed a considerable appreciation for the importance of knowing a country’s history and politics.

The good news is that a candidate who demonstrates capabilities in critical thinking, creative problem-solving and communication has a far greater chance of being employed today than his or her counterpart without those skills. The better news is these are not skills that only a graduate education or a stint at McKinsey can confer. They are competencies that our public elementary and high schools can and should be developing through subjects like history.

Far more than simply conveying the story of a country or civilization, an education in history can create critical thinkers who can digest, analyze and synthesize information and articulate their findings. These are skills needed across a broad range of subjects and disciplines....

Read the full article at WSJ...

RESEARCH PAPER OR NOT?

2011-08-29T13:26:00.004-04:00

New York Times; The Opinion Pages

Are Research Papers a Waste of Time?
Room for Debate, Will Fitzhugh

Has the Internet made research papers a useless exercise for college students? Is there a better way to assess knowledge?

Knowledge and the Individual
Updated August 28, 2011, 05:45 PM

Will Fitzhugh is the founder of The Concord Review, since 1987 the only journal in the world for the academic research papers of secondary students.

The Internet can supply information—tables, charts, lists, graphs, facts—but that information is manufactured. Knowledge has to be handmade by each individual; the Internet cannot supply it.

If students abandon the research paper, they will miss the only discipline that can reveal to them the accuracy and integrity of their own thoughts.

To make knowledge, which is the foundation of learning, it is necessary to apply thought to information, to think about the facts that have been gathered, and this is work only an individual can do. Reading books can help a person discover how others—with more information, experience and wisdom—have thought about a subject, but there is no better way to comprehend, consider and digest information for oneself than to write a serious paper.

A research paper can show the student whether he or she has really understood as much as he or she supposed about a subject. The exercise of writing helps a student to organize and examine the information gathered in a careful way.

Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1625 that “Reading maketh a Full man, conference a Ready man, and writing an Exact man.” If students abandon the research paper, they will miss the only discipline that can reveal to them the accuracy and integrity of their own thoughts. The Internet can be a supermarket of information to assist such efforts, and books and fine teachers can also help, but the real effort of acquiring knowledge belongs to the student, and there is, at least in the humanities, no better work for the student to undertake than a serious research paper.

TEACHERS NOT ENOUGH? WHO KNEW?

2011-08-26T10:09:00.004-04:00

This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students...

BREAKTHROUGH

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

26 August 2011

It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.

However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance...” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning...”

This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.

In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.

In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything...(but) It’s a teacher’s job...to give students the motivation to learn.”

It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.

While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; “For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”

As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be—namely the students.

Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.

This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.

------------------------------
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

TRENDY WIKI DIGITALISM

2011-08-23T11:23:00.006-04:00

NY Times Op-Ed: "Education Needs a Digital-Age Upgrade,"
by Virginia Heffernan, in a review of Now You See It by Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions. 7 August 2011

"The new classroom should teach the huge array of complex skills that come under the heading of digital literacy. And it should make students accountable on the Web, where they should regularly be aiming, from grade-school on, to contribute to a wide range of wiki projects...."

I am not surprised that after the MacArthur Foundation put $50,000,000 into the study of Digital Learning (not learning just with one’s digits, of course) they discovered that using digital technology to enhance learning is a super-duper idea.

But I worked for the North American Aviation Space and Information Systems Division, on the Apollo Program, which was somehow managed by engineers with computers only as powerful as iPhones are now, and who, with their pocket protectors and slide-rules, had sat patiently in rows in old-fashioned classes at MIT and Caltech, and learned the “huge array of complex skills” (of which Ms. Davidson speaks) that they needed to know to get men to the moon and back, and that includes the test pilot/astronauts who were also pocket-protector-wearing students who sat in rows learning aeronautical engineering, when they were not writing out their flight plans with a ballpoint pen.

The tens and tens of billions of dollars that have been spent on computers and software for education, and the hundreds of thousands (or millions of dollars?) spent on advertising for that stuff, coupled with a despair of ever raising the academic achievement of kids who skip classes and fail to do any of their homework, have deluded Digitopundits into a flight of digitalistical fantasies of wonderful changes which will relieve us of the hard work of teaching math, grammar, rhetoric, patience, self-discipline, history, attention, persistence, and all the other basic tools of learning a civilization requires, whether in the 18th century, the 19th century or the 21st century.

I find all of this drooling over the changes for education which technology will bring in some digitalistically magical mystery way to our tasks as parents and teachers to be a waste of time, money, and thought.

Pardon my age, but if 65 percent of jobs in the future will have new names, they will all still require basic literacy, patience, honesty, responsibility, probably some knowledge of math and science, an ability to listen and to follow instructions, etc. In short, nothing new.

I don’t forsee the day when “witty and incisive blogs” will be able to take the place of writing legislation, annual reports, history books, judicial opinions or any of the other vital tasks of a literate society.

This is all the malady of surrender to trendy digitalism that promises an escape from the hard work and necessary standards for literacy in our civilization.

If we can't do a good job of educating students, they seem to feel, then we should just jettison the effort and have lots of fun with Facebook and Tweets instead. So the standards for learning join those for modern art, showing that junk is, really, all we should hope to create.

Samuel Johnson and George Orwell would turn over in their graves at junk like this:

"Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers. But instead of simply carping about students with colleagues in the great faculty-lounge tradition, Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper. 'What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in school—the term paper—and not necessarily intrinsic to a student’s natural writing style or thought process?' She adds: 'What if ‘research paper’ is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook?'”

Will Fitzhugh

Professor Shaughnessey

2011-07-28T10:35:00.006-04:00

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

July 28, 2011 8:05 am

An Interview with Will Fitzhugh:
Concord Review Authors on Television [CNN]

Michael Shaughnessy, EducationViews Senior Columnist on July 28, 2011 in Commentaries

Michael F. Shaughnessy, Ph.D. 
Eastern New Mexico University,  Portales, New Mexico

1) Will, I understand that CNN broadcast a feature on U.S. History in the schools at 8:45am EST on Wednesday, July 27, 2011. How did this come about ?

A producer at CNN wanted to do a story on the sad performance of American students on the NAEP test of U.S. History, and thought that it would be useful to include The Concord Review and its authors in the discussion. The piece was short and superficial and mirrored well how we neglect history (and academic expository writing) in American education.

2) It seems that this feature included a (very brief) interview with one of the high school authors whose history research papers were published by The Concord Review in recent issues. Do you keep track of these authors?

I work alone and cannot keep track of most of the authors I publish. They have active, mobile lives, and I don’t have the time or energy to keep after them for information. I used to have support for the Concord Review Society, our alumni effort, but after a couple of years the angel who provided funding for that flew away.

3) How long has The Concord Review been in existence and what do you hope to accomplish?

The Concord Review was founded in March of 1987, and in August of that year I sent a brochure asking for history research papers to every high school in the United States and Canada and 1,500 schools overseas. My goal has been to find and recognize exemplary secondary student work in history and then to distribute it as widely as possible to show other HS students the serious papers of their peers. We have now published 956 by students from 44 states and 38 other countries.

4) Will, I have read past issues of The Concord Review, and I have to say that with each issue, you assemble some of the finest academic writing I have ever seen. How do you do it?

I don’t do it, of course. The students do it, and they have been raising the standards every year since I started the journal. My secret is the same that works in athletics. Show young people the exemplary accomplishments of their peers and they will strive to meet and exceed them. The standards have been going up every year, but they are academic expository writing standards set by our authors, not by me.

5) Further, the topics cover everything from the Renaissance to the American to the French to the Russian Revolution and everything in between! It seems that these writers are young aspiring historians. How many go on to actually write a history book?

Some go on to major in history at Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale and so on, but even physics and pre-med majors can sometimes write first-class history papers. We don’t reward history the way we do student work in STEM, but I like to think that our authors will continue to write well and perhaps read history for the rest of their lives.

6) Recently you did a special South Korean issue—having been to Seoul, and actually all of the Universities in South Korea, I know they treasure and value education. Can you brief us on some of the papers from South Korea?

The First Special Korean Issue was the result of the work of Caroline Lee, a South Korean very concerned about the English expository writing skills of Korean students who want to attend American independent schools and selective American universities. She felt that while Korean students put serious and successful efforts into math and science and objective tests, many underestimate the work they need to do to become fluent in English expository writing. So she worked with me to produce the Korean issue, which has seven (of eleven) papers by Asian students, but only two by Korean students studying in the United States. Others were by a student from Singapore and one from Japan, and the rest from students at schools here.

7) Is there any one high school that seems to consistently produce exemplary papers of historical relevance?

I can think of several I can count on for a steady stream of excellent papers: Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland, Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York, Hunter College High School in New York, the Ellis School in Pittsburgh, and more recently, the University of Chicago Laboratory High School in Chicago, among several others.

8) Obviously, you rely on principals and teachers to encourage students. Is there any one parent, principal or teacher who deserves recognition?

Robert Hines of Richard Montgomery, Broeck Oder of Santa Catalina School, Steven Houser of Horace Greeley, Paul Horton of the Chicago Lab High School, Ric Bisset of Singapore American School, and a number of others, of course.

9) Subtle question—but what is the impact of having been published in The Concord Review?

For high school students who are published, there is the pride and satisfaction of knowing their academic paper meets the standard of the only journal in the world for such work at the secondary level. Their success usually leads to more confidence and then on to greater efforts to achieve academically in school and later in college. The prestige of being published in The Concord Review has been compared to that of being a finalist in the Intel or Siemens Science Competitions, which are much, much better funded, of course.

10) How can readers, historians, and librarians assist you in your endeavors?

Historians, and Upper Education History Professors, with one or two exceptions, have shown no interest in the exemplary work in history by students in Lower Education, but every reader, teacher and librarian who subscribes is voting for the survival of this unique journal and its efforts to recognize, distribute, and encourage exemplary academic expository writing among secondary students all over the world.

Volume 21 Emerson Prizes

2011-07-21T15:40:00.005-04:00

2012 Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [Volume 21]

Ayana Gray, Pulaski Academy, Little Rock, Arkansas, Fall 2010
“Female Infanticide”

Eric Keen, Homescholar, Bethesda, Maryland, Summer 2011
“Anglo-Afghan War”

Maya Krishnan, Richard Montgomery High School, Rockville, Maryland, Fall 2010
“Socialist Realism”

Caitlin Lu, Chinese International School, Hong Kong, Spring 2011
“Matteo Ricci”

Jonathan Lu, Chinese International School, Hong Kong, Summer 2011
“The Needham Question”

Matthew C. Weinstein, Belmont Hill School, Belmont, Massachusetts, Winter 2010
“Lodges vs. Kennedys”

KOREAN ISSUE

2011-07-09T10:27:00.003-04:00

DONATION OF THE 2011 KOREAN ISSUE

Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review

Secondary students should read history, think about it, and learn to write serious research papers, not only to prepare themselves for higher education, but also to get ready for the nonfiction reading and expository writing tasks they will meet in their careers.

I started The Concord Review in 1987 to recognize exemplary academic expository writing by secondary students and to inspire others to read history and to improve their own nonfiction writing abilities.

We have now published 956 history research papers by students from 44 states in the United States and from 38 other countries. These include a number of very good papers by South Korean students, some now at school in the United States and some at school in Korea.

In 2010, Caroline Lee began to work towards the first issue of this journal to be published in another country. In July of this year, she produced the First Special Korean Issue of The Concord Review, with essays from Japan and Singapore, and from Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio. Four of the authors won our Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes. These students are now attending Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale and Williams, among other colleges.

Caroline Lee, as Managing Editor of this issue, will be donating copies to a number of South Korean secondary schools, with the goal of inspiring their students to do more nonfiction reading and academic expository writing in the international language of English.

I welcome essay submissions from South Korean secondary students writing in English on any historical topic, ancient or modern, domestic or foreign. The submission form may be found on the website of The Concord Review at www.tcr.org. My email address is: fitzhugh@tcr.org, and I welcome questions and comments from secondary students, their teachers, and any others interested in history and in serious academic writing.

KNOWING HOW TO KNOW

2011-06-18T09:27:00.003-04:00

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

Knowing How to Know

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
18 June 2011

Students in schools of education pay a lot of attention to the problems of learning how to learn, lifelong leaning, and the like. In the absence of much knowledge of history, economics, physics, literature, foreign languages, chemistry, calculus and so on, this can degenerate into what Professor E.D. Hirsch, Jr., calls “How-to-ism,” an absorption in “pedagogy” without any secure foundation in academic knowledge.

It is also the case that most graduates of our schools of education are shocked by the day-to-day problems of managing youngsters with Twitter, popular music, sports, popularity, and Grand Theft Auto on their minds. But it should be noted that it is very hard to get students interested in academic work, for instance history, if the teacher doesn’t know any history herself. This problem causes some number of coaches who teach Social Studies to shy away from the Renaissance in favor of current events, which may seem more approachable both to them and their students. How ‘bout those Bruins!

In the meantime, even American students who are Seniors in high school show a pitiful ignorance of the most basic knowledge of the history of their own country, as revealed in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report released this month.

In The Knowledge Deficit, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., tried to get across the point that teaching “learning skills,” for example, which pedagogy graduates are supposed to be good at, does little or nothing for helping students acquire knowledge. He argues that the only way to increase knowledge is to build on a stronger and stronger base of knowledge, not by wasting time on the dubious techniques of “Learning How to Learn.”

I am convinced that one of the reasons even some students who do not require remediation in reading and writing when they get to college still fail to gain a degree after six or eight years, in part go under academically, because they do not bring enough knowledge to help them understand what the professor is talking about. Their ignorance makes them feel lost. Some become determined to find the knowledge they have not been given in high school, but too many quit instead.

To be more fair to the education schools, even Harvard has had great difficulty in committing its faculty to teach certain basic areas of knowledge. The faculty tried to avoid arguing over what needed to be taught, so they fell back on allowing each department to teach “the skills” of its discipline, which they believed could be taught with any subject matter (such as that which the professor’s research happened to focus on at the moment).

The problem, as pointed out in an article by Caleb Nelson in The Atlantic called “Harvard’s Hollow Core,” is that “One cannot think like a physicist, for example, without actually knowing a great deal of physics.” Similarly, it is quite hard to think like a historian if you don’t know any history.

So the whole “Learning How to Learn” paradigm collapses of its own emptiness and leads to academic failure for many students who have been offered rubrics, techniques and skills as a substitute for the academic knowledge they would need to survive in college.

The Common Core is offering national goals for knowledge. Others have critiqued their weakness in math, but I would suggest that their goals for reading in history are scarcely
challenging for eight graders. Reading The Declaration of Independence and A Letter from the Birmingham Jail is not a waste of time, but for high school students, why not offer
Mornings on Horseback, Washington’s Crossing, Battle Cry of Freedom and The Path Between the Seas? In other words, actual history books? I cannot find out when it was decided (or by whom) that American high school students can manage European history, calculus, Latin, chemistry and so on, but cannot be expected to read through even one complete history book? How did our expectations for nonfiction reading (and gathering knowledge thereby) get so dramatically dumbed down? Of course STEM is very important, but even engineers and scientists need to read and write.

To demonstrate how far we have slid down the slope of expectations since Thomas Jefferson’s day, here is an example from The Knowledge Deficit (p. 9):

“In our pre-romantic days, books were seen as key to education. In a 1786 letter to his nephew, aged fifteen, Jefferson recommended that he read books (in the original languages and in this order) by the following authors: [history] Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Anabasis, Arian, Quintus Curtius, Diodorus Siculus, and Justin. On morality, Jefferson recommended books by Epictetus, Plato, Cicero, Antoninus, Seneca, and Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and in poetry Virgil, Terence, Horace, Anacreon, Theocritus, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Milton, Shakespeare, Ossian, Pope and Swift.”

ADVENTURES IN INTELLECT

2011-05-27T13:55:00.005-04:00

That’s why Chetan Singhal, a senior at United World College of S.E. Asia in Singapore, was inspired to turn his interest in medieval history into a research paper on the trial of the Knights Templar. After literally stumbling across a volume of The Concord Review in his library a year ago, he became intrigued by the fact that such high-quality work was being done by other high school students. “It was then it struck me, that even I could produce a work like this, and that even if it doesn’t get published, it will definitely be worth the effort,” says the 17-year-old.

University of Pennsylvania; The Wharton School
Knowledge@Wharton High School
Adventures in Intellect: The Value of a Good Research Paper

Published on May 25, 2011

“Researching allows me to pursue what I really want to learn and forces me to think creatively to answer questions that I have posed”– Caroline Tan, freshman, Yale University, Connecticut

“I think the thought process involved in writing a research paper definitely got me thinking critically of the knowledge around me, and asking questions instead of just accepting other people’s opinions” – Chetan Singhal, senior at United World College of S.E. Asia, Singapore

“Researching [Alexander] Hamilton would allow me to analyze issues in politics, economics and even constitutional law, subjects in which I have a very strong interest. I found the challenge of constructing a scholarly paper of my own to be enticing in terms of the intellectual adventure and sheer joy that it promised” – Tianhao He, senior, Walter Johnson High School, Maryland

Nothing makes William Hughes Fitzhugh, a former high school history teacher, happier than hearing students talk about their love of research. It is what inspired him to launch a small academic journal 24 years ago in Sudbury, Massachusetts, that is highly revered today as The Concord Review. “I felt there was a need to recognize diligent high school students who were going above and beyond their school’s academic requirements to research and write quality history papers,” says Fitzhugh.

In keeping with that mission, the Review has published 945 research papers from teenagers in 44 states and 38 other countries, ranging in topics from the history of IBM and the Asian financial crisis to Christianity in Korea and the American philosopher George Ripley. “My goal has been to not only recognize these students for their achievements, but to encourage others to follow in their footsteps,” says Fitzhugh.

Definitely Worth the Effort

That’s why Chetan Singhal, a senior at United World College of S.E. Asia in Singapore, was inspired to turn his interest in medieval history into a research paper on the trial of the Knights Templar. After literally stumbling across a volume of The Concord Review in his library a year ago, he became intrigued by the fact that such high-quality work was being done by other high school students. “It was then it struck me, that even I could produce a work like this, and that even if it doesn’t get published, it will definitely be worth the effort,” says the 17-year-old.

Singhal’s essay was published in the Review—an accomplishment that helped him gain acceptance at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he will be going in the fall.

Not everyone is as fortunate to make the same self-discovery as Singhal. According to Fitzhugh, reading nonfiction books and writing a research paper still remain foreign concepts to most high school students.

Tianhao He, 17 and a senior at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland, has grown used to the puzzled looks on people’s faces when they discover he researched and wrote an 11,200-word history paper—not as homework or extra credit, but for the sheer enjoyment of learning something new. “The first thing I tell people is that I wrote it because it was fun,” says He, whose essay focused on Alexander Hamilton and his contributions as the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. “I realized that researching Hamilton would allow me to analyze issues in politics, economics and even constitutional law, subjects in which I have a very strong interest.”

As He looks forward to attending Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the fall and studying economics, he feels better prepared to tackle the in-depth studying the college requires. “I know that I will continue to hone the critical thinking skills that I learned through writing this research paper in college and beyond,” says He.

Skillful Library Navigation

Kristy Henrich, a freshman at Stanford University in Stanford, California, also values the chance to strengthen her research skills before arriving at college, especially since all freshmen are required to write a 12-to 15-page research-based argument. Thanks to the [Emerson Prize] essay she wrote on Civil War Medicine for The Concord Review, Henrich says she developed a number of skills, such as organization, time management, analysis, development of original ideas, creativity and diligence. “While tackling a research paper is always challenging, it is not nearly as daunting for me as it has been for some of my classmates who have never had this experience before,” says Henrich.

Caroline Tan, a freshman at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, agrees. She, too, credits the research paper she wrote in high school for the Review, which was on President Wilson’s influence on student-led demonstrations in China, for better preparing her for coursework at Yale.

“When professors assign research papers in class, I know how to use academic databases to find scholarly articles or navigate libraries to find relevant books,” says Tan. “I know how to brainstorm, structure and ultimately churn out thousands of words regarding a particular intellectual topic.”

As more businesses, such as law firms, report spending money on remedial writing courses for their employees, writing a research paper may prove to have a positive impact on building skills necessary for the workforce as well. “You won’t get anywhere in a career by just talking about yourself,” says Fitzhugh. “Accumulating and communicating information are essential skills for any job.”

ABSENT FROM CLASS

2011-05-18T11:43:00.002-04:00

EdNews.org
[Houston, Texas]

ABSENT FROM CLASS

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
Columnist EdNews.org

There are many important variables to consider in evaluating the causes for academic failure or success in the high school classroom. The training of the teacher, the quality of the curriculum, school safety, availability of books, etc., etc., are extensively studied, and all these have a part to play.

But I would argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work, including classroom work. Why do so many of our high school students do so little academic work? Because they can get away with it.

A close study of the academic demands on students in the vast majority of our high school classrooms would disclose, I feel certain, that one of the principal reasons for their boredom is that they really have nothing to do but sit still and wait for the bell.

In most classrooms the chances of a student being called on are slight, and of being called on twice are almost nonexistent. If a student is called on and has not done the reading or other class preparation, most probably the teacher will just call on someone else. There are no real consequences for being unprepared, and as a result many, if not most, students are unprepared, and that also contributes to their boredom.

By contrast, on the football or soccer field, every player is called on in every practice and in every game. Even if a player is on the bench, there is a constant risk for most of them that they may be called on at any time, and if they do not know what to do, the disgrace and disapproval will be obvious and swift. The same may be said for Drama productions, Chorus, Model UN, and most of the students’ other activities.

In extracurricular activities, the student will often face a peer pressure to do well that is usually lacking in the classroom. Peers in the classroom may even think it is cool for another student to “get away with” having done no preparation for the class.

It is these circumstances, among others, that lead, in my view, to the findings, by the Indiana University High School Survey of Student Engagement (2005), that of the 80,000 students they questioned, 49% do only three to four hours a week of homework, and they still report getting As and Bs. I can not think of a single high school sport that asks for only three to four hours a week of practice, and so little time would easily lead to an athletic failure to match the academic failure of so many of our students.

The absence of serious academic demands on the attention and effort of students in our high school classrooms means not only boredom and daydreaming, but allows students outside of school to spend, according to the Kaiser Foundation study (2005), an average of 6.5 hours a day (44.5 hours a week) with various electronic entertainment media—not homework on the computer—but entertainment.

Somehow, in addition to all that time spent entertaining themselves, high school students usually find time for an active social life, perhaps a job, and often sports or other student activities.

While we have lots of research studies on test results, teaching training, per-pupil expenditure, new curricula, professional workshops, and many other subjects, I believe there is a striking need for a close study of what students are actually being asked to do while they are in class. The remarkable thing, to me, is not that 30% to 50% of our students drop out before graduating from high school, but rather how the other 50% to 70% of them stay in a situation in which so little is asked of them that they are often bored, and in which they are usually very tired of sitting and waiting for the bell.

We sometimes claim that if only the teacher is brilliant or entertaining enough, boredom can be banished, or if we show enough movies, PowerPoint presentations and DVDs on “relevant” subject matter, the students will not sleep in class, either with their eyes open or closed. But imagine how absurd it would be to expect students to stay committed to a sport where they spent all their time sitting in the stands while the coach told wonderful stories, showed great movies and talked amusingly about her/his personal athletic history. The students come to play, as they should, and their motivation to participate is rewarded by their chance to participate, often with sweat, strain, and even potential injury.

When we make so few demands on students in the classroom we should not wonder why so many check out, and are really “absent from class,” whether they are sitting there or not. If they have nothing to do, and nothing is asked of them, and they are not challenged academically, then really they are better off if their attention and their minds are on other things that may offer them greater rewards than sitting still and doing nothing.

I hope the education research community will consider comparing the academic demands on students in the typical classroom with the demands of other activities in which students take a more active part. Let us discover which high school classrooms are like law school and business school classrooms, where students are expected to be prepared and are at risk to be called on for clear proof of their readiness at a moment's notice, as they are in the games and matches in which their energy and commitment are so commonly understood to be essential. If we want our high school students to do more academic work, let’s try to figure out how to stop boring and ignoring them in our classes. Let’s give them better reasons not to be “absent from class.”

THEY CAN WRITE

2011-05-05T08:38:00.002-04:00

New York Sun
September 13, 2006 Edition
Section: Opinion

They Can Write

BY WILLIAM FITZHUGH
September 13, 2006

URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/39528

In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, there was increasing concern about measuring the outcomes of education. It occurred to me that a journal of exemplary high school history essays might show other students and teachers what was possible.

So I established a quarterly journal in 1987, and students started to send in their work. Each year for the past 12 ]16] years The Concord Review has given out at a prize, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, for outstanding academic promise seen in the 44 published research papers [five prizes each year].

About a decade later I founded the National Writing Board to provide an independent assessment of high school research papers. [The main high school writing assessment is now the superficial SAT essay, a 25-minute test on which factual errors do not matter to the score.]

Since 1987, I have been privileged to publish 737 [945] exemplary high school history research papers from 34 [39] countries in The Concord Review. None of these papers would have met the standard English department guidelines, or for that matter the requirements for a high score on an SAT essay. They are all too long, too concerned with historical accuracy, and not personal enough.

Some of the best have come from students in New York City, including one of the first two Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize winners in 1995, a paper by Aaron Einbond, then a Sophomore at Hunter College High School, on the degree of originality in John Maynard Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.

When I first read this 7,366-word paper, I thought it could not have been written by a high school sophomore. But I learned that Mr. Einbond had placed 5th in the Westinghouse [now Intel] Science Talent Search, was first clarinet in the New York Youth Symphony Orchestra and a legend around Hunter, so I published the paper. He went on to Harvard, became a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge, and is now getting a Ph.D. in music composition at Berkeley.

I also published two papers by Hana Lee, class of 2003 at Hunter, one on Tiananmen Square and one on Transcendentalism. She graduated first in her class at Hunter and she recently told me she was at Harvard, majoring in molecular biology and evolutionary genetics, and "working in a lab that studies a chaperone protein in Arabidopsis that may function to buffer the effects of genetic variation in phenotype."

Some of the papers by New York students have been about New York itself, including a great essay on the economic revitalization of Flushing by Amy Peltz at Hunter, who is now at the University of Chicago. Ms. Peltz wrote, “In these times of rising anti-immigrant sentiment, it is important to remember the valuable contributions immigrants can make. In Flushing, the Asian immigrants saved Main Street. Perhaps there are other immigrants waiting in the wings, and other Main Streets in need of saving.” There was a fine paper about the history of Jewish Harlem by Sarah Goldberg who went to the Horace Mann School and is now at Williams. There was a great paper on the Harlem Renaissance by Gabriella Gruder-Poni, an Italian girl studying in this country, who also attended Hunter.

There have also been fine history papers from the Bronx High School of Science, Poly Prep Country Day School, Great Neck North High School, Horace Greeley High School, and Paul D. Schreiber High School, among several other schools.

While this is some of the good news, there is some bad news as well. Part of the bad news is the low and non-academic writing standards of the College Board. With funding from the Albert Shanker Institute (affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers) The Concord Review commissioned a study of the state of the history research paper in public high schools in America in 2002.

We found that, while 95% of teachers praised the value of research papers, 81% never assigned a 5,000-word paper, and 62% never assigned a 3,000-word paper in history classes. Most teachers said they simply did not have time to assign, monitor, and read history papers, so they didn't have their students do them.

The English department in public high schools has its attention on fiction, personal, and creative writing or the five-paragraph essay. Nonfiction reading and serious research papers are not to be found there.

There are real consequences for students who go on to college or to jobs. The Business Roundtable reported on a survey of its member companies in 2004, in which it had found that they were spending $3,090,943,194 annually on remedial writing courses for their salaried and hourly employees, in about equal numbers. American College Testing (ACT) reported this spring that 49% of the high school graduates they tested were unable to read at the level of college freshman texts.

James Story, an education policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation reported in the September 2006 School Reform News, “Nearly 50 percent of Texas college freshmen require remedial or corrective courses.” Of course some of this remediation is in math, but a large share is in reading and writing.

The powers that be in college freshman composition courses are not doing much to raise standards for academic writing in the high schools either. Nancy Sommers, the director of Expository Writing at Harvard, told a Chronicle of Higher Education colloquium on writing that she was grateful to the high school teachers who had prepared students for Harvard by having them work on the five-paragraph essay.

Some Harvard students don’t see that as great help in preparing for college. Laura Arandes, Harvard Class of 2005, wrote, in a letter to me, that she was shocked by how poorly her public high school in California had prepared her for college papers. She had never been assigned anything more than a five-paragraph essay, at which, she said, she was quite good.

She commented: “This lack of forethought on the part of high school educators and administrators is creating a large divide among college graduates—and it's one that helps neither the students nor their alumni institutions. Modern public high schools have an obligation not simply to pump out graduates at the end of the year, but also to prepare their students for the intellectual rigors of college.”

Many forces are at work in dumbing down writing (and nonfiction reading) in our high schools. Teachers are too busy, most favor creative or personal writing, and nonfiction books are no longer assigned. Students have little to write about, and major organizations, like the National Commission on Writing in the Schools, have a lot of money and publicity, but serious nonfiction academic writing is not one of their goals for high school students.

The Concord Review has very little money and too few subscribers, and its funding future is always in doubt. I met with the Director of Education Programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities a couple of years ago and he told me that while he thought all of our efforts were truly wonderful, NEH could not provide any funding for us, and that has been the case at scores of other foundations over the years.

People are accustomed to thinking of high school student academic work, especially in history, as being of no value. I started The Concord Review in 1987 not only to recognize exemplary papers by high school students of history, but also to distribute them as widely as possible to give lots of other students a chance to read some history and to see what some of their diligent peers have been able to do.

A few teachers, like Broeck Oder at Santa Catalina School in Monterey, California, and Bill Rives, at the Singapore American School, have bought class sets, to make sure their history students see this good work, but most high school teachers seem to have neither the time nor the inclination to let their students know that some of their peers are meeting much higher expectations than they are. Their students will find that out soon enough in college, perhaps.

• Mr. Fitzhugh, a Harvard graduate, and one-time high school history teacher, is the founder and editor of The Concord Review.

ALBERT SHANKER 1990

2011-04-30T12:17:00.001-04:00

"The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning.
Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously."

New York Times, June 3, 1990
Where We Stand
by Albert Shanker
American Federation of Teachers

History By and For Students
The Concord Review

People who are hungry for a little good news about what U.S. schools and students are achieving—and that’s most of us—should take a look at The Concord Review. The Review publishes history essays written by secondary students from all over the English-speaking world [945 from 39 countries so far], but most are from the U.S. and fully half are by students attending public schools.

If you picked up a copy of the Review and started reading, you probably wouldn’t realize that its lively and substantial articles come from students in high school—or even junior high. An eighth-grader contributed the readable discussion about the future of Richard Nixon’s reputation to the Winter 1989 issue. And in the same issue, the balanced treatment of 19th-century theories about African-Americans that contributed to the founding and development of a society to return former slaves to Africa came from a student in grade ten. The essays in The Concord Review suggest what students can do when they find a subject that engages them and they are encouraged to run with it.

Will Fitzhugh, a former high school history teacher who used his own savings to found The Concord Review in 1987, sees the journal as a way of recognizing—and fostering—achievement. When a student writes an outstanding essay, the only reward a teacher can offer is a top grade. Like many good teachers, Fitzhugh felt that the grade was somehow not enough. So he designed the Review as an extra recognition—a history’s student’s equivalent to winning a varsity letter or getting a prize in a science fair. But of course it does much more...

The Concord Review deserves support—and contributing a subscription to a local school library might be a good way of showing it. It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously.

HIGHS AND LOWS

2011-04-21T10:01:00.002-04:00

EducationNews.org; Houston, Texas
SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

HIGHS AND LOWS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
21 April 2011

It seems that the academic expository writing of our public high school students will rise, or fall, to the level of our expectations. Here are excerpts from narrative essays, written by U.S. public high school students, to illustrate that claim—three have been written to the student’s own high expectations and the other three to our generally low expectations for National Competitions, civics and otherwise:

Excerpt from a 40-page essay written as an independent study by a Junior in a Massachusetts public high school [endnote notation omitted]:

“At first, the church hierarchy was pleased at this outburst of religious enthusiasm and female piety; it was almost a revival. Hutchinson, after all, was a prominent and devout member of the Boston church, and only the most suspicious churchmen found immediate fault in the meetings. But soon, Hutchinson’s soirées became less innocuous. In response to her audience’s interest—in fact, their near-adulation—and in keeping with her own brilliance and constant theological introspection, she moved from repeating sermons to commenting on them, and from commenting to formulating her own distinct doctrine. As Winthrop sardonically remarked, ‘the pretense was to repeat sermons, but when that was done, she would comment...and she would be sure to make it serve her turn.’ What was actually happening, however, was far more radical and far more significant than Hutchinson making the words of others ‘serve her turn.’ She was not using anyone else’s words; she was preaching a new brand of Puritanism, and this is what is now known as Antinomianism.”

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Excerpt from a Grand Prize-winning 700-word essay written for a National Competition by a Junior from a public high school in Mableton, Georgia:

“Without history, there is no way to learn from mistakes or remember the good times through the bad. History is more than a teacher to me; it’s an understanding of why I am who I am. It’s a part of my life on which I can never turn back. History is the one thing you can count on never to change; the only thing that changes is people’s perception of it.

It cannot be denied that every aspect of the past has shaped the present, nor that every aspect of the present is shaping and will continue to shape the future. In a sense, history is me, and I am the history of the future. History does not mean series of events; history means stories and pictures; history means people, and yet, history means much more. History means the people of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. History means me.”

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Excerpt from a 30-page independent study by a Junior at a public high school in Worthington, Ohio [endnote notation omitted]:

“Opposition to this strictly-planned agricultural system found leadership under Deng Zihui, the director of rural affairs in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC). This faction believed that peasants engaged in farming should have freedom in management, and advocated a form of private ownership. To them, peasants should have the power to buy, sell, or lease land, and to manage and employ labor. Zihui saw collectivization as a dangerous and detrimental practice to the Chinese economy. The production-team system that was practiced under collective farming did not maximize agricultural output. Production teams were comprised of around 20 to 30 households in the neighborhood, and net income was based on the performance of the production team as a whole. Individual peasants did not see direct returns for their efforts, and therefore the incentive to work hard did not exist under the production-team system. Consequently, agricultural outputs and farmers’ per capita net income were significantly low; in 1957, each farmer received an average net income of 73.37 yuan.”

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Excerpt from a 750-word Grand Prize-Winning essay for a National Competition by a Sophomore from a public high school in Rochester, Michigan:

“Similar to how courage has changed our country, having courage has helped shaped who I am today. When I was in 7th grade, I befriended two boys with autism in my gym class. I fully knew that being friends with them was not going to help me climb any higher on the social ladder, but I did not care. I had the courage to go against what was socially acceptable in order to do what was right. I soon not only played with them in gym but invited them to sit with my friends at lunch too. Someone had to have the courage to say that they deserved to be treated equally.

Equality is a civic value that Americans take pride in, and it needs to be defended.

Courageous people stand up for what is right in order to preserve these civic values.

Courageous acts in American history are what have molded us into the great nation we are today. They are, in large part, the reason why we became an independent nation and also an important reason why we have our first African-American president. Social and political movements in the U.S. began with one courageous person willing to stand up and go against the crowd. Every downpour has to start with one drop of rain.”

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Excerpt from a 25-page essay by a Junior at a public high school in Manchester, Massachusetts [endnote notation omitted]:

“Paris was the center of medicine in the 19th century, an age which witnessed a revolt against dogmatism and a new emphasis on scientific thought. As universities were freed of political and ecclesiastic control, more social classes were able to attend, and true scientific thought was encouraged. A new type of clinical observation emerged that focused on active examination and explainable symptoms. Furthermore, laboratory medicine, meaning research-based medicine, gained a foothold. As medicine became more systematic, scientists moved away from the four humors view of the body and began conducting experiments in chemistry, notably biochemistry. In 1838, Theodor Schwann and Malthais Schleidan formulated the cell theory, and in 1854, Hugo von Mohl, John Goodsir, Robert Remak, and Rudolf Virchow demonstrated that cells arise from other cells. These two discoveries make up the modern cell theory and the foundation of all biological advances. With the discovery of cells came new opinions about the origins of disease, reviving interest in microbiology. The most widely accepted theory about how disease was spread was the “filth theory.” According to the filth theory, epidemics were caused by miasmatic hazes rising from decaying organic matter. However, some disagreed with this hypothesis. The idea that epidemic diseases were caused by micro-organisms and transmitted by contagion was not new in the mid-19th century. It had been proclaimed by Fracastorius in the 16th century, Kircher in the 17th, and Lancisi and Linne in the 18th. Opposing the filth theory, Jacob Henle proposed the role of micro-organisms again in 1840. Unfortunately, many of his contemporaries viewed him as old-fashioned until some notable discoveries occurred. Bassi, Donné, Schoelein, and Grubi each proved fungi to be the cause of certain diseases. In 1850, bacteria, discovered earlier by Leeuwenhoek, were also confirmed as sources of disease. Even though micro-organisms as the source of disease was well documented, many did not accept this theory until about 20 years later. Nevertheless, people knew something was causing diseases, igniting a public hygiene movement in Europe and the dawn of the preventive medicine age.”

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Excerpt from a First Prize essay by a public high school Sophomore for a National Creative Minds Competition [creative nonfiction writing] organized by the oldest and best-known gifted program in the United States:

“It is summer, one of those elusive, warm days when the world seems at peace. I splash around in the ocean, listening to the voices of the beachgoers mingling with the quiet roar of the waves. When I scoop water into my palm, it is clear, yet all the water together becomes an ocean of blue. Nothing plus nothing equals something; I cannot explain the equation of the ocean. I dip my head under to get my hair wet and to taste the salt once held by ancient rocks. I hold myself up on my hands, imaging I am an astronaut, and explore my newfound weightlessness.

But water is the opposite of space. Space is cold and lifeless, and water is warm and life giving. Both are alien to my body, though not to my soul.

Underwater, I open my eyes, and there is sunlight filtering through the ceiling of water. As I toss a handful of sand, the rays illuminate every drifting grain in turn. I feel as if I can spend forever here, the endless blue washing over me. Though the water is pure, I can’t see very far. There is a feeling of unknown, of infinite depths.

As a little girl, I used to press my face against the glass of my fish tank and pretend I swam with my guppies, our iridescent tails flashing. The world moved so unhurriedly, with such grace. Everything looked so beautiful underwater—so poetic. It was pure magic how the fish stayed together, moving as one in an instant. What was their signal? Could they read minds? how did these tiny, insignificant fish know things I did not?”

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The questions suggest themselves: What sort of writing better prepares our students for college and career assignments, and must we leave high standards for high school academic expository writing up to the students who set them for themselves? [The more academic excerpts were taken from papers published in The Concord Review—www.tcr.org]

DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS

2011-04-11T10:11:00.003-04:00

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DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
April 11, 2011

The California State College System reported recently that 47% of their freshmen must take remedial reading courses before they can be admitted to regular college academic courses. The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools Project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at our colleges each year.

Keep in mind that these are not high school dropouts. These are students who did what we asked them to do, were awarded their high school diplomas at graduation, applied to college, were accepted at college, and then told when they got there that they were not well prepared enough by their high schools to take college courses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education did a survey of college professors, who reported that 90% of their freshmen were not very well prepared in reading, doing research or writing.

From my perspective, these students, regardless of their gender, race, creed, or national origin, have been disadvantaged during their twelve years in our public schools. My research indicates that the vast majority have never been asked to do a single serious research paper in high school, and, while I have been unable to find money to do a study of this, I have anecdotal evidence that the vast majority of our public high school students are never asked to read one complete nonfiction book by their teachers during their four years.

Race can be a disadvantage of course, even for the children of Vietnamese boat people, and poverty can be a disadvantage in education as well, even for the children of unemployed white families in Appalachia. But the disadvantages of disgracefully low expectations for academic reading and writing are disinterestedly applied to all of our public high school students, it appears.

Huge numbers of unprepared public high school students provide an achievement gap all by themselves, albeit one that is largely ignored by those who think that funding is the main reason so many of our students fail to complete any college degree.

In that study by The Chronicle of Higher Education, they also asked English teachers if they thought their students were prepared for college reading and writing tasks, and most of them thought their students were well prepared. The problem may be that English departments typically assign fiction as reading for students and the writing they ask for is almost universally personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, supplemented now by work on the little 500-word personal “college essay.”

It is hard to conceive of a literacy program better designed to render our public high school students poorly prepared for the nonfiction books and term papers at the college level. Of course, many colleges, eager to fill their dorms and please their “customers” with easy courses and grade inflation, are gradually reducing the number of books students are assigned and the length of papers they are asked to write, but this simply adds to the disadvantages to which we are subjecting our students, all the while charging them large amounts of money for tuition.

Many parents are satisfied when their children tell them that they love their high school, perhaps not fully realizing that the students are talking mostly about their social life and their after-school sports and other activities. They may remain unaware that our students are being prevented from learning to read history books and from writing serious term papers. No one mentions that disadvantage, so no doubt these parents are just as surprised, humiliated, and embarrassed as their children when they are not allowed into regular college courses when they get there.

Americans have big hearts, and are concerned when they are told of the plight of our disadvantaged students who are black, Hispanic, or poor. But they are naturally not really able to summon up much concern over an academic literacy achievement gap which disadvantages practically all of our public high school students, especially if the schools and the Edupundits keep them quite uninformed about it.

PUSHOUT

2011-03-31T10:11:00.004-04:00

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PUSHOUT

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
31 March 2011

Several decades ago, the Canadian Army was having a problem with its male recruits. Far too many of them were going Absent WithOut Leave, for various reasons, to various places, for varying amounts of time.

The Army tried giving them punishment laps, kitchen duty, latrine duty, even time in the stockade, but nothing worked—they were still going AWOL.

Finally, someone thought of trying something completely new. They sent the recruit home to his mother, with a note saying he was too immature for Army duty, and would she keep him at home for another year, and then perhaps he could try again. The AWOL problem disappeared.

Something like 50% of new teachers leave the profession within five years, and they don’t, for the most part, go home to mother, but they do leave a hole and a problem in filling their shoes back in the schools.

My guess is that no one conducts serious exit interviews with these teachers, who are perfectly free to leave the profession, for personal reasons, to start a different career, or whatever. But I would argue that a significant portion of them, it would be found if there were serious exit interviews conducted, have actually been pushed out.

People go back and forth arguing whether teaching is a profession or a civil service job like firefighters and police, paid out of municipal taxes.

In general, professionals don’t have clients delivered to them, as students are delivered to teachers, and if a client leaves a lawyer for another lawyer the first lawyer does not call his union representative.

For me, one test of whether a teacher is a professional or not is whether she/he can refuse service to someone. Lawyers who are about to try a case in court before a jury can interview potential jurors and they have, I think, two peremptory challenges, which allow them to say: “This potential juror and that potential juror are excused.” They can exercise this privilege if there are a couple of people they think would prejudice their case or make it harder to win. They don’t have to give any reasons.

A “professional” teacher, on the other hand, is not allowed to look over a class, and say, “This one and that one, I can’t teach.” Even if what it means is if those students stay in their class they may have to give 60% of their time to controlling them, and have only 40% of their time for the other 27 students. And it is worse than that, because the effort to control disruptive students does not come at one time in the class, but is needed to interrupt the rest of the class any number of times.

Teachers are trained and expected not to think about stuff like that. They are taught and expected to believe that it is their job to accept all comers and exercise their “classroom management skills” without being relieved of the burden of any disruptive student, no matter how much damage that student may do to the education of the other students in the class.

So teachers, for the most part, take all students, and their teaching suffers as a result. They are frustrated in their efforts to offer the best that they have to the majority of their students. And, by the way, it is no secret to the students that the school administration doesn’t have enough respect for the teacher’s professional work to remove such a student. And we wonder why people don’t want to be teachers and don’t want their children to be teachers.

Theodore Roosevelt had a guest in the oval office one day, when his daughter Alice came charging through the room screaming. The guest asked the President if he couldn’t control her. TR responded that he could control Alice, or he could be President of the United States, but not both. He was a professional and was treated as such.

I blame teachers for not having the courage to say that if I have to keep this student or that student in my class, the education I am able to offer to the other students will be damaged by 60%. If they did say that, of course they would be judged incompetent in classroom management and probably encouraged to leave the profession.

Many too many do leave the profession, and I believe that many of them were literally pushed out through being prevented from doing their best by the unchecked and disregarded misbehavior of some students. I know that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student, but so was every rapist and murderer, and students who cannot conduct themselves as they should must not be allowed to ruin the careers of our teachers. Perhaps such students should be sent home to their mothers, but they don’t belong in classrooms where important professional academic work is going on.

AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

2011-03-28T10:56:00.001-04:00

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Audience Participation
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 March 2011

I remember once, in the early 1980s, when I was teaching at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I visited a class in European History taught by my most senior colleague, a man with a rich background in history and many years of teaching.

He presented a lot of historical material in that class period, interlaced with interesting historical stories and anecdotes which the students seemed to enjoy. While I envied him for his knowledge and experience, I began to notice that the students were, for the most part at least, laid back and simply being entertained.

They were not being asked to answer challenging questions on the material, or demonstrate the knowledge they had gathered from their homework or outside reading in history, or, in fact, do anything except sit there and be entertained.

This was before the IPod, IPhone, IPad or laptops appeared in classrooms, so no one was texting anyone, but I did see that a few students were not even being bothered enough to be entertained. Here was this fine, educated instructor offering them European history and they were just not paying attention.

I understand that high school classes are only partly voluntary, that if students want a high school diploma they have to take some courses, and history is generally less demanding than calculus, chemistry or physics.

Nevertheless it stayed with me that there was so little “audience participation” from these Juniors and Seniors. I couldn’t see that any of them felt much obligation, or had an opportunity really, to do any work or take part in the class.

Perhaps the teacher was trying to entertain them because a junior colleague was visiting the class, but I don’t think that was it. I think that good teacher, like so many of us, and so many of his colleagues to this day, had bought the idea that it was his job to entertain them, rather than to demand that they work hard to learn history for themselves.

He told good stories, but the students said nothing. They, too, had adopted the notion that a “good” teacher would keep them entertained with the absolute minimum of effort on their part, as though it was the teacher’s responsibility to “make learning happen,” as it were, to them.

The memory of this classroom visit comes back to me as I see so many people in and out of education these days, talk about selecting, monitoring, controlling, and, if necessary removing, teachers who are not sufficiently entertaining, who do not “make students learn” whether they want to or are wiling to work on it themselves or not.

As a high school student in Pennsylvania recently commented, “It’s a teacher’s job to motivate students.” Of course, football and basketball coaches are expected to motivate their athletes as well, but not while those athletes do nothing but sit in the stands and watch the coach do “his thing.” They are expected to take part, to work hard, to get themselves into condition and to carry their load in the enterprise of sports.

A sports clothing store near me sells sweatshirts which say; “Work all Summer, Win all Fall.” I confirmed with the store owner, a part-time high school football coach, that “Work” in this case does not mean get a summer job and save some money. Rather, it means run, lift weights and generally put time in on their physical fitness so that they will be in shape to play sports in the Fall.

I do not know of any equivalent sweatshirt for high school academics: “Study all Summer, Get Good Grades all Fall.” I don’t think there is one, and I think the reason is, in part, that so many of us, including too many teachers, have decided that teachers are the ones who need to work on, and take responsibility for, student academic learning. Their job goes way beyond the coaches’ task of motivating young athletes who “Work all Summer” and come expecting to give it their all in the Fall.

Those who keep saying that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality simply conspire with all those others, including too many students, who support the idea that academic work and student learning are the teachers’ problem, and not one in which the students have a major share. Of course teachers who are forced out of teaching because their students don’t do any academic work suffer, but we should also be concerned with the consequences for so many of our students who have been led down the primrose path of believing that school is not their primary job at which they also must work hard.

NOMENCLATURA

2011-03-21T13:47:00.002-04:00

NAS.org; Articles and Archives
Nomenclatura
March 21, 2011 By Will Fitzhugh

Editor's note: This is a guest article by Will Fitzhugh, founder and publisher of the journal, The Concord Review, which features original papers on history, written by high school students. We intend to publish additional articles by Will Fitzhugh in the future. As with all guest articles published at NAS.org, the opinions expressed therein do not necessarily reflect the official position of the National Association of Scholars. This article is cross posted from The Concord Review blog.

Albert Shanker was one of a kind (sui generis). No one has replaced him or the intelligent analysis of American education in his weekly columns in The New York Times. Known as a powerful advocate of union solidarity and the protection of teachers, he was also the source of the idea for charter schools, and, perhaps most astonishingly, he often spoke of the “nomenclatura of American education.”

He used that term, borrowed from the name for the Soviet bureaucrats and their special privileges and interlocking tentacles, to label the complex interconnections of the many layers of special interest agencies in our education system: organizations of superintendents, school boards, curriculum specialists, counselors, professional development experts, literacy experts of all kinds, and so forth.

I believe he was pointing out that this system of special interest groups had achieved a paralysis of our educational efforts similar to the paralysis that the Soviet nomenclatura brought to the economy and society of the USSR, leading to its spectacular collapse in 1989.

He suggested that any good idea for reform to help our students learn more was likely to be immediately studied, re-interpreted, deconstructed, re-formulated and expounded until all of its value and any hope of its bringing higher standards to American education had been reduced to nothingness. The concern of the special educational nomenclatura for their own jobs, pensions, perks, prerogatives, and policies would manage to overwhelm, confuse and disintegrate any worthwhile initiative for greater academic achievement by students.

Mr. Shanker is gone, and the loss is ours, but the nomenclatura he spoke of is alive and well. With all the best intentions, for example, the Council of Chief State School Officers, and the National Governors Association, cheered on by the Department of Education, major foundations, and others, have taken on the idea of Common Standards for American students.

Unfortunately, they have largely left out curriculum—any clear requirements for our high school students to, for instance, read a history book or write a serious research paper. For a long time, those in the nomenclatura involved in assessment have been reluctant to ask students to demonstrate any knowledge on tests, for fear that they would not have any knowledge to demonstrate. So essay tests, for example, do not ask students to write about literature, history or science, but rather to give opinions off the top of their heads about school uniforms or whether it is more important to be a good student or to be popular, and the like.

For all the talk in the nomenclatura about college and career readiness, no one knows whether our high school students are now expected to read a single complete nonfiction book or write one 20-page research paper before they graduate, because no one asks about that.

One could have hoped that our Edupundits would try to fill the void left by the loss of Mr. Shanker, but sad to say, they have largely become lost in the tangles and tentacles of the nomenclatura themselves. They endlessly debate the intricate problems of class size, teacher selection, budgets, principal education, collective bargaining, school governance, and so on, until they are too exhausted, or perhaps just unable, to take an interest in what our students are being asked to read and write.

Although great efforts have gone into the new Common Core Standards, they contain no actual curriculum, partly because the nomenclatura doesn’t want to engage in difficult political battles over what actual knowledge our students must have. So, even though almost all of the state bureaucracies have signed on to the new Standards, the chance is good that they will collapse of their own weight because they contain no clear requirements for the actual academic work of students.

Our Edupundits are constantly hard at work. Some could be described, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, as “dull, heavy, busy, bold and blind,” and they do meet, discuss, speak, and write a great deal about the details of educational administration and management—details which are very popular with those who seek to apply a business school mindset to the organization of our K-12 education.

However, so long as they continue to ignore the actual academic work of our students, our students will be quite free to do the same. Fortunately, some teachers will continue to require their own high school students to read serious books and write research papers, and to do the most difficult academic work of which they are capable, in history, literature, languages, math and science. But in their efforts they will have received at best no help (or one can only hope no interference) from the nomenclatura, and the Edupundits who are lost in their wake.

BREAKTHROUGH

2011-03-05T09:15:00.011-05:00

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin
EducationNews.org; Houston, Texas

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
8 March 2011

It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.

However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance...” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning...”

This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.

In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.

In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything...(but) It’s a teacher’s job...to give students the motivation to learn.”

It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.

While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; “For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”

As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be—namely the students.

Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, calculus, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.

This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.

Motivation

2011-03-04T14:47:00.010-05:00

A super teacher can help to motivate (almost) all of the students some of the time, and some of the students (almost) all of the time, but even a super teacher can not motivate all of the students all of the time (with apologies to Mr. Lincoln). (And it helps a lot if the students do bring some motivation with them...)

Google Analytics

2011-03-01T13:42:00.001-05:00

Google Analytics tells me we had 836 visitors from 53 countries from 2/21/2011 to 2/27/2011...

Our website (www.tcr.org) has had foreign visitors from: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China (Beijing, Shanghai, Taijin, Youngzhou, etc.), Colombia, Costa Rica, Cote D’Ivoire, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Dubai, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Faroe Islands, France, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Grenada, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Libya, Macao, Macedonia, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Niger, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Sarajevo, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia & Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom (England), United Kingdom (Scotland), Uruguay, Yemen, Vietnam, and Zambia. www.tcr.org/blog

Colin Rhys Hill

2011-02-23T11:34:00.003-05:00

You should know that the Oxford interview tutors for politics spent a lot of time talking to me about my TCR essay in the interview. Oxford doesn't recognize or consider extra-curriculars/sports in the admissions process (no rowing recruits) because they are so focused on academics. So I thought it was pretty high praise of the Review that they were so interested in my essay (at that time it had not won the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize).

Also, FYI, most of the "get into college" publications I read referred to The Concord Review as the "Intel Science Competition" of the humanities and the only serious way to get academic work noticed.

[TCR Author and Emerson Prize winner who went from high school in Atlanta, Georgia
to Christ Church College, Oxford.]

San Diego City College

2011-02-21T13:52:00.002-05:00

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh:

My name is Peter D. Haro and I am the Chair of the History and Political Science Department at San Diego City College in San Diego, California. I read the article about you and The Concord Review in the New York Times about a month ago and I must say that I had a rejuvenating moment as I read about you and The Concord Review. I also believe that student writing is an imperative that must not be allowed to decline. Unfortunately, in today’s culture of testing mania, texting, etc., good research writing is something that is often overlooked or ignored. I have students who are dumbfounded when I tell them that a research assignment is part of their semester grade. However, I do have students that also rise to the occasion and produce outstanding undergraduate research papers. My question to you is, are you accepting submissions from community college students? I think that this would be an excellent opportunity for my students who do intend to transfer and many of them have moved on to top-tier colleges and universities all over the United States, such as Columbia, Cornell, Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA. Please let me know if this is something that The Concord Review is interested in or if you are aware of any similar organizations dedicated to publishing the research of community college students. Thank you for your time in this matter and I hope to hear from you soon.

National Writing Board

2011-02-05T10:22:00.003-05:00

[Professor Stotsky's comment on a four-page assessment report from the National Writing Board on a high school research paper from Dubai] [www.tcr.org]

"What extraordinary feedback for a high school student to get! How lucky he/she is, even if the paper received a poor rating and doesn't get published. That feedback is worth more than probably a whole year of college teaching. How can we get current high school history and English teachers to understand what it means to write like a historian?

This should be a case study example in every workshop that will be given to high school English and history teachers to understand what the Common Core 'literacy' standards imply."

Sandra Stotsky
former Deputy Commissioner of Education in Massachusetts
Professor of Education
University of Arkansas

Diane Ravitch

2011-01-17T09:44:00.004-05:00

Brooklyn, New York
15 January 2011

Dear Will,

I applaud you for your dedication to improving education, lifting genuine standards of accomplishment, and maintaining your high ideals for our youth. Almost alone, you have fought to improve the teaching of history, while encouraging young people to write thoughtfully and clearly about the meaning of the past. Your devotion to history, to good writing, to serious reading, and to the potential of young people should be an inspiration to us all. I wish you the best as you continue to promote sound ideas about education.

Diane Ravitch
Research Professor
New York University

[Professor Ravitch (@DianeRavitch) is the author of, among others, The Great School Wars, Left Back, The Language Police, and The Life and Death of the Great American School System]

The New York Times

2011-01-09T13:15:00.009-05:00

"Journal Showcases Dying Art of the Research Paper", by Sam Dillon

SUDBURY, Mass. — William H. Fitzhugh, the cantankerous publisher of a journal that showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation’s declining academic standards.

“Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.”

His mood brightens, however, when talk turns... [click to read the entire article at NYT]

Joe Nathan Column

2011-01-07T12:58:00.009-05:00

Helping The Concord Review honor and promote “Varsity Academics®”

HometownSource.com; 7 January 2011, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Will Fitzhugh lives and works with a powerful, provocative philosophy: He believes “that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities…

Varsity athletics and athletes are celebrated everywhere. We celebrate Varsity Academics®.” (Fitzhugh’s emphasis) I’d like to help spread his ideas and work.

Since 1988, former public school teacher Fitzhugh has published The Concord Review. (www.tcr.org) This quarterly journal contains one thing: outstanding research papers in history, written by high school students. According to Fitzhugh, “The journal has published [84 issues with] 923 such essays, [from 39 countries] averaging 5,500 words, including endnotes and bibliography.”

So today, I am offering the first five high schools that contact me a small amount of money to work with Fitzhugh. Here’s how.

You agree to pay half of the $40 one-year subscription rate of The Concord Review, and I’ll pay the other half. This is open to schools, parents, community groups—if you pay half, I’ll pay half.

Fitzhugh believes, and I agree, that writing a research paper is not just for those planning to be professors. Reading and assessing sometimes conflicting opinions and versions of events helps young people learn how to gather and evaluate evidence and reach informed opinions. Those are vital skills in a democracy.

The current issue includes essays on Theodore Roosevelt, the Battle of Gettysburg, Sinn Fein, election battles between Henry Cabot Lodge and John F. Kennedy, and several others. Students have written on a vast array of subjects, such as the history of the “Ferris Wheel,” whether Abigail Adams really was a feminist, legacy of medical practices in the Civil War, and efforts to suppress The Wizard of Oz.

Minnesota and Wisconsin high school students have published essays in TCR. The current issue contains essays written by students in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, as well as Canada and Korea.

High school students from the U.S. and other countries have written these essays as part of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, independent study and other challenging classes. TCR essays have helped students be admitted to places like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Princeton, Macalester, Stanford, etc.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have praised the journal. His work has been commended by the late American Federation of Teachers president Al Shanker, historians David McCullough and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr and in letters from hundreds of students, teachers and parents.

Fitzhugh, now in his 70s, has made this his life’s work. What a wonderful contribution to young people, and this country.

So many groups promote high school sports and varsity athletics. And sports can be very valuable. But how about promoting what Fitzhugh calls “Varsity Academics®?” Will you, or a group you know, please help?

Joe Nathan, former public school teacher, administrator, PTA president, parent of 3 public school graduates now directs the Center for School Change at Macalester College. Reactions welcome, jnathan@macalester.edu

Singapore American School

2011-01-04T15:42:00.006-05:00

So, I passed out The Concord Review at the beginning of class.

I didn't say anything except: "Take a look at this."

Here it is 10 minutes later, as I type this, and everyone is reading it and not saying a word.

Amazing! What a powerful tool. Great idea, Bill [Bill Rives]

Rick Bisset
Singapore American School
History Department
SINGAPORE

HS Author Inspiration [samples from letters]

2010-12-16T11:46:00.003-05:00

[Albert Shanker understood: (1993) “Publication in The Concord Review is a kind of prize—a recognition of excellence and a validation of intellectual achievement—that could be for young historians what the Westinghouse [Intel] Science Competition is for young scientists. Equally important, the published essays can let youngsters see what other students their own age are capable of and what they themselves can aspire to.”]

Jesse Esch: “Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank you, on behalf of all students who have been called upon to attempt the seemingly insurmountable task of writing an in-depth history paper, for providing us with plentiful examples of good writing and good history.”

Candace Choi: “I attend a public high school with teachers who rarely, if ever, assign any paper that exceeds two thousand words, much less a research paper. Therefore, I am writing my paper as independent research...I thank you for this great opportunity you are providing for high schoolers all around the globe. It is indeed rare to have a publication that showcases works of secondary students.”

Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse: “As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women’s history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts...Writing about the Ladies’ Land League, I finally understood and appreciated the beautiful complexity of history...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.”

Shounan Ho: “Although history has always been my favorite subject, I had never written a paper with this extensive research before. After reading the high quality of essays in The Concord Review, I was very inspired to try to write one myself. I thought it was a significant opportunity to challenge and expand my academic horizons. Thus during the summer before my Senior year, I began doing the research for my own paper...”

Samuel Brudner: “No one from my school had ever been published in the Review, and I’ll admit I was unfamiliar with it at first. A little research, however, alerted me to its outstanding quality, and I revisited my paper with my teacher’s suggestions and a sense of the journal’s high standards in mind. After several months of further research and revisions, I completed something I thought would be worth submitting. The process of revision was as transformative for me as it was for my paper, not only better informing me about an important controversy, but also leading me to think very deeply about certain ideas at play in the world. Studying a subject as closely as The Concord Review requires was a valuable experience for me, as I am sure it has been for many students. I cannot thank you enough for motivating me to achieve, and for recognizing the hard work I put into my paper. I am honored to see my paper among the fine examples of terrific historical research published in your journal.”

Kaitlin Marie Bergan: “When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it. While most of the writing I have completed for my high school history classes has been formulaic and limited to specified topics, The Concord Review motivated me to undertake independent research in the development of the American Economy. The chance to delve further into a historical topic was an incredible experience for me and the honor of being published is by far the greatest I have ever received. This coming autumn, I will be starting at Oxford University, where I will be concentrating in Modern History.”

Daniel Winik: “As many others have no doubt told you, your publication of The Concord Review is a noble enterprise with tremendous value for young historians....The Concord Review not only recognizes such work but also encourages it. Your publication of my paper has inspired several of my classmates to consider submitting theirs. I can only hope that with your jubilee [50th] issue, you will begin to receive the accolades you deserve. Once more, I thank you for honoring me and for recognizing the work of young historians everywhere.”

Colin Rhys Hill: “Also, for your information, most of the “get into college” publications I read referred to The Concord Review as the “Intel Science Competition” of the humanities and the only serious way to get academic work noticed...”

Antoine Cadot-Wood: “The paper I wrote three years ago for The Concord Review was an undertaking beyond what I had attempted up to that point, and I have continued to write papers on history frequently ever since. The [Emerson] prize will be put to good use, as I embark this week on a six-month trip to China. I will be attending a program to continue to improve my Mandarin, with the goal of being able to use it for research as my college career continues. Thank you for providing me with such a great opportunity during my last year of high school, and I hope that The Concord Review continues to publish for many years more.”

Jessica Leight: “At CRLHS, a much-beloved history teacher suggested to me that I consider writing for The Concord Review, a publication that I had previously heard of, but knew little about. He proposed, and I agreed, that it would be an opportunity for me to pursue more independent work, something that I longed for, and hone my writing and research skills in a project of considerably broader scope than anything I had undertaken up to that point...I likewise hope that the range of academic opportunities and challenges I discovered beyond my school, that contributed to make my experience in secondary school so rewarding and paved the way for a happy and successful career as an undergraduate [summa at Yale] and (I hope) as a graduate student [Rhodes Scholar], will still be available for them [my children]. Among those opportunities, of course, is The Concord Review. Twenty or twenty-five years from now, I will be looking for it.”

NO HS SCHOLARS NEED APPLY

2010-12-12T08:45:00.006-05:00

Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12x20-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.

Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students...No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn’t mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.

In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, find any notice from the Globe.

International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don’t care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.

The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that at least in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don’t think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.

ASK STUDENTS (for once)

2010-12-08T10:01:00.003-05:00

Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee’s new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our HS students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.

Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (out of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.

When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.

Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their “hands-on” experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.

What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.

This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000 to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.

Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let’s, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let’s give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.

This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.

I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.

HELP FROM STUDENTS?

2010-12-07T11:06:00.005-05:00

I have argued lately that students in our schools, who, by end of high school, have logged nearly 12,960 hours of classroom observation, compared with the pitiful few hours for which the official teacher evaluator in the school has time, but that those young observers are never asked for their views on any aspect of education reform. No one asks them how they think teachers should be selected or trained, or about anything else. Unlike many companies, we do not even conduct exit interviews when our best students leave our schools. When this idea is offered, many object that students are, after all, only students, forgetting, no doubt, that every Nobel Prize winner, every summa cum laude graduate of Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT and Harvard, and every college professor, was once a student sitting there and observing, and even thinking about, our education reform efforts. We spend billions and billions “giving help” to our students, but we have perhaps forgotten what Douglas McGregor wrote about the provision of help in 1960. It is worth reading again...

Douglas McGregor, Sloan School, MIT, The Human Side of Enterprise
Boston: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1960, p. 163-164

“The Appropriate Role of Staff

The appropriate role of any major staff group...is that of providing professional help to all levels of management. In some cases, such as engineering, the help is provided primarily to one or two functions, e.g., manufacturing and sales. In other cases, such as accounting and personnel, the help is provided to all other functions.

The hierarchical nature of the organization has tended to focus attention on help given to the level at which the staff group reports. Rewards and punishments for staff members come from there. Moreover, prestige and status are greater the higher level of ‘attachment.’ In large companies, where there are both headquarters and field staff groups, it is particularly important that the headquarters groups recognize and accept their responsibilities for providing help to all levels of management.

The provision of professional help is a subtle and complex process. Perhaps the most critical point—and the one hardest to keep clearly in mind—is that help is always defined by the recipient. Taking an action with respect to someone because ‘it is best for him,’ or because ‘it is for the good of the organization,’ may be influencing him, but it is not providing help unless he so perceives it. Headquarters staff groups tend to rationalize many of their activities on the field organization in a paternalistic manner and, as a consequence, fail to see that they are relying on inappropriate methods of control. When the influence is unsuccessful, the usual reaction occurs: The recipients of the ‘help’ are seen as resistant, stupid, indifferent to organizational needs, etc. The provision of help, like any other form of control or influence, requires selective adaptation to natural law. One important characteristic of ‘natural law’ in this case is that help is defined by the recipient...”

INTERESTED OBSERVERS

2010-12-01T10:09:00.005-05:00

[Offered for the Commentary section of Education Week]

INTERESTED OBSERVERS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

1 December 2010

In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch “jaundiced,” and “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including “student feedback,” which Alter observes, parenthetically, is “(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)...”

Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?

I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.

Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.

Hasn’t a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that “below” the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: “Can we not—using W.C. Field’s paraphrase—see the handwriting on the floor?”

But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.

We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don’t you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?

But we don’t think to ask them. We don’t benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!

Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.

While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don’t we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?

We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn’t we? And brought the astronauts safely home...surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn’t we?

From Hong Kong

2010-11-29T12:53:00.005-05:00

Hong Kong

23 November 2010

Mr. Will Fitzhugh 
Founder
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Please accept my essay submission: “Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Mission in China: 1583-1610.”

I’m a Junior at the Chinese International School (www.cis.edu.hk) in Hong Kong. CIS is a K-12 bilingual English-Mandarin school. I am fluent in both languages, and am now pursuing the IB Diploma. I intend to edit this essay and submit it as my IB extended essay.

My favorite subject is history, and my teacher, Mr. Christopher Caves, supervised the writing of this essay. Allow me to explain how I decided upon my subject. Last spring I was on holiday in Beijing with my family and we visited a special exhibition at the Capital Museum honoring the life of Matteo Ricci. He was the Italian scholar and priest who led the pioneering Jesuit mission to China in the late 16th century. There are Jesuit schools and colleges in Hong Kong and Macau named after Ricci, but I confess I did not know anything more about him. It turns out that this year marks the 400th anniversary of his death, and the exhibition was a showcase of his intellectually astonishing life. The exhibition was stunning. On display were a number of his books written in Latin, Portuguese, and Chinese; his journals; scientific and musical instruments he brought to China from Europe; and copies of some of the incredible world maps he created. As my essay explains, Matteo Ricci was the first major conduit connecting China to the West, and he left an indelible mark on both worlds in terms of a mutual appreciation for culture and civilization.

By chance, my mother had read Jonathan Spence’s wonderful book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, and I read it soon after returning from Beijing. I was enthralled at the breadth and depth of Ricci’s intellect, and his devotion to his mission. I was also amazed by his mastery of Chinese. I have found it a difficult language to learn, so I can only imagine what it was like for him to master the Confucian classics four centuries ago. Blood, toil, tears and sweat. I felt deeply humbled.

The large-scale world maps he started producing in 1584 are amazing. He cleverly put China in the middle of the world to please the Ming Emperor Wan Li. Attached are copies of a few (reprinted with permission) which give you a glimpse of his genius.

I thank you for giving high school students like myself a chance to pursue our passions in depth. This process of research, discovery, organizing thoughts and references, and continuous redrafting has made me much more appreciative of historical scholarship. Regardless of whether my essay is selected, I hope you enjoy reading it and learning about this fascinating man, whose life and work have opened up my eyes to the beauty of the humanities across cultures.

Sincerely yours,
Caitlin Lu
Class of 2012
Chinese International School (Hong Kong)

PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES

2010-11-15T12:42:00.004-05:00

There are many suggestions that the best teachers have an obligation
to teach in the worst schools. Perhaps they would be more likely to do so
if they were granted a few privileges, such as the peremptory
challenge available to lawyers in court trials....

PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

15 November 2010

The conductor pauses, waiting for the coughing to die down before he raises his baton. The surgeon looks over her team, making sure all are in place and ready to work, before she makes the first incision. The prosecuting attorney pauses to study the jury for a little while before making his opening statement.

All these highly trained people need certain conditions to be met before they can begin their vital work with the necessary confidence that it can be carried out well. If the audience is too noisy, the conductor must wait. If the team is not in their places, the surgeon will not begin. If the members of the jury have not been examined, the attorney will not have to present his case before them.

Only schoolteachers must start their classes in the absence of the calm and attention which are essential to the careful exchange of information and ideas. Only the schoolteacher must attempt the delicate surgery of attaching knowledge and removing ignorance, with no team to help. Only schoolteachers must accept all who are assigned to the class, without the benefit of the peremptory challenges the attorney may use to shape his audience, and give his case the benefit of the doubt.

The Sanskrit word for a teaching, sutra, is the source of the English word, suture, and indeed the stitching of learning to the understanding in young minds is a particularly delicate form of surgery. The teacher does not deal with meat, but with ideas and knowledge, attempting to remove misconceptions and provide truth. The teacher has to do this, not with one anaesthetized patient, and a team of five, but with twenty-five or thirty students and no help.

Those who attend concerts want to be quiet, so that they and their fellows can hear and appreciate the music. Those who come in for surgery want the doctor to have all the help she needs and to have her work under the very best possible conditions, because the outcome of the operation is vital to their interests. The legal system tries to weed out jurors with evident biases, and works in many ways to protect the process which allows both the prosecution and the defense to do their best within the law. The jury members have been made aware of the importance of their mission, and of their duty to attend and to decide with care.

Students, on the other hand, are constantly exposed to a fabulously rich popular culture which assures them that teachers are losers and so is anyone who takes the work of learning in school seriously. Too many single parents feel they have lost the power to influence their offspring, especially as they become adolescents, and many are in any case more concerned that their youngsters be happy and make friends, than that they respect and listen to their teachers, bring home a lot of homework, and do it in preparation for the serious academic work that awaits them the next day.

Students are led to believe that to reject authority and to neglect academic work are evidence of their independence, their rebellion against the dead hand of the older generation. We must of course make an exception here for those fortunate children, many but not all Asian, who reject this foolish idea, and instead apply themselves diligently to their studies, grateful for the effort of their teachers and for the magical opportunity of 12 years of free education.

But what they see as a privilege worthy of their very best efforts, many other students see as a burden, an wanted intrusion on their social and digital time of entertainment. A study of the Kaiser Foundation last year found that the average U.S. student spends more than six hours each day with some form, or combination of forms, of electronic entertainment, and the Indiana Study of High School Student Engagement studied 80,000 teenagers and found that 55% spent three hours or less each week on their homework and still managed to get As and Bs.

We hear stories about the seriousness of students in China and India and South Korea, but we are inclined to ignore them, perhaps as the Romans discounted rumors about the Goths and the Visigoths until it was too late. We hear about our students doing more poorly in international academic competitions the longer they stay in school, but we prefer to think that our American character and our creativity will carry us through somehow, even as we can see with our own eyes how many of the things we use every day are “Made in China.”

Part of the responsibility lies with our teachers in the schools, overburdened and unappreciated as they are. Their unions fight for better pay and working conditions, but say nothing about their academic work. Teachers, too, like lawyers, should demand peremptory challenges, so that they can say they will not be able to teach this one and that one, without damaging the work of the whole class. They, as much as the surgeons who are cutting meat, must be able to enforce close attention to the serious work of suturing learning and minds in their classes. And like the conductor, they must be given the attention that is essential if the music of their teaching is to be heard and appreciated. Teachers who do not demand these conditions are simply saying that their academic work is not important enough to deserve such protections and conditions, and as a result, parents and students are encouraged to see it in the same light.

2010-11-05T09:36:00.002-04:00

ALBERT SHANKER ECHOES

In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote:

“...It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously.”

================

In a June 1993 letter to the MacArthur Foundation, Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote:

“...Equally important, the published essays can let youngsters see what other students their own age are capable of and what they themselves can aspire to. The Review also has a vital message for teachers. American education suffers from an impoverishment of standards at all levels. We see that when we look at what is expected of students in other industrialized nations and at what they achieve. Could American students achieve at that level? Of course, but our teachers often have a hard time knowing exactly what they can expect of their students or even what a first-rate essay looks like. The Concord Review sets a high but realistic standard; and it could be invaluable for teachers trying to recalibrate their own standards of excellence.”

...Let me say that I think The Concord Review could be especially useful to poor and disadvantaged children and their teachers. Last year, I was privileged to hear John Jacob, the president of the National Urban League, talk about how poor black children, in particular, need to be held up to higher academic standards. Jacob believes that, instead of lowering our sights, we must raise them and demand high academic performance. Among the specific standards he suggested was that every African-American child—and in fact every American child—write a 25-page paper in order to graduate from high school. I think Jacob is right. I also think The Concord Review could be a vehicle for raising the sights of disadvantaged children and their teachers. And I plan to work with leaders in one or more of the American Federation of Teachers’ urban locals to help set up special issues of The Concord Review for their cities similar to the special International Baccalaureate issue the Review recently published.”

2010-11-01T09:00:00.002-04:00

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES

October 21, 2010

The Concord Review has, over the years, deeply engaged and inspired hundreds of high school students to conduct research and then to write full-length, thoughtful and publishable essays of the highest quality.

I commend your dedication to this effort.

Carole M. Watson
Deputy Chairman
National Endowment for the Humanities
Washington, DC

2010-10-28T12:24:00.003-04:00

Curriculum Matters; Education Week

Why Students Don't Write Research Papers in High School

By Catherine Gewertz on October 25, 2010 11:53 AM

Those of you who lament the state of high school students' research and writing skills will be interested in a discussion that's been unfolding at the National Association of Scholars. It began a couple weeks ago with the publication of a previously undisclosed report on why students are not learning—let alone mastering— the skills of crafting substantial research papers.

The report is here, and the explanation of its origins and disclosure is described in the press release here. A response from a frustrated high school English teacher is here.

The report found that most social studies/history teachers never assign moderately long research papers. Most of the teachers—whose student loads often surpass 150—said they can't afford the time necessary to grade such papers.

This is hardly a new conversation. Consider the work done by Achieve and ACT on this issue, and the look Cincinnati took at it last year. And Will Fitzhugh, who was the driving force behind the recently disclosed paper, has been tirelessly advocating for rigorous high school research papers for years. A former history teacher, he runs The Concord Review, the only journal [in the world] that publishes high school students' history research papers, and blogs as well. (He sums up his views on the importance of research papers in this EdWeek commentary, from a few years ago, and more recently on The Washington Post's Answer Sheet blog.)

On a related note, another recent paper pinpointed a fragmented high school English curriculum and a neglect of close-reading skills as key explanations for teenagers' poor reading skills. That paper was written by one of the architects of Massachusetts' academic standards, former state board member Sandra Stotsky, and published by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW).

While the reflections on students' mastery of reading, writing and research skills are hardly new, they take on an interesting dimension (and more urgency, perhaps?) with the widespread adoption of common standards that envision a significant shift in how literacy skills are taught.

2010-10-24T10:34:00.002-04:00

Digital Dilettantism

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.

For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.

For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.

One recent two-year grant, “for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people's ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers,” went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.

The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.

Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn’t help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.

The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write more about themselves as well.

Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.

In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.

But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to “the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years).”

The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what “digital learning” actually means, if anything).

This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation’s schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.

2010-10-16T13:43:00.002-04:00

EDUPUNDIT MYOPIA

The consensus among Edupundits is that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement.

I argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

EdNews.org, 29 March 2007
Columnist EdNews.org, Houston, Texas

Edupundits have chosen very complex subject matter for their investigations and reports. They study and write about dropouts, vouchers, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, budgets, curricula in all subjects, union contracts, school management issues, and many many more.

Meanwhile, practically all of them fail to give any attention to the basic purpose of schools, which is to have students do academic work. Almost none of them seems inclined to look past the teacher to see if the students are, for instance, reading any nonfiction books or writing any term papers.

Of course all of the things they do pay attention to are vitally important, but without student academic work they mean very little. Now, I realize there are state standards in math and reading, and some states test for writing after a fashion, but no state standards ask if students have read a history book while they were in school or written a substantial research paper, and neither do the SAT, ACT, or NAEP tests.

Basic math skills are important, and current standards try to find out if those graduating from our high schools can do math at the 8th-grade level, and a similar standard is in place for reading, but for the time being, higher education and the workplace are still not well designed for students with 8th-grade math and reading skills.

Students in Massachusetts who pass the state test for graduation, the MCAS, find out when they take their college placement tests that they have come up against a different level of expectation. In Massachusetts, more than 60% of those who go to community colleges have to take remedial courses and 34% of those who go to the four-year colleges have to take remedial courses. As the Chancellor of Higher Education in the Commonwealth has pointed out, the state is now paying for high school twice. The students have to learn to do in college what they should have learned to do in the high schools.

Once they are allowed into college courses for credit, they encounter nonfiction books and term paper requirements which they hadn't been asked to manage in high school.

After college, there are tremendous efforts at remediation required as well. The Business Roundtable has reported that their member companies are spending more than three billion dollars [>$3,000,000,000] every year on remedial writing courses for their employees, both hourly and salaried, in about equal numbers.

One of the sad and damaging consequences of this myopia among Edupundits is that everyone but students is imagined to be responsible for student academic work. As Paul Zoch has so regularly pointed out, the message that sends down the line to students is that their job is to get through high school with a minimum of work, while it is someone else's responsibility to educate them. The result is that, whatever gets decided about dropouts, vouchers, union contracts, budgets, textbooks, teacher selection and training, school governance, curricula in all subjects, school management issues, and the like, our students are not working hard enough on their own education.

Of course there are exceptions, students whose teachers demand that they read history books and write research papers, and there are students who do that on their own, in independent studies, partly because they have become aware that they must meet more rigorous academic demands down the road, and they are determined to get themselves ready.

But far too many of our high school students are waiting for someone else to set demanding academic standards, and when they don't, the students accept that, and get jobs, play sports, lead an active social life, spend hours a day on video games, and so forth. But after they slide through high school and emerge, they are mightily sorry they were not asked to do more and held to a higher standard for their own academic work.

We should not kid them about the need for serious reading and academic expository writing, and when we do, we are not educating them, we are cheating them. Edupundits should heed the old Hindu saying, "Whatever you give your attention to, grows in your life." The actual academic work of students while they are in school deserves a lot more attention than it has been receiving from them so far.

2010-10-14T11:08:00.002-04:00

National Association of Scholars

Peter Wood, President
Princeton, New Jersey

October 14, 2010

Why aren’t our high schools doing a better job of preparing college-bound students in academic expository writing? And in particular, to master the research paper?

The question was raised in a research project a decade ago by Will Fitzhugh, one of the great unsung champions of school reform in the United States. If ever there were a person who deserved a MacArthur “genius grant” and was doomed never to get it, Fitzhugh would be the man. A retired history teacher living in Sudbury, Massachusetts, he has dedicated the last twenty-three years to publishing The Concord Review, a quarterly journal dedicated to showcasing the best history papers written by high school students (from 39 countries so far). He dreams of making academic excellence as important to American schools as varsity athletics. And he has been tireless in making his case....

2010-10-06T12:19:00.005-04:00

PAUL ZOCH REVISITED

"Mankind needs more to be reminded, than informed."
—Samuel Johnson

"We must change our attitudes about school, the nature of young people, and how one achieves in academics. No school reform will succeed without a far-reaching transformation that goes beyond teachers and curriculum."

Doomed to Fail
Paul A. Zoch, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004, pp. 200-202

American schools must change student attitudes by making clear the purpose of being in school. Students must understand that going to school is their job, something most do not now realize. Many students, thinking it is the teacher’s job to do what will “make” them smart, feel little need to take their classes seriously. End-of-course tests and an altered view of how success is achieved would help students focus their efforts and give them a feeling that school is a real mission, one that demands seriousness of purpose, dedication, and diligence. If they study more diligently, they might even come to enjoy learning and the feeling of real accomplishment.

Students should be told in plain language why they must take academic courses in school, why society has decided that they must learn math, English, the sciences, a foreign language, history and social studies. Most students do not understand why they must learn these subjects; they tend to think of school only in terms of a future job. Some say they must learn such things in order to be well-rounded individuals, which is not a bad answer. But students should begin learning from their earliest school days that academic subjects are the primary means to understanding world civilization. These disciplines are essential to the development of an educated person who will be the equal of all other educated persons in America’s republican democracy. To many Americans, academic subjects seem to be required because of mere tradition.

Changing what is expected of students will simultaneously change the attitudes of teachers, improving the morale and status of the teaching profession. The knee-jerk tendency in the United States is to charge teachers with incompetence for any perceived failure of their students or their schools. Considering what teachers are expected to do—make students smart without causing them stress, and make their time at school a joyful, emotionally fulfilling experience—teachers cannot but fail and thus incur society’s contempt. Placing responsibility for learning on the students, and expecting teachers only to present competent lessons (as teachers in Japan and other countries are expected to do), might retain many of the large percentage of teachers who leave within the first three years, and might reduce the burnout factor among veterans.

At the same time we should change the relative responsibilities of teachers and students, we should reduce the number of hours teachers teach per day. So important is such a change that Stevenson and Stigler make it their first recommendation for changing the schools. Teacher in the United States should teach the same number of hours that teachers in other countries do—approximately four a day or slightly less, instead of five or more. Reducing teaching hours will relieve teachers and also make it possible to lengthen the school day so that teachers can require failing students to attend tutoring sessions. Many teachers do not tutor as willingly as they should, one reason being that at the end of the day they are exhausted and have lesson plans to make, tests and quizzes to grade, and paperwork to complete. With more time during the day for non-instructional work, teachers can be required to tutor students who want and need help. Mandatory after-school tutoring for failing students should take precedence over all extra-curricular activities.

Our educational system must look to students and what they do as the fount of success. A few of the authors quoted in this book have noted the irony that in the United States, though famous for our work ethic, in our schools we don’t expect students to work at their studies. One observer noted that to study the relationship between school success and character development, he had to go to Japan. We must change our attitudes about school, the nature of young people, and how one achieves in academics. No school reform will succeed without a far-reaching transformation that goes beyond teachers and curriculum. We need also to change the attitudes of the education experts, who continually promote an unworkable and unfeasible educational philosophy and then flay teachers for their inability to meet impossible expectations.

Education is so important in the United States that we expect teachers, who are professionals trained in pedagogical science, to get the job done. We sincerely want all students to learn so that they may lead good, productive lives. But teachers, parents, and adults cannot do it for them. The nation is looking for educational excellence in the wrong place, in the actions of teachers. We must instead expect students to create their success, give them our full support and guidance in their labors, encourage and expect them to try again with renewed effort and persistence when they fail, and reward them for their success...

2010-10-05T09:43:00.003-04:00

66th NACAC Conference

St. Louis, Missouri, October 1, 2010
Friday Morning Panel on the 500-word College Personal Essay
Panelists: Christopher Burkmar, Associate Dean of Admissions at Princeton;
Will Fitzhugh, Founder, The Concord Review; Jonathan Reider, Director of College Counseling, San Francisco University High School

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

I propose a thought experiment for what it may be worth.

What if we change the name of our organization from the National Association of College Admissions Counselors to: The National Association of College Completion Counselors?

Note that the new name is more comprehensive, as Completion presupposes Admission, but, as is all too obvious these days, Admission cannot assume Completion.

You are all at least as aware as I am of the numbers about the need for academic remediation in Higher Education and the numbers of dropouts from college, but I will review a couple of them. Tony Wagner of Harvard reports that in general, including community colleges, half of college freshman do not return for a second year, and a huge percentage of our HS graduates take six years or more to complete a Bachelor’s degree, and four years or more to complete an Associate’s degree.

Students who need remediation in basic academic skills are more likely to drop out, and the more remedial courses they have to take, the more likely they are to drop out.

The California State College System reported at a conference last Fall that 47% of their Freshman students are in remedial reading courses.

We may assume that these students have had 12 years of reading in school already, but they still can’t read well enough to do college work, at least by California standards.

Reading is not calculus or chemistry, it is just a basic academic skill in which we expect that the schools have offered practice for 12 years.

Now, a youngster can start to play Pop Warner football at age 6. By graduation from HS, he could have had 12 years of practice at the basic skills of football. Imagine athletes reporting for a college football team, only to be told that they need a year of remedial blocking and tackling practice before they can be allowed to play. It seems unlikely that they would not have learned basic blocking and tackling skills in their previous 12 years of playing football.

I am not just talking about improvement here. Of course, students in college can learn to read more difficult material in new academic subjects. And of course college athletes can get better at all the skills needed for success in their sports.

But we are talking about basic, entry-level academic skills. 47% of freshmen in the California State College System don’t have them in reading, after 12 years of practice in school.

When I went into the Army in 1960, I had never fired a rifle before, but in a week or two on the range in Basic Training, I was able to meet the standard for “Sharpshooter.” I missed “Expert” by one target.

I am convinced that if I had had 12 years of practice with my M-1 Garand, I really could have scored “Expert”—perhaps even by the higher standards of the U.S. Marine Corps.

I have to confess I am stunned that so many of our high school students, having been awarded one of our high school diplomas, and having been accepted at one of our colleges, are found to be unable to read well enough to do college work.

The Diploma to Nowhere report of the Strong American Schools project said that more than one million of our high school graduates are now in remedial courses each year when they get to college.

It also notes that these students, having satisfied our requirements for the high school diploma, and graduated—having applied to college and been accepted—are told when they get there, that they can’t make the grade without perhaps an additional year of work on their academic fundamentals. Naturally this experience is surprising to them, given that they satisfied our requirements for graduation and admission to college, and embarrassing, humiliating and discouraging, as well.

As you may know, my particular interest since 1987 has been in student history research papers at the high school level. I have published 912 essays by secondary students from 44 states and 38 other countries over the last 23 years.

Some of the students who wrote the required Extended Essays for the IB Diploma and were published in The Concord Review, and some of our other authors as well, have told me that in their freshman dorms they are often mobbed by their peers who are facing a serious term paper for the first time and have no idea how to do one.

It is absurd to contemplate, but imagine a well-prepared college basketball player being mobbed for help by his peers who had never been taught to dribble, pass, or shoot in high school.

If even colleges like Harvard and Stanford require all their Freshmen to take a year of expository writing, that may not exactly be remedial writing, but I would argue that a student who has completed an Extended Essay for the International Baccalaureate Diploma, and a student who has published a 12,000-word paper on Irish Nationalism or a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War for The Concord Review, should perhaps be allowed to skip that year of remedial writing. The author of the Soviet-Afghan War paper, from Georgia, is now at Christ Church College, Oxford, where I believe he did not have to spend a year in an expository writing course, and the author of the Irish Nationalism paper is at Princeton, where she may very well have been asked to spend a year in such a course.

If so many of our students need to learn how to do academic writing (not to mention how to read), what are they spending time on in high school?

I believe that writing is the most dumbed-down activity we now have in our schools. The AP program includes no research paper, only responses to document-based questions, and most high school Social Studies departments leave academic writing tasks to the English Department.

Now, in general, English Departments favor personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, but college admission requirements have given them an additional task on which they are working with students. Teaching writing takes time, not only in preparing and monitoring students, but more especially in reading what students have written and offering corrections and advice. Time for one kind of writing necessarily means less time for another kind.

Personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay have already taken a lot of the time of English teachers and their students, but as college admissions officers ask for the 500-word personal essay, time has to be given to teaching for that.

While high school English departments work with their students on the 500-word personal essay, they do not have the time to give to serious term papers, so they don’t do them, and I believe that is why so many students arrive in our colleges in need of a one-year course on the expository writing they didn’t get a chance to do in school.

Lots of the public high school students whose work I publish simply do their papers as independent studies, as there is no place for serious academic writing like that in the curriculum.

I would suggest that if college admissions officers would ask instead for an academic research paper from applicants in place of the short little personal essay, while it would be more work for them, it would make it more likely that students they accept would arrive ready for college work, perhaps even ready enough to allow them to skip that year of expository writing they now have to sit through, and they could take an actual academic course in its place.

Making sure that our high school students arrive in college able to manage college-level nonfiction reading and academic expository writing might really help us earn our new credential as professionals who work not just to help students get accepted at college, but to help them complete college as well.

AUTHOR LETTER

2010-09-26T12:22:00.003-04:00

From: Oliver Kim
Date: September 26, 2010 5:17:44 AM EDT
To: fitzhugh@tcr.org
Subject: Thank you from Singapore

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you for publishing my essay on the Maginot Line in this year’s fall issue of The Concord Review. Receiving your letter was at once joyous and humbling.

From the rise of the standardized test as a measure of academic success, to the subordination and disappearance of the long-form essay in the high school curriculum, the humanities appear to be losing ground in education. In light of the numerous competitions and accolades available to students of math and the hard sciences, options for students of the humanities, especially history, are comparatively few. The Concord Review stands alone as an exemplar for quality writing by lovers of history.

Thanks to your hard work, my school has all freshman students write a long-form historical essay based on the model of the essays that appear in The Concord Review. All students of AP European History are required to do the same, and, even in those classes that do not require long-form essays, The Concord Review is employed as a standard of quality and academic rigor. Though I cannot speak for my whole school, I can say that, anecdotally, this project has sparked historical curiosity and illuminated unexplored talents in my classmates.

Again, thank you for publishing my essay. I hope that the Review will find a solution to its financial woes and continue inspiring future generations of historians.

Warm regards,

Oliver Kim
Singapore American School
[Class of 2011]

AUTHOR LETTER

2010-09-25T10:14:00.003-04:00

Mr. William Fitzhugh, Founder
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776

May 17, 2006

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you so much for publishing my essay on the Irish Ladies’ Land League in the Spring 2006 issue of The Concord Review. I am honored that my writing was chosen to appear alongside such thoughtful work in your journal.

When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports. A week before a paper was due, I would visit the local university library, check out all available books on my assigned topic and write as articulate a summary as possible. Such assignments are a useful strategy for learning to build a coherent argument, but they do not teach students to appreciate the subtleties and difficulties of writing good history. Consequently, few students really understand how history is constructed.

As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task. At first, I did check out every relevant book from the library, running up some impressive fines in the process, but I learned to skim bibliographies and academic databases to find more interesting texts. I read about women’s history, agrarian activism and Irish nationalism, considering the ideas of feminist and radical historians alongside contemporary accounts.

Gradually, I came to understand the central difficulty of writing history: how do you resurrect, in words, events that took place in a different place and time? More importantly, how do you resurrect the past only using the words of someone else? In the words of Carl Becker, “History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning.”

Flipping through my note cards, the ideas began to fit themselves together in my mind. I was not certain, but there was an excitement in being forced to think rigorously; in wrestling with difficult problems I knew I could not entirely solve. Writing about the Ladies’ Land League, I finally understood and appreciated the beautiful complexity of history.

In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.

Sincerely,
Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse
Class of 2009, Columbia University
North Central High School, Indianapolis, Indiana 2005

2010-09-16T12:17:00.001-04:00

HARVARD COLLEGE
Office of Admissions and Financial Aid

September 15, 2010

Mr. Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA

Dear Will,

We agree with your argument that high school students who have read a complete nonfiction book or two, and written a serious research paper or two, will be better prepared for college academic work than those who have not.

The Concord Review, founded in 1987, remains the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we in the Admissions Office here are always glad to see reprints of papers which students have had published in the Review and which they send to us as part of their application materials. Over the years, more than 10% (103) of these authors have come to college at Harvard.

Since 1998, when it started, we have been supporters of your National Writing Board, which is still unique in supplying independent three-page assessments of the research papers of secondary students. The NWB reports also provide a useful addition to the college application materials of high school students who are seeking admission to selective colleges.

For all our undergraduates, even those in the sciences, such competence, both in reading nonfiction books and in the writing of serious research papers, is essential for academic success. Some of our high schools now place too little emphasis on this, but The Concord Review and the National Writing Board are doing a national service in encouraging our secondary students, and their teachers, to spend more time and effort on developing these abilities.

Sincerely,

William R. Fitzsimmons
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
WRF:oap

Administrative Office: 86 Brattle Street • Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

2010-09-15T08:29:00.004-04:00

ST. MAUR INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

From: Glenn Scoggins
Date: September 5, 2010 7:44:12 PM EDT
To: Will Fitzhugh
Cc: College , Timothy Matsumoto
Subject: RE: Singapore Emerson

Dear Will,

Thank you for sharing this letter with me. I enjoyed [Ms.] Wei Li’s paper immensely and learned a lot from it that I had never known, even though I have been teaching about this time period in medieval Spain as part of the middle year in the three-year World History course at Saint Maur (Grades 8 through 10) which I oversee. I will be able to use this information in class to make more sense of the era and its impact on modern Spain and relations between Islam and the West.

Kaya Nagayo [Ainu Trade, 1650-1720, Spring 2010 issue] graduated with honors from Saint Maur in June and is entering her first year at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she will major in History with a concentration on Russia and other Slavic countries of central and eastern Europe, as well as Russian relations with Japan. She has been interested in this area for several years, and wrote about 2000 words of her Extended Essay (on trade relations between the Ainu and the Wajin of Tokugawa Japan) on Ainu trade with Russians and other people of Siberia, Sakhalin, the Kurile islands, and the Kamchatka peninsula—all of which had to be cut out to make the IB 4000-word limit. This was a valuable experience for her in editing her own work and sharpening her focus.

I continue to support and congratulate you and The Concord Review for your valuable work in maintaining and raising standards and expectations for young scholars around the world. It has a ripple effect—when Kaya’s paper was published, every student at Saint Maur realized that the hard work they put into their research and writing in History, English, the Sciences, and other subjects can be recognized by a worldwide audience. I hope there is another budding student in a lower grade whose work will be worthy of publication as well.

Thank you again for keeping me abreast of the impressive work of which our students are capable!

Sincerely,
Glenn Scoggins
College Admissions Counselor
Social Studies Department Head
Saint Maur International School
Yokohama, Japan

2010-09-04T08:46:00.003-04:00

SIINGAPORE AMERICAN SCHOOL

From: Wei Li
Date: September 4, 2010 5:06:38 AM EDT
To: fitzhugh@tcr.org
Subject: Thank you from a very grateful student

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I am writing to thank you for publishing my paper (“Convivencia in Medieval Spain”) in the Fall 2009 issue of The Concord Review and for also choosing me as one of the Ralph Waldo Emerson laureates for this year. It is a huge honor and one that although I’d dreamed about, never quite expected to be realized.

Getting my paper published and then winning the Emerson prize have been two of the greatest highlights of my high school career. When my teacher, Mr. Bisset, recommended me, a sophomore in his AP European History class, to submit for publication the research paper that I wrote in his class, I did so without ever expecting a response. The news I received a few months later shattered all my expectations. Mr. Bisset was quite right in pulling out a chair for me before breaking the news! (In retrospect, I wished he’d done that again this year when he told me about the Emerson Prize!)

In writing my paper, I have learned so much more about myself—my interests, capabilities, and passions. I have enjoyed every minute of the months I spent researching. Reading articles and books on topics ranging from Hebrew poetry in the 11th century, to Islamic architecture, expanded my knowledge, horizons, and tastes and allowed me to discover that I was genuinely interested in all of these eclectic topics. And the long process of drafting, editing, and revising allowed me to discover that I was truly capable of producing an extended piece of work—something that I had never tried before—of high quality.

My experiences with The Concord Review inspired me to continue writing history academic papers. Last year, I wrote another serious research paper on China’s One Child Policy for a different history teacher and am looking forward to writing another one of equal caliber for AP Art History this year. Most importantly, working on my Convivencia paper made me realize that my interest in history was a true passion—something I want to pursue for the rest of my life.

The Concord Review, by honoring me with publication and then with the Emerson Prize, has made me confident in my own abilities. With it, I was able to persuade my parents, and now I am planning to follow the passion that it inspired in me by majoring in History in college.

I cannot thank you enough for your efforts over the past 20 years in providing students like me with the opportunity to explore writing a scholarly history paper. The Concord Review has provided examples of quality writing and excellent history topics as well as asking students to rise to those high standards you have set. Thank you for allowing me to find my passion in life and for believing that all high school students can rise to the challenge you have set for us.

Best regards,

Wei Li
Singapore American School
Class of 2011

2010-09-03T12:22:00.002-04:00

HARVARD COLLEGE
Office of Admissions and Financial Aid

September 2, 2010

Mr. Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, MA 01776

Dear Will,

I very much enjoy receiving your emails. You continue to stand for the highest ideals in education.

If there is an easy way for you to send us the names and addresses of the winners of your various awards, we would be happy to send them a “search letter” assuming we have not already contacted them. Such an accomplishment is a clear indication of their love of learning and the real possibility that they would be competitive applicants at Harvard.

Take care and I hope everything continues to go well for you.

Best personal regards,

Sincerely,
Bill
William R. Fitzsimmons
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid

WRF:cap

Administrative Office: 86 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

2010-08-30T09:03:00.003-04:00

HARVARD ED SCHOOL

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
August 2010

When my father graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1927, I am pretty sure it was not called “The Harvard Graduate School of Medical Education.” People I know who got their degrees from Harvard Law School tell me that it was never, to their knowledge, called the “Harvard Graduate School of Legal Education.” I think that the Harvard Business School does not routinely refer to itself as the “Harvard Graduate School of Business Education.” Harvard College (this is my 50th reunion year) has never seen the need to call itself “The Harvard Undergraduate School of Academic Subjects,” as far as I know. But the Harvard Education School, where I was informed, in the late 1960s, that I had been made a “Master of Education,” (!?) calls itself the “Harvard Graduate School of Education.” Perhaps that makes it a status step up from being called the Harvard Normal School, but the name is, in my view, a small symptom of a deeper problem there.

I had lunch in Cambridge yesterday with a man from Madagascar, who was bringing his daughter (one of The Concord Review’s authors), for her first year at Harvard College. He asked me why there seemed to be so much emphasis in United States schools on nonacademic efforts by students (I assumed he was referring to things like art, band, drama, chorus, jazz ensemble, video workshop, sports of various kinds, community service, etc., etc.). Now you have to make allowances for a geophysicist from Madagascar. After all, on that large island, and indeed in the whole Southern Hemisphere, they think that June, July, and August are Winter months, for goodness’ sake!

As I tried to explain to him the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life, and the widespread anti-academic attitudes and efforts of so many of our school Pundits, I thought again about the way the Harvard Education School defines its mission.

As you may know, I am very biased in favor of reading and writing, especially by high school students, and since 1987, I have published 912 exemplary history essays by secondary students from 39 countries in the only journal in the world for such work, so when I have failed to stir some interest in faculty at the Harvard Education School, it has disposed me to look closer at what they are interested in other than the exemplary academic work of students at the high school (or any other) level.

To be fair, there have been a few Harvard people who have taken an interest in my work. Harold Howe II wrote to fifteen foundations on my behalf (without success) and Theodore Sizer wrote the introduction to the first issue in the Fall of 1988, and served on my Board of Directors for several years. Recently, Tony Wagner has taken an interest, and, a very good friend, William Fitzsimmons, Harvard Dean of Admissions, got his doctorate there.

But what are the research interests of faculty at the Harvard Education School, if they don’t include the academic work of students? I recommend that anyone who is curious about this odd phenomenon may review the interests of this graduate faculty by looking at their website, but here a few revealing examples:

“Dr. Ronald F. Ferguson is a Lecturer in Public Policy and Senior Research Associate at the Wiener Center for Social Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he has taught since 1983. His research publications cover issues in education policy, youth development programming, community development, economic consequences of skill disparities, and state and local economic development. For much of the past decade, Dr. Ferguson's research has focused on racial achievement gaps...”

“During the past two decades, [Howard] Gardner and colleagues have been involved in the design of performance-based assessments; education for understanding; the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curriculum, instruction, and pedagogy; and the quality of interdisciplinary efforts in education. Since the mid-1990s, in collaboration with psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and William Damon, Gardner has directed the GoodWork Project, a study of work that is excellent, engaging, and ethical. More recently, with longtime Project Zero colleagues Lynn Barendsen and Wendy Fischman, he has conducted reflection sessions designed to enhance the understanding and incidence of good work among young people. With Carrie James, he is investigating trust in contemporary society and ethical dimensions entailed in the use of the new digital media. Underway are studies of effective collaboration among nonprofit institutions in education and of conceptions of quality in the contemporary era. In 2008 he delivered a set of three lectures at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on the topic ‘The True, The Beautiful, and the Good: Reconsiderations in a post-modern, digital era.’”

“Nancy Hill’s area of research focuses on variations in parenting and family socialization practices across ethnic, socioeconomic status, and neighborhood contexts. In addition, her research focuses on demographic variations in the relations between family dynamics and children's school performance and other developmental outcomes. Recent and ongoing projects include Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students), a longitudinal study between kindergarten and 4th grade examining family related predictors of children's early school performance; Project Alliance/Projecto Alianzo, a multiethnic, longitudinal study of parental involvement in education at the transition between elementary and middle school. She is the co-founder of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, an interdisciplinary group of scientists who develop theory and methodology for defining and understanding the cultural context within diverse families. In addition to articles in peer-reviewed journals, she recently edited a book, African American Family Life: Ecological and Cultural Diversity (Guilford, 2005) and another edited volume is forthcoming (Family-School Relations during Adolescence: Linking Interdisciplinary Research, Policy and Practice; Teachers College Press).”

This is really a random sample and there are scores of faculty members in the School, studying all sort of things. If I were to summarize their work, I would suggest it tends toward research on poverty, race, culture, diversity, ethnicity, emotional and social disability, developmental psychology, school organization, “The True, the Beautiful, and the Good...in a post-modern, digital era,” and the like, but as far as I can tell, no one there is interested in the academic study (by students) of Asian history, biology, calculus, literature, chemistry, foreign languages, European history, physics, United States History, or any of the academic subjects many taxpayers think should be the main business of education in our schools.

Of course all the things they do study are important, and can be funded with grants, but how can the academic work of students in our schools be of no importance to these scholars? How can they have no interest in the academic subjects which occupy the time and efforts of the teachers and students in our schools?

Perhaps if they were interested in the main academic business of our schools, the place would have to change its name to something less pretentious, like the Harvard Education School?

2010-08-29T11:46:00.001-04:00

The Core Knowledge Blog
Rigor? Who Has Time for Rigor?

by Robert Pondiscio
August 25th, 2010

Tags: college readiness, The Concord Review, Will Fitzhugh
Posted in Education Practice |

Most people would agree that it would be beneficial for high school students to write the kind of research paper that Will Fitzhugh publishes in The Concord Review, the only publication in the country [world] that features scholarly papers penned by high school students. The ability to research and write a thoughtful, cogent research paper fairly screams “College Ready” no?

Just back from a three-day workshop with a group of “diligent, pleasant and interesting teachers” in Florida, Fitzhugh describes at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog teachers who “were genuinely interested in having their students do serious papers and be better prepared for college (and career).” The problem is that the teachers each have at six [one has seven] classes of 30 or more students—180 to 210 students each.

Fitzhugh is a man of letters, but he does the math:

“After absorbing the fact of this shameful and irresponsible number of assigned students, I realized that if these teachers were to ask for the 20-page history research paper which is typical of the ones I publish in The Concord Review, they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term.

“It made me both sad and angry that these willing teachers, who want their students to be prepared for higher education, have been given impossible working conditions which will most certainly prevent them from helping their students get ready for the academic reading and writing tasks which await them in college,” Fitzhugh concludes.

The man’s got a point. Always does. It’s easy to make grand pronouncements about college readiness, rigor, and high expectations. It swells the chest with pride to be on the side of the angels. Fitzhugh’s example shows the long distance between what it takes and mere homilies.

2010-08-25T10:43:00.004-04:00

The Washington Post
theanswersheet.com
25 August 2010
Valerie Strauss

'Impossible' working conditions for teachers

My guest is Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, believed to be the world’s only English-language quarterly review for history academic papers by high school students.

[Note: In fact, it is the only academic journal in the world for the serious papers by high student scholars in any subject—from 39 countries so far....WF]

By Will Fitzhugh

I have just returned from giving a three-day workshop on student history research papers for English and Social Studies teachers, both high school and middle school, in Collier Country, Florida.

They assessed and discussed four high school student research papers using the procedures of the National Writing Board. We went over some of the consequences for a million of our students each year who graduate from high school and are required to take (and pay for) non-credit remedial courses when they get to college.

I talked to them about the advantages students have if they have written a serious paper, like the International Baccalaureate Extended Essay, in high school, and the difficulties with both reading nonfiction books and writing term papers which students (and college graduates) have if they have not been asked to do those tasks in high school.

It was a diligent, pleasant and interesting group of teachers, and I was glad to have had the chance to meet with them for a few days. They seemed genuinely interested in having their students do serious papers and be better prepared for college (and career).

At lunch on the last day, however, I discovered that Florida is a “right to work” state, and that their local union is rather weak, so they each have six classes of 30 or more students (180 students). One teacher is being asked to teach seven classes this year, with 30 or more students in each (210).

After absorbing the fact of this shameful and irresponsible number of assigned students, I realized that if these teachers were to ask for the 20-page history research paper which is typical of the ones I publish in The Concord Review, they would have 3,600 pages to read, correct, and comment on when they were turned in, not to mention the extra hours guiding students through their research and writing efforts. The one teacher with 210 students would have 4,200 pages of papers presented to him at the end of term.

It made me both sad and angry that these willing teachers, who want their students to be prepared for higher education, have been given impossible working conditions which will most certainly prevent them from helping their students get ready for the academic reading and writing tasks which await them in college (and career).

-0-

Follow my blog every day by bookmarking washingtonpost.com/answersheet And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our new Higher Education page at washingtonpost.com/higher-ed Bookmark it!

By Valerie Strauss | August 25, 2010; 6:00 AM ET
Categories: Guest Bloggers , Teachers | Tags: class loads and teachers, class size, florida teachers, history papers, research papers, right to work state, teachers

2010-08-24T08:49:00.003-04:00

Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student academic work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.

WHAT STUDENTS DO

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
24 August 2010

In the 1980s, when I was teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, one day there was a faculty meeting during which some of my colleagues put on a skit about one of our most intractable problems: students wandering in the hallways during classes. One person played the principal, another the hall monitor, and others the guidance counselor, the vice-principal, and I can’t remember who else from the staff. One teacher played the student who had been in the halls.

They did a good job on the acting and the lines were good, but as it went on, I noticed something a bit odd. Everyone had a part and things to say, but the only passive member of the show was the student, who had nothing much to say or do.

I notice a parallel to this in the majority of discussions about education reform these days. With some exceptions, including Carol Jago, Diane Ravitch, Paul Zoch, and me, edupundits seem occupied with just about everything except what students do academically.

There is a lot of discussion of what teachers do, and what superintendents, curriculum coordinators, principals, financial officers, mayors, legislators, and so on, do, but the actual academic work of students gets very little attention (perhaps especially in history).

This observation was reinforced for me when the TCR Institute did a study in 2002 of the assignment of serious term papers in U.S. public high schools. It was the first (and last) study of its kind, and it found that the majority of HS students are not being asked to do the sort of academic writing they need to work on to prepare themselves for college (and career).

In the last eight years, I have sought funds for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, but no one seems interested. Of course, many billions have been spent since 2002 on school reinvention and reorganization, assessment plans, teacher selection, training and retention, and so on, but again, the academic work of the students (the principal mission of schools) is “more honored in the breach than the observance.”

My perspective on this is necessarily a bottom-up, Lower Education one. I publish the serious research papers of high school students of history [912 from 39 countries since 1987]. Most of the 20,000+ U.S. public high schools never send me one, which is not a great surprise, because most history departments, other than in IB schools, do not assign research papers.

But it gives me a curiosity over the neglect of student work which is all too present in those whose focus is at a Higher Level in education. Those who live on the Public Policy level of Education Punditry can not see far enough Down or focus closely enough on the activity of schools to find out whether our HS students are reading history books and writing term papers.

I believe this is because foundation people, consultants, education professors, public policy experts, and their tribes mostly talk to each other, not to students or even to teachers, who are so far far beneath them. They hold conferences, and symposia, and they write papers and books about what needs to be done in education, but from almost none of them comes a suggestion that involves the academic reading and writing our students should be doing.

Of course what teachers do is vastly important, as well as very difficult to influence, but surely it cannot be that much more important than what students do.

Naturally, we should design curricula rich in knowledge, but if they don’t include serious independent academic work by students, the burden will still be on the teacher, and many too many students can slide through under it and arrive in college ready for their remedial classes in reading, math and writing, as more than a million do now each year.

Tony Wagner, the only person I know at the Harvard Education School who is interested in student academic work, did a focus group with some graduates of a high school he was working with, and they all said they wished they had been given more serious work in academic writing while they were in the high school. I asked him how many schools he knows of which take the time to hold focus groups with their recent graduates to get feedback from them on their level of academic preparation in school, and he said he only knew of three high schools in the country which did it.

We do need improvements in all the things the edupundits are working on, and the foundations and our governments are spending billions on. But if we continue to lack curiosity about and to ignore what students are doing academically, I feel sure all that money will continue to be wasted, as it has been so many many times in the past.

2010-08-18T18:42:00.002-04:00

WRITING

...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular. Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life....

Edward Gibbon
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776]
London: Everyman’s Library, 1993
Volume I, pp. 242-243

2010-08-17T09:06:00.004-04:00

Re: Emerson Prize Winners 2010

Will,

Are these essays from The Concord Review? If they are, I'd like to feature them in an upcoming NRIE Newsletter.

I love what you are doing!

Edward Amatetti
New Renaissance In Education
ed.amatetti@nrie.org
(m) 301-728-6505 www.nrie.org

2010-07-26T08:48:00.003-04:00

Theodore Sizer
[1932-2009]

Introduction to Volume One, Number One
The Concord Review, Fall 1988

Theodore Sizer: late Professor of Education, Brown University Author, Horace’s Compromise, Horace’s School; Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools; Former Dean, Harvard School of Education; Former Headmaster, Phillips Academy at Andover.

Americans shamefully underestimate their adolescents. With often misdirected generosity, we offer them all sorts of opportunities and, at least for middle-class and affluent youths, the time and resources to take advantage of them.

We ask little in return. We expect little, and the young people sense this, and relax. The genially superficial is tolerated, save in areas where the high school students themselves have some control, in inter-scholastic athletics, sometimes in their part-time work, almost always in their socializing.

At least if and when they reflect about it, adolescents have cause to resent us old folks. We do not signal clear standards for many important areas of their lives, and we deny them the respect of high expectations. In a word, we are careless about them, and, not surprisingly, many are thus careless about themselves. "Me take on such a difficult and responsible task?" they query, "I'm just a kid!"

All sorts of young Americans are capable of solid, imaginative scholarship, and they exhibit it for us when we give them both the opportunity and a clear measure of the standard expected. Presented with this opportunity, young folk respond. The Concord Review is such an opportunity, a place for fine scholarship to be exhibited, to be exposed to that most exquisite of scholarly tests, wide publication.

The prospect of “exhibition” is provocative. I must show publicly that I know, that I have ideas, and that I can defend them resourcefully. My competence is not merely an affair between me and a soulless grading machine in Princeton, New Jersey. It is a very public act.

The Concord Review is, for the History-inclined high school student, what the best of secondary school theatre and music performances, athletics, and (in some respects) science fairs are, for their aficionados. It is a testing ground, and one of elegant style, taste and standards. The Review does not undersell students. It respects them. And in such respect is the fuel for excellence.

2010-07-18T10:18:00.003-04:00

GLOBAL PROVINCE

17 July 2010

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Global Province Smith

113. Best Kids' Expository Writing

The Concord Review is shockingly good, and we are annoyed that we did not see it sooner. It is "A Quarterly Review of Essays by Students of History," a selection of papers from high school students all over the country [and 38 other countries] who, in general, write and research better than their college cousins. You can find a short history of IBM, a piece on Williston Academy and World War I, two treatments of Marbury vs. Madison, a memory of Julia Morgan (the architect of Hearst Castle and friend of the great California architect Bernard Maybeck), and just about everything else you can imagine. This is the child and worthy compulsion of Will Fitzhugh of Sudbury, Massachusetts. A one-time teacher who has spent 23 years building the Journal, he has earned the praise of everyone, even though, financially, his enterprise has been a hand-to-mouth affair. So subscribe and get your friends to endow it. On the Internet, you will find some sample essays at www.tcr.org. Send praise and dollars to Mr. Fitzhugh at fitzhugh@tcr.org.

2010-07-15T09:40:00.008-04:00

Summer 2010 Issue (#82)

EducationNews.org; Houston, Texas
Commentary: And now for some reading!
13/07/2010 19:25:00 Michael F. Shaughnessy, Senior Columnist EducationNews.org

7.14.10—Well, the World Cup is over and Spain has triumphed over the Netherlands and now perhaps we can turn our sights to some other WORLD CLASS scholars—those who have been published in The Concord Review.

Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

Well, the World Cup is over and Spain has triumphed over the Netherlands and now perhaps we can turn our sights to some other WORLD CLASS scholars—those who have been published in The Concord Review.

You know, we extol Lebron James (although I will challenge him to a game of one on one at Greyhound Arena in Portales, New Mexico) and we make a big deal of football (and soccer players) and we seem to idolize baseball players and tennis players and volleyball stars, but I do not think we pay enough attention to true scholars who are at the head of their class. So, today, let me pay homage and tribute to those high school writers and scholars whose research and writings have appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of The Concord Review (#82).

Benjamin Weichman wrote an essay about Norman Borlaug (the exact title of his essay was “ Seeds of Innovation : Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution”). Benjamin will be a Senior at Bedford High School, Bedford Massachusetts.

Abhishek Raman Parajuli wrote on the topic of the Rwandan Genocide. He is from Kathmandu, Nepal, and this essay was written while he was a student at Li Po Chun United World College, in Hong Kong. He is taking a gap year before college.

Neal Feldman penned an essay on the Balkan Wars, 1912-1913, and he is from George Washington High School in Denver, Colorado. He is going to be in the Honors Program at the University of Denver.

Jane Oliver Cavalier described Pittsburg’s East Liberty. She is from Ellis School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She will be at Dartmouth in the Fall.

Emma Silverman wrote on the topic of the Muslim Brotherhood. She will be a Senior at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park, Illinois.

Anirudha Balasubramanian penned a piece on American Economics. This paper was written while at St. Albans School, Mount St. Alban, Washington, D.C. He is headed for Harvard.

Ruodi Duan wrote on the Confederate Divide. Ruodi attended Arcadia High School in Arcadia, California. She will be at Amherst in the Fall.

Sydney Small researched and wrote on the topic of the African Colonies of Belgium and Germany. Sydney attended the University of Chicago Laboratory High School in Chicago, Illinois. She will be at Columbia in the Fall.

Antonia Woodford wrote on the topic of Italian Fascism. Antonia attended The Horace Mann School in Riverside, New York. She is headed for Yale.

Scotland William Long contributed an essay on The Long Telegram and he attended Irvington High School in Irvington, New York (Sleepy Hollow Country, as I recall). He will be at Bates College.

EuNa Noh wrote about one of our greatest American Presidents, Andrew Jackson, and it comes as no surprise to me that EuNa will be a Senior at Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire. She came to the U.S. from South Korea just three years ago.

All of these individuals deserve congratulations and all of the teachers of these individuals have probably contributed to some extent and deserve recognition and all of the parents of these fine writers and scholars deserve some acknowledgement.

I do apologize for any misspellings and accept responsibility for these large clumsy fingers. In addition to these fine papers, Kristy Henrich of Marblehead High School Class of 2010 contributed a brief piece to the back cover of this edition of The Concord Review.

If you want to learn more about these outstanding writers, researchers and scholars, there is a section entitled “Notes on Contributors“ at the end of each issue. I have a feeling these high school students are well on their way to success in whatever college or university is lucky enough to recruit them.

The Concord Review belongs in every high school library in America. For more information go to www.tcr.org...

2010-07-13T10:02:00.004-04:00

This website (www.tcr.org) has now had foreign visitors from: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belgium, Bhutan, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei Darussalam, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China (Beijing, Shanghai, Tiajin, Youngzhou, etc.), Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Dubai, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Grenada, Guam, Haiti, Honduras, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Macao, Madagascar, Malaysia, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Serbia & Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom (England), United Kingdom (Scotland), Uruguay, and Vietnam.

Perhaps this is because The Concord Review is the only journal in the world that publishes the academic papers of secondary students of history...

2010-07-07T13:50:00.006-04:00

DIANA E. SHEETS

Will Fitzhugh's Review has been featured in The Boston Globe (12/17/2009). It's been praised by Albert Shanker and David McCullough. Shanker himself published two New York Times articles about The Concord Review. I've read through several of the papers that have been published. The Concord Review is just the sort of scholarly excellence that should be promoted in American high schools. Students in history classes throughout the country should be submitting papers for publication to The Concord Review.

[Diana E. Sheets is a Research Scholar in the Departments of English and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Columbia University with honors in her minor field, Literature and Politics.]

2010-07-05T14:47:00.001-04:00

JESSE ESCH

William Fitzhugh
Editor and Publisher
The Concord Review

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I am writing to thank you for publishing my International Baccalaureate essay (“An Assessment of the Handling of Operation Jubilee”) in this summer’s issue of The Concord Review. I was very excited when I first heard that this essay was being considered for publication, and I can happily say that all my expectations have been met and surpassed. I am very pleased with the final result, and am very proud to be in the company of the other fine authors (and historians!) published by the Review.

Although I am now studying mathematics at the University of Alberta, I am still grateful for my experiences with The Concord Review, and with the study of history in general. The opportunity you offer young historians is essential because it provides a goal for them to strive for; moreover, achieving this goal gives them greater confidence in their ability to contribute something to our understanding of the past (and perhaps of our future). Further, I think it is important that people such as yourself continue to support the study of history, which is sometimes looked down upon as not being very “useful.” I firmly believe that an understanding of the past, by providing a framework into which knowledge may be placed, enhances the study of any subject—no matter how far removed it may seem to be from history.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank you, on behalf of all students who have been called upon to attempt the seemingly insurmountable task of writing an in-depth history paper, for providing us with plentiful examples of good writing and good history. Your publication has helped us to see a way through the jungle.

Again, many thanks. I wish you all the best!

Sincerely,
(signed)
Jesse Esch
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

2010-07-02T09:48:00.003-04:00

Harvard Magazine
July-August 2010, p. 76C

Class Notes

1960
50th Reunion

An article by Jay Mathews on Will Fitzhugh, Ed.M. ’68, and his campaign to have schools include more nonfiction in their reading lists for students, appeared in the February 22 issue of The Washington Post. Fitzhugh’s article “Meaningful Academic Work” (SchoolInfoSystem.com, Madison, Wisconsin), in which he argues that “reading good history books and writing serious history research papers provide the sort of work which students do find meaningful,” was republished in The Doyle Report (www.schoolnet.com) as a guest column.

2010-06-29T08:56:00.001-04:00

LETTER TO THE BOSTON GLOBE

I notice The Boston Globe has scholarships for student-athletes.

Does it have any for student-students?

Will Fitzhugh

2010-06-27T09:29:00.007-04:00

Tianhao He

June 19, 2010

Will Fitzhugh, Founder
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

It has been a little over a year since I first heard about The Concord Review in March 2009. As my Junior year draws to a close, I can proudly say that the publication of my essay in this prestigious journal has been one of the highlights of my school year. From reading scholarly articles under the mid-July sun to plowing through Alexander Hamilton's lengthy economic reports while snow was piling up outside my window, my journey in writing my research paper on Hamilton for The Concord Review was one of tremendous growth and opportunity.

In many ways, completing this independent research project was much like building a house, in terms of the personal initiative and industry that it took. From a mere list of ideas on a sheet of notebook paper to an 11,200-word essay within the pages of The Concord Review, I was able to craft a product that was unique and that reflected the insights I had gained from an enormous (to me) amount of research and analysis. What was truly remarkable about this opportunity was that it allowed me to combine my passion for writing with my passion for subjects like history, economics, and government. From a (HS) student author's perspective, the rigorous process of researching, writing, and revising that this project entailed was an active learning experience that allowed me to improve my skills in critically analyzing academic material and in drawing my own conclusions supported by evidence. The countless hours I spent on this project were all worth it. The beauty of it all is that the skills I gained through this experience carry over not only to the classroom but also to all of the future academic endeavors upon which I embark.

But most importantly, writing a research paper for The Concord Review was FUN! I found great joy in learning new things from every page I read, and it is this genuine passion for learning that I think The Concord Review so effectively cultivates in budding scholars. Whenever anyone asks me about my paper after seeing my picture in our school's library of our principal and me holding the Spring 2010 issue of The Concord Review, the first thing I tell them is that I spent so much time writing this paper because I enjoyed it and because it was fun.

The Concord Review has opened many paths for me, all of which I look forward to exploring with enthusiasm. The opportunity for students that is afforded by The Concord Review is simply invaluable, and I would like to offer my sincerest gratitude for all that you have made possible for me and for so many student authors over the past 20 volumes of this unique journal.

With great appreciation,
Tianhao He, Class of 2011
Walter Johnson High School
Bethesda, Maryland

2010-06-19T14:07:00.004-04:00

Jay Mathews, The Washington Post

"Why don't we unleash the creativity of educators, parents, and students and find ways to improve schools without more spending? Here are seven ideas I came up with, in consultation with teachers I know...

#5...Have every high school student read at least one non-fiction book before graduation. I am not talking about textbooks. Will Fitzhugh, publisher of The Concord Review, a journal of high school research papers, has been campaigning for nonfiction school reading. I was surprised, when I looked into it, how overloaded high school reading lists are with fiction. Non-fiction, with all those facts, is often more challenging for this age group. Good. If every English teacher substituted one non-fiction book for one novel on the required list, schools would improve without any extra expense."

2010-06-14T08:49:00.003-04:00

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

Incomplete Standards

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

The new national standards are too timid to recommend that high school students read complete history (or other nonfiction) books, or that high school students should write serious research papers, like the Extended Essays required for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.

Even the College Board, when it put together “101 books for the college-bound student” included only four or five nonfiction books, and none was a history book like Battle Cry of Freedom, or Washington’s Crossing.

For many many years it has been taboo to discuss asking our students to read complete nonfiction books and write substantial term papers. Not sure why...

In fact, since the early days of Achieve's efforts on standards, no one has taken a stand in recommending serious history research papers for high school students, and nonfiction books have never made the cut either.

Since 1987 or so it has seemed just sensible to me that, as long as colleges do assign history and other nonfiction books on their reading lists, and they also assign research papers, perhaps high school students should read a nonfiction book and write a term paper each year, to get in academic shape, as it were.

After all, in helping students prepare for college math, many high schools offer calculus. For college science, high school students can get ready with biology, chemistry and physics courses. To get ready for college literature courses, students read good novels and Shakespeare plays. Students can study languages and government and even engineering and statistics in their high schools, but they aren’t reading nonfiction books and they aren’t writing research papers.

The English departments, who are in charge of reading and writing in the high schools, tend to assign novels, poetry, and plays rather than nonfiction books, and they have little interest in asking for serious research papers either.

For 23 years, I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students from near and far [39 countries so far], and it gradually became clearer to me that perhaps most high school students were not being asked to write them.

In 2002, with a grant from the Shanker Institute, I was able to commission (the only) study of the assignment of history term papers in U.S. public high schools, and we found that most students were not being asked to do them. This helped to explain why, even though The Concord Review is the only journal in the world to publish such academic papers, more than 19,000 of the 20,000 U.S. public high schools never submitted one.

The nonfiction readings suggested in the new national standards, such as The Declaration of Independence, Letter From Birmingham Jail, and one chapter (column) from The Federalist Papers, would not tax high school students for more than an hour, much less time than they now spend on Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and the like. What would the equivalent be for college preparation in math: long division? decimals?

High school graduates who arrive at college without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious term paper, even if they are not in remedial courses (and more than one million are each year, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report), start way behind their IB and private school peers academically, when it comes to reading and writing at the college level.

Having national standards which would send our high school graduates off to higher education with no experience of real term papers and no complete nonfiction books doesn't seem the right way to make it likely that they will ever get through to graduation.

2010-06-14T08:33:00.003-04:00

"The Concord Review provides a splendid forum for the best student work in history...It deserves the support of everyone in the country who cares about improving the study of history in the schools."

Diane Ravitch

2010-06-04T08:15:00.003-04:00

TWO MESSAGES

Will Fitzhugh
Editor and Publisher, The Concord Review

When was the last time a college history professor made it her business to find out the names and schools of the best high school history students in the United States?

When was the last time a college basketball coach sat in his office and waited for the admissions office to deliver a good crop of recruits for the team?

When was the last time a high school history teacher got scores of phone calls and dozens of visits from college professors when he had an unusually promising history student?

When was the last time a high school athlete who was unusually productive in a major sport heard from no one at the college level?

Not one of these things happens, for some good reasons and some not-so-good reasons.

Before you think of the reasons however, we should be aware that sometimes the high school coach who is besieged with interest from the colleges is the same person who is ignored by colleges as a teacher. And sometimes the athlete who gets a number of offers from college coaches is the same person who, as an outstanding student, draws no interest at all. Not only do they observe this demonstration of our placing a higher value on athletics than on academics at the high school level, but their peers, both faculty and student, see it as well, and it teaches them a lesson.

Now it is obvious that if college coaches don’t scramble for the best high school athletes they can find, they may start to lose games, and, before long, perhaps their jobs as well.

College professors wait for the admissions office to deliver their students to them, and, while they may then complain about the ignorance of those students, and their inability to read or write well, they feel no need to search for high school students who are working hard and doing well in their field. Their jobs do not depend, they imagine, on finding good students to come to their college.

It is difficult to estimate the number of high school athletes who are contacted by college coaches each year, but if there are 3,400 colleges and for example 16 varsity sports, all of them needing players, and if only 16 athletes are contacted at each of the 20,000 high schools in the U.S. (a very conservative estimate), then 320,000 student athletes get contacted by colleges each year.

It is important to remember that National Merit Scholars are selected on the basis of their NMSQT scores, not on any achievement in history, physics, literature, or math. The equivalent process for athletics would be that scholarships were awarded on the basis of a physical fitness test, with no regard for the athlete’s specific achievement in basketball, track, football, baseball, gymnastics, etc.

Not only do coaches make it their business to know who are the best high school athletes they are likely to be able to attract, they know a lot about them. If they are recruiting a basketball player, not only do they know if he is hard-working and scores a lot, they also know the stats on his average minutes of play, blocks, free throws, steals, assists, fouls, field goals, three-point shots, and perhaps other things.

College professors not only do not know who the best high school students are, they also know nothing about their specific academic accomplishments.

College Admissions officers are routinely nagged by coaches on the one hand, to admit good prospects, but on the other hand they can almost never find any professor to take the slightest interest in the college freshman class they are trying to assemble for the coming year.

Anti-academic messages do not come from colleges alone. The Boston Globe has about 150 pages of coverage each year on high school sports, and also three seasonal 16-page supplement sections on local all-scholastic athletes, with photos, data, a few interviews, etc. For all practical purposes, their coverage of high school academic achievement of any kind is non-existent.

Alumni of colleges also take an interest in good high school athletes, and the word “elitist” never occurs to them (or anyone else) in this context. When Lew Alcindor [Karim Abdul Jabbar] was a tall high school senior, not only did he get pursued by the head coach at every major basketball program in the country, but he got personal letters from Ralph Bunche (at the United Nations) and from Jackie Robinson (integrated baseball), urging him to go to UCLA and play basketball, which he did. [The top ten high school history students that year heard from no one at colleges or from any celebrity, and it has been the same every year since.]

Why are these “two messages” important to high school teachers and students? During these times of great public concern over the level of academic achievement of our high school graduates, two messages are regularly and reliably being sent: “Athletics matter; Academics do not.” Both high school teachers, even those who are not coaches, and high school students, even those who are not athletes, get this message in the clear.

We should remember to be thankful for those students and teachers who continue to take high school academics seriously anyway.

2010-06-02T09:57:00.003-04:00

ASPEN International Baccalaureate Teacher

To: Will Fitzhugh

“I enjoy reading your column notes and regularly share them with my colleagues. Thank you for the immense contribution you make to the scholarship of history—for teachers and students...

I have long admired your philosophy about history education and appreciate your recommendations about how to improve it. Your dedication inspires me to do a better job.”

Karen Green, IB Global History, Aspen High School, Aspen, Colorado, May 2010

2010-05-27T16:19:00.008-04:00

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

HERESY

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
May 2010

A Boston High School Senior, Chrismaldy Morgado, writing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe [April 30], has claimed that students have some responsibility for their own academic achievement.

The Boston Globe may be forgiven for printing such a heretical claim, because it is trying to give a “voice” to young people, and the high school student may not be aware that his suggestion goes against the settled wisdom of the vast majority of U.S. Edupundits.

Our Edupundits are in substantial agreement, often repeated, that “the principal variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.” I have nowhere found much interest in my own argument that the principal variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.

Yet here is a high school Senior, writing that: “students seem to socialize more than they should. In hallways, stairwells, and bathrooms, students sit and talk to their friends after the late bell rang for classes.” He adds that: “My friends agree that new teachers alone are not going to solve the problems at Burke [Jeremiah Burke High School in Boston is one of 35 schools in the state that is asking its staff to re-apply for their jobs]. Jussara Sequeira, a Junior, said: “Some of us students are not trying hard enough and I don’t think the school’s teachers should pay the consequences.”

Paul Zoch, a high school Latin teacher, in Doomed to Fail [2004] points out that: “the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education. That being the accepted wisdom, students are free to do nothing more than wait for the teachers to create success for them. Education reform literature rarely contains the thought that our students are primarily failing because they do not study enough.” Another heretic!

Many thanks to Paul Zoch, Diane Ravitch, Chrismaldy Morgado, and Jussara Sequeira for pointing out the egregious folly of leaving student effort out of the analysis of those things which make for academic success in the schools.

It is hard to understand how so many Edupundits miss this essential sine qua non of good learning outcomes for our schools. One possibility is that their view is so lofty and unfocused that they never take the academic work of mere students into account.

Tony Wagner at Harvard has found that only three high schools in the country, for instance, ever sit down in a focus group with their graduates and ask them for their thoughts about their education while they were at the school.

This still does not completely explain why students’ academic responsibility gets so routinely overlooked in all the multi-billion-dollar efforts at school reform.

Paul Zoch writes: “In reading about Japanese education, one is repeatedly struck by the expectation that the students must work hard for success, in contrast to the United States, where the teacher is expected to work hard to find a way for the students to succeed...Effort and self-discipline are considered by the Japanese to be essential bases for accomplishment. Lack of achievement, then, is attributed to the failure to work hard.”

What chance is there that the voices of Chirsmaldy Morgado and Jussara Sequeira will be heard in their call for more student academic effort in Boston high schools? It is hard to say. So much attention and concern, on the part of parents and the rest of us, seems to be on whether our students have friends and are having a good time in school, rather than whether they are working as hard as they can academically. It is far easier to blame teachers if student academic achievement is too low.

If we listened to those two public high school students, we should surely inform our students at the start of every school year, that they have the responsibility to pay attention, do their homework, read books and write papers, and in general give their very best efforts to making the most out of the free public education which has been provided them. Let’s tell them that their academic success is their job. It is up to them how much they learn and how much they grow in competence through their own work in school.

2010-05-10T09:38:00.007-04:00

“Will, this is brilliant. You have been on a roll lately.” Diane Ravitch

[SchoolInfoSystem.org, Madison, Wisconsin; EducationNews.org, Houston, Texas;
Education Matters; theanswersheet.com; Curriculum Matters; ]

LITERACY KUDZU

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
10 May 2010

Kudzu, (Pueraria lobata), I learn from Wikipedia, was “...introduced from Japan into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, where it was promoted as a forage crop and an ornamental plant. From 1935 to the early 1950s, the Soil Conservation Service encouraged farmers in the southeastern United States to plant kudzu to reduce soil erosion... The Civilian Conservation Corps planted it widely for many years. It was subsequently discovered that the southeastern US has near-perfect conditions for kudzu to grow out of control—hot, humid summers, frequent rainfall, and temperate winters with few hard freezes...As such, the once-promoted plant was named a pest weed by the United States Department of Agriculture in 1953.”

We now have, I suggest, an analogous risk from the widespread application of “the evidence-based techniques and processes of literacy instruction, k-12.” At least one major foundation and one very old and influential college for teachers are now promoting what I have described as “guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, processes and the like, as props to substitute for students’ absent motivation to describe or express in writing something that they have learned.”

Most of these literacy experts are psychologists and educators, rather than historians or authors of literature. Samuel Johnson, an 18th century author some may remember, once wrote that “an author will turn over half a library to produce one book.” A recent major foundation report suggests that Dr. Johnson didn’t know what he was talking about when it comes to adolescents:

“Some educators feel that the ‘adolescent literacy crisis’ can be resolved simply by having adolescents read more books. This idea is based on the misconception that the source of the problem is ‘illiteracy.’ The truth is that adolescents—even those who have already ‘learned how to read’—need systematic support to learn how to ‘read to learn’ across a wide variety of contexts and content.”

Therefore, no need for adolescents to read books, just give them lots of literacy kudzu classes in “rubrics, guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, and processes...”

Other literacy kudzu specialists also suggest that reading books is not so important, instead that: (to quote a recent Washington Post article by Psychologist Dolores Perin of Teachers College, Columbia) “many students cannot learn well from a content curriculum because they have difficulty reading assigned text and fulfilling subject-area writing assignments. Secondary content teachers need to understand literacy processes and become aware of evidence-based reading and writing techniques to promote learners’ understanding of the content material being taught. Extended school-based professional development should be provided through collaborations between literacy and content-area specialists.”

E.D. Hirsch has called this “technique” philosophy of literacy instruction, “How-To-Ism” and says that it quite uselessly tries to substitute methods and skills for the knowledge that students must have in order to read well and often, and to write on academic subjects in school.

Literacy Kudzu has been with us for a long time, but it has received new fertilizer from large private foundation and now federal standards grants which will only help it choke off, where it can, attention to the reading of complete books and the writing of serious academic papers by the students in our schools.

Writing in Insidehighereducation.com, Lisa Roney recently said: “But let me also point out that the rise of Composition Studies over the past 30 or 40 years does not seem to have led to a populace that writes better.”

Educrat Professors and Educrat Psychologists who have, perhaps, missed learning much about history and literature during their own educations, and have not made any obvious attempt to study their value in their education research, of course fall back on what they feel they can do: teach processes, skills, methods, rubrics, parameters, and techniques of literacy instruction. Their efforts, wherever they are successful, will be a disaster, in my view, for teachers and students who care about academic writing and about history and literature in the schools.

In a recent issue of Harvard Magazine an alum wrote: “Dad ( a professional writer) used to tell us what he felt was the best advice he ever had on good writing. One of his professors was the legendary Charles Townsend Copeland, A.B. 1882, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory. Copeland didn’t collect themes and grade them. Rather, he made an appointment with each student to come to his quarters in Hollis Hall to read his theme and receive comments from the Master...“Dad started reading his offering and heard occasional groans and sighs of anguish from various locations in the (room). Finally, Copeland said in pained tones, ‘Stop, Mr. Duncan, stop.’ Dad stopped. After several seconds of deep silence, Copeland asked, ‘Mr. Duncan, what are you trying to say?’ Dad explained what he was trying to say. Said Copeland, ‘Why didn’t you write it down?’”

This is the sort of advice (quite unintelligible to the literacy kudzu community), which understands that in writing one first must have something to say (knowledge) and then one must work to express that knowledge so it may be understood. That may not play to the literacy kudzu community’s perception of their strengths, but it has a lot more to do with academic reading and writing than anything they are working to inflict on our teachers and students.

I hope they, including the foundations and the university consultant world, may before too long pause to re-consider their approach to literacy instruction, before we experience more damage from this pest-weed which they are presently, perhaps unwittingly, in the method-technique-process of spreading in our schools.