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Search Results for: "Will Fitzhugh"

Monstrous (aka CC “deeper learning”)

[The Prentice Hall Common Core literature textbook for the tenth grade:]
….Teachers may (or may not) ask interested students (two, four, or half a dozen?) to read a segment of the book (presumably a brief one only describing the monster) that will lead to two silly compare-and contrast-assignments, one involving “similar novels they have read.” (Have they read any? They haven’t read Frankenstein yet.) What about the students who are not “advanced readers”? What is being done to help them become better readers? And why should even the advanced readers read only a few pages out of this classic? What should students be doing if not reading Frankenstein?
According to the notes in the margins of the Teacher’s Edition, they should begin by offering to the class “classic examples of urban myths, tales of alien abductions, or ghost stories. (Examples include stories of alligators in the sewers, a man abducted for his kidneys, and aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico).” (The word “classic” is being used very loosely.) To reinforce the findings of this “brainstorming activity,” students should also “write a paragraph based on one of these modern urban myths.” The class will also discuss Mary Shelley’s introduction in various ways. Helping out, Elizabeth McCracken offers several more “scholar’s insights,” including one informing us of another ghost story about a man who buried his murder victim at the base of a tree “only to find that the next year’s apples all had a clot of blood at the center of them.” On the following page, we learn that Elizabeth McCracken did read the book, which she found better than the movie because, she tells us, in the book the monster can actually talk. Teachers are prompted to ask students why they think the film version would choose to keep the monster silent. Since the class will not be diverted enough with all this talk of movies, the Teacher’s Edition also recommends that talented and gifted students “illustrate one aspect of Shelley’s imaginings that is especially Gothic in its mood” and “display their Gothic art to the rest of the class.”
Do the editors realize that all this extraneous discussion of monsters and ghosts only serves to preserve the silly Halloween caricature of Frankenstein? Apparently this caricature is what they want. On page 766, students are encouraged to “write a brief autobiography of a monster.” The editors point out that monster stories are usually told from the perspective of “the humans confronting the monster.” The editors of The British Tradition want to turn the tables and have students ask themselves “what monsters think about their treatment.” Now there’s a great exercise in multiculturalism! Those poor, misunderstood monsters. Thus, students are being asked to write a monster story. What good could come from this? Without reading the novel Frankenstein itself (which does in fact tell much of the story from the monster’s perspective), students have no way of knowing how human this Gothic tale really is. After a mere three and a half pages of Mary Shelley’s introduction, the book offers a series of questions under various headings: Critical Reading, Literary Analysis, and so forth. Some of these questions are steeped in two-bit literary criticism. Others require students to delve into the moral realms of science and creation. One is a question asking students to interpret a modern cartoon about Frankenstein–funny, but out of place in this literature book. Notwithstanding whether the questions are good or bad, the enterprise is as false as the worst Hollywood versions of Frankenstein. The questions offer the façade of learning without genuine learning having taken place. That is for a very simple reason. My wife, the former English teacher who recognizes pretense when she sees it, took one look at these pages and put it very simply:
“They (the editors) are requiring students to have opinions on something they know nothing about.”
Moore, Terrence (2013-11-29).
The Story-Killers: A Common-Sense Case Against the Common Core (pp. 176-177). Kindle Edition.
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“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

Peach Baskets

In 1891, when Mr. James Naismith (he got his MD in 1898) put two peach baskets with the bottoms out at about 10 feet up at each end of the gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts, how many high school students do you think could make the three-point shot? Zero.
Today, when people see the exemplary history research papers published in The Concord Review, the most common reaction is: “These were written by High School Students?!” The reason for this disbelief is that most adults (even Edupudits, etc.) today no more expect high school student to write 11,000-word research papers than people in 1891 expected them to be able to make a three-point shot or dunk the basketball.
Theodore Sizer, late Dean of the Harvard School of Education and Headmaster of Phillips Academy, Andover, wrote, in 1988, that:
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 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.”
Since 1987, The Concord Review has published more than a thousand 6,000-word, 8,000-word, 11,000-word, 15,000-word, and longer history papers by secondary students from 46 states and 38 other countries, and, as we only take about 5% of the ones we get, evidently several more thousands of high school students have written serious history papers and submitted them. But I was recently asked, “How many high school students do you think could actually write papers like that?”–Suggesting that it must be a very small number indeed! As small perhaps as the number of high school students who could make that three-pointer in 1891?
Some examples: Colin Rhys Hill, of Atlanta, Georgia, decided to write a 15,000-word history research paper on the Soviet-Afghan War; Sarah Willeman of Byfield, Massachusetts, decided she wanted to write a 21,000-word paper on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857; Nathaniel Bernstein, of San Francisco, chose to write an 11,000-word paper on the unintended consequences of Direct Legislation reforms in the early 1900s in California; and Jonathan Lu, of Hong Kong, wrote a 13,000-word paper on the Needham Question (why did Chinese technology stall after 1500?)…(send to fitzhugh@tcr.org for pdfs of these papers).
“Where there’s a Way, there’s a Will,” I sometimes think. If peach baskets exist, some day somewhere a high school student or two will try to shoot a ball through one. Obviously by now the number of such students who can make a three-point shot is very large. We even have nationally-televised high school basketball games in which they can demonstrate such an achievement. If an international journal for the academic history research papers of secondary students exists, perhaps some students will actually write and submit them?
Most people may tell a high school students that they are not capable of doing the reading and the writing for a long serious history research paper. Most of their teachers do not want to spend the time coaching for and reading them. But my advice to any prospective high school author is (pay no attention to the people who tell you that you are only capable of writing a five-paragraph essay), and:
Prepare yourself over hours, weeks, months, and years of practice.
Make sure your feet are behind the three-point line.
Take the shot.
—————————
“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

AUTODIDACT

The term “autodidact” is usually reserved for those who, like Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Carnegie, and so on, did not have the advantages of spending much time in school or the help of schoolteachers with their education.
I would like to suggest that every student is an autodidact, because only the student can decide what information to accept and retain. Re-education camps in the Communist world, from Korea to Vietnam to China, no doubt made claims that they could “teach” people things whether they want to learn them or not, but I would argue that the threat of force and social isolation used in such camps are not the teaching methods we are searching for in our schools.
And further, I would claim that even in re-education camps, students often indeed reserve private places in their minds about which their instructors know very little.
My main point is that the individual is the sovereign ruler of their own attention and the sole arbiter of what information they choose to admit and retain. Our system of instruction and examination has no doubt persuaded many sovereign learners over the years to accept enough of the knowledge we offer to let most of them pass whatever exams we have presented, but the cliché is that after the test, nearly all of that information is gone.
Teachers have known all this from the beginning, and so have developed and employed all their arts to first attract, and then retain, the attention of their students, and they have labored tirelessly to persuade their students that they should decide to attend to and make use of the knowledge they are offering.
One of the best arguments for having teachers be very well-grounded in the subjects they are teaching is that the likelihood increases that they will really love their subject, and it is easier for teachers to convince students of the value of what they are teaching if they clearly believe in its value themselves.
It should not be forgotten, however, that the mind is a mercurial and fickle instrument, and the attention of students is vulnerable to all the distractions of life, in the classroom and out of it. I am distressed that so many who write about education seem to overlook the role of students almost entirely, concentrating on the public policy issues of the Education Enterprise and forgetting that without the attention and interest of students, all of their efforts are futile.
It seems strange to me that so little research is ever done into the actual academic work of students, for instance whether they ever read a complete nonfiction book, and whether they every write a serious academic paper on a subject other than themselves.
For many reformers, it seems the only student work they are interested in is student scores on objective tests. Sadly, objective tests discover almost nothing about the students’ interest in their experiences of the complexity of the chemistry, history, literature, Chinese, and other subjects they have been offered.
There was a time when college entrance decisions were based on essays students would write on academic subjects, and those could reveal not only student fluency and knowledge, but something of their attachment to and appreciation for academic matter.
But now, we seem to have decided that neither we nor they have time for extended essays on history and the like (except for the International Baccalaureate, and The Concord Review), and the attractions of technology have led examiners to prefer tests that can be graded very quickly, by computer wherever possible. So, when the examiners show no interest in serious academic work, it should not surprise us that students may see less value in it as well.
The Lower Education teachers are still out there, loving their subjects, and offering them up for students to judge, and to decide how much of them they will accept into their memories and their thoughts, but meanwhile the EduPundits and the leaders of the Education Enterprise [Global Education Reform Movement = GERM, as Pasi Sahlberg calls it], with lots of funding to encourage them, sail on, ignoring the control students have, and always have had, over their own attention and their own learning.
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“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

History is AWOL

The Common Core National Education Standards are, they say, very interested in having all our students taught the techniques of deeper reading, deeper writing, deeper listening, deeper analysis, and deeper thinking.
What they seen to have almost no interest in, is knowledge–for example knowledge of history, especially military history. As far as I can tell at the moment, their view of the history our high school students need to know includes: The Letter From Birmingham Jail, The Gettysburg Address, and Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address.
While these are all, of course, worthy objects for deeper reading and the like, they do not, to my mind, fully encompass the knowledge of the Magna Carta, the Constitution of the United States, the Battle of the Bulge and of Iwo Jima and of Okinawa, or the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, or the U.S. transcontinental railroad, or the Panama Canal, or woman suffrage or the Great Depression, or a number of other interesting historical circumstances our students perhaps should know about.
Nor does it seem to call for much knowledge about William Penn, or Increase Mather, or George Washington, or Alexander Hamilton, or Robert E. Lee, or Ulysses S. Grant, or Thomas Edison, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Dwight David Eisenhower, or several hundreds of other historical figures who might be not only interesting, but also important for students to be familiar with.
In short, from what I have seen, the Common Core Vision of necessary historical knowledge includes what any high school Junior ought to be able to read in one afternoon (i.e. three short “historical documents”).
Ignorance of history has, it may be said, been almost an American tradition, and many Americans have discovered in their travels, and to their embarrassment, that people in other countries may know more about our history than they do.
We have, many times in the past, even invaded countries our soldiers knew next to nothing about, and sometimes that has been a disadvantage for us. But if the Common Core doesn’t care if our students know any United States history, they are certainly not going to mind if our students don’t know the history of any other country either.
But even in schools were history is still taught, and where the Common Core has not yet sunk its roots, one area of history is perhaps neglected more than any other. Was it Trotsky who said: “You may not be interested in War, but War is interested in you.”?
And Publius Flavius Vegetius argued that: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” In many of our school history departments, military history is regarded as “militaristic,” and the thought, apparently, is that if we tell our students nothing about war, then war will simply go away.
History doesn’t seem to support that notion, and if war does come to us again, it might be useful for students in places other than our Military Academies to know something about military history. In addition, military history tells absorbing stories of some of the most inspiring efforts ever made in the history of mankind.
We talk a fair amount these days about our Wounded Warriors and about what we owe to our veterans, past and present, but for some odd reason, that seldom translates into the responsibility to teach military history, at least to some minimal extent, to the students in our public high schools.
It is quite clear to me that ignorance of history does not make history go away, and ignorance of the lessons of history does not make us better prepared to understand the issues of our time. And certainly, in spite of whatever dreams and wishes are out there, ignorance of war has not ever made, and quite probably will not make, war go away.
We want to honor our veterans, but we do not do so by erasing knowledge of our wars, past and present, from our high school history curriculum, whatever the pundits who are bringing us the Common Core may think about, and plan for, the teaching of history.
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“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

History Paralysis

When it comes to working together to support the survival and enjoyment of history for students in our schools, why are history teachers, as a group, as good as paralyzed?
Whatever the reason, in the national debates over nonfiction reading (history books, anyone?) and nonfiction writing for students in the schools, the voice of history teachers, at least in the wider conversation, has not been clearly heard.
Perhaps it could be because, as David Steiner, former Commissioner of Education in New York State, put it: “History is so politically toxic that no one wants to touch it.”
Have the bad feelings and fears raised over the ill-fated National History Standards which emerged from UCLA so long ago persisted and contributed to our paralysis in these national discussions?
Are we (I used to be one) too sensitive to the feelings of other members of the social studies universe? Are we too afraid that someone will say we have given insufficient space and emphasis to the sociology of the mound people of Ohio or the history and geography of the Hmong people or the psychology of the Apache and the Comanche? Or do we feel guilty, even though it is not completely our fault, that all of the Presidents of the United States have been, (so far), men?
I am concerned when the National Assessment of Educational Progress finds that 86% of our high school seniors scored Basic or Below on U.S. History, and I am appalled by stories of students, who, when asked to choose our Allies in World War II on a multiple-choice test, select Germany (both here and in the United Kingdom, I am told). After all, Germany is an ally now, they were probably an ally in World War II, right? So Presentism reaps its harvest of historical ignorance.
Of course there is always competition for time to give to subjects in schools. Various groups push their concerns all the time. Business people often argue that students should learn about the stock market at least, if not credit default swaps and the like. Other groups want other things taught. I understand that there is new energy behind the revival of home economics courses for our high school future homemakers.
But what my main efforts have been directed towards since 1987 is prevention of the need for remedial nonfiction reading and writing courses in college. My national research has found that most U.S. public high schools do not ask students to write a serious research paper, and I am convinced that, if a study were ever done, it would show that we send the vast majority of our high school graduates off without ever having assigned them a complete history book to read. Students not proficient in nonfiction reading and writing are at risk of not understanding what their professors are talking about, and are, in my view, more likely to drop out of college.
For all I know, book reports are as dead in the English departments as they are in History departments. In any case, most college professors express strong disappointment in the degree to which entering students are capable of reading the nonfiction books they are assigned and of writing the term papers that are assigned.
A study done by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of professors judge their students to be “not very well prepared” in reading, doing research, and writing.
I cannot fathom why we put off instruction in nonfiction books and term papers until college in so many cases. We start young people at a very early age in Pop Warner football and in Little League baseball, but when it comes to nonfiction reading and writing we seem content to wait until they are 18 or so.
For whatever reason, some students have not let our paralysis prevent them either from studying history or from writing serious history papers, and I have proof that they can do good work in history, if asked to do so. When I started The Concord Review in 1987, I hoped that students might send me 4,000-word research papers in history. By now, I have published, in 98 issues, 1,077 history research papers averaging 6,000 words, on a huge variety of topics, by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries.
Some have been inspired by their history teachers, other by their history-buff parents, but a good number have been encouraged by seeing the exemplary work of their peers in print. Here are parts of two comments from authors–Kaitlin Marie Bergan: “When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the 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.” And 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.”
Lots of high school [and middle school] students are sitting out there, waiting to be inspired by their history teachers [and their peers] to read history books and to prepare their best history research papers, and lots of history teachers are out there, wishing there were a stronger and more optimistic set of arguments coming from a history presence in the national conversation about higher standards for nonfiction reading and writing in our schools.
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“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

Missing out on timeless literature

Jamie Gass, via Will Fitzhugh

He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,” Mississippi’s William Faulkner said of man upon receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, “but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.”
New Englanders can rightfully claim to have been America’s 19th-century literary hub, but no other regional landscape dominated 20th-century literature like the South and its genius for storytelling. Famously, Faulkner’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Chickasaw for “split land,” provided the setting for his most inspired novels.
American high school students should read Southern writers like Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, author of the 1962 National Book Award-winning “The Moviegoer.” Percy crafted stories about “the dislocation of man in the modern age,” while contributing to a “community of discourse” around fiction writing. His Greenville, Miss., was a wellspring of outstanding writers.
Greenville’s patriarch, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, planter and poet from a suicide-plagued family. He authored the best-selling 1941 memoir “Lanterns on the Levee.” His second cousin, Walker Percy, and Walker’s lifelong best friend, Shelby Foote, were both young when they lost their fathers. Will Percy’s book-filled house became a sanctuary for writers, journalists and musicians, as the man himself mentored a region.

2 Hours Per Week for Homework, but 8 ½ per day Stabbing Girls and Other Media Fun.

Bill Korach, via Will Fitzhugh:

A new video war game “Call of Duty” integrates women as the objects of violence while time spent on homework declines to about two hours per week. This is not a formula designed to produce an educated literate society that will be competitive in the global economy. On the other hand, spending 8 ½ hours per day on media including games of shocking violence is a formula that will continue to coarsen our culture and even produce real violence. Recall that the Columbine killers were avid video game players.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
“Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media–and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38–almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]”

Leftist Educator Diane Ravitch Meets Her Match: An Important Critique by Sol Stern

Ron Radosh via Will Fitzhugh:

Do you know who Diane Ravitch is? If not, you should. No other educator has been acclaimed in so many places as the woman who can lead American education into the future. Her new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, had a first printing of 75,000 copies and quickly made the New York Times non-fiction best seller list.
Recently, the leading magazine for left-liberal intellectuals, The New York Review of Books, featured a cover story about Ravitch by Andrew Delbanco. He compares the approaches of the educator most despised by the Left, Michelle Rhee, with Ravitch. He calls Ravitch “our leading historian of primary and secondary education.” Having established that, he goes on to note Ravitch’s condemnation of Rhee, which he says “borders on contempt.” Delbanco also dislikes Rhee. He does not agree with what he calls her “determination to remake public institutions on the model of private corporations.” Rhee is pro-corporate, a woman who wants “to introduce private competition (in police, military, and postal services, for example) where government was once the only provider.” In other words, Rhee stands with the enemies of the Left who want school choice for poor children, vouchers, charter schools, and competition, rather than more pay for teachers, smaller classes, and working with and through the teachers’ unions.

Send in the SEALs: Can a new generation of young, Navy SEAL-like teachers finally club the achievement gap out of existence?

EduShyster
Hedge funder Whitney Tilson argues that a new generation of young Navy SEAL-like teachers can club the achievement gap out of existence.
Can a new generation of young, Navy SEAL-like teachers finally club the achievement gap out of existence? That is today’s fiercely urgent question, reader, and believe it or not, I do not ask it in jest. The call to send in the SEALs comes from hedge fund manager and edu-visionary extraordinaire Whitney Tilson. When Tilson read this recent New York Times story about high turnover among young charter school teachers, he went ballistic, to use a military metaphor. After all, turnover among Navy SEALs is also very high, notes Tilson, and no one complains about that.
Bigger rigor
So how exactly is the young super teacher in an urban No Excuses charter school like a Navy SEAL? Better yet, how are such teachers NOT like SEALs? Both sign onto an all-consuming mission, the SEAL to take on any situation or enemy the world has to offer, the teacher to tackle the greatest enemy our nation has ever known: teacher union low expectations. But as Tilson has seen second-hand, being a “bad a**” warrior is exhausting, which is why SEALs, like young super teachers, enjoy extraordinarily short careers.
But the work is incredibly intense and not really compatible with family life, so few are doing active missions for their career–they move on into management/leadership positions or go into the private sector (egads!). Could you imagine the NY Times writing a snarky story about high turnover among SEALs?!
Cream of the crop
Egads! indeed, reader. In fact, now that I think of it, *crushing* the achievement gap in our failed and failing public schools is almost exactly like delivering highly specialized, intensely challenging warfare capabilities that are beyond the means of standard military forces. For one thing, the SEALs are extremely choosy about who they let into their ranks, just as we’ll need to be if we’re going to replace our old, low-expectations teachers with fresh young commandos. Only the cream of the crop make it to SEALdom, and by cream, I mean “cream” colored. The SEALs are overwhelmingly white; just 2% of SEAL officers are African American.
See the world
And let’s not forget that SEALs and new urban teachers both get plenty of opportunities to experience parts of the world they haven’t seen before. The elite Navy men train and operate in desert and urban areas, mountains and woodlands, and jungle and arctic conditions, while members of the elite teaching force spend two years combating the achievement gap in the urban schools before they receive officer status. And while Frog Men live on military bases, our commando teachers increasingly live in special encampments built just for them.
And here is where our metaphor begins to break down ever so slightly….
Of course, there are a few teeny tiny areas where the SEALs differ from the young teachers who will finally club the achievement gap out of existence. There is, for instance, the teeny tiny matter of the training that the SEALs receive: 8-weeks Naval Special Warfare Prep School, 24-weeks Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/s) Training, 3-weeks Parachute Jump School, 26-weeks SEAL Qualification Training (SQT), followed by 18-months of pre-deployment training, including 6-month Individual Specialty Training, 6-month Unit Level Training and 6-month Task Group Level Training before they are considered deployable. TFA, which Tilson praises for its “yeoman” work in recruiting and grooming the next generation of urban teacher hot shots, relies upon an, ahem, somewhat different approach…
Send tips and comments to tips@edushyster.com.
——————————
“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®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

Distraction

Let’s say the history teacher, a descendant of the 1960s, is talking (of course) about the Vietnam War, and how Walter Cronkite won the Tet Offensive, even though the North lost it, and the student is perhaps paying some attention, but when the teacher shifts to an explanation of the hardships of war in the hot weather and the humidity, the student, effortlessly, may begin to remember what his grandfather told him about the cold at the Chosin Reservoir in 1950, and how easy it was to get frostbitten or even to freeze to death.
The teacher, quite understandably, so often has no idea that the student is no longer listening to, or learning from him, no matter how “great” the teacher is.
Those who say that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement seem to have forgotten the student’s role in student academic achievement. They have failed to think about, and they have not come to realize, the fact that the student is the sole proprietor of his/her own attention, and that her/his attention is the sine qua non for student academic achievement.
Again, the history teacher might be talking about the rise of organized labor in American life, and the student’s mind could easily slip away to the stories her aunt has told her about the difficult labor she had to go through with her first daughter.
Attention wanders, and in class wandering attention means the end of learning on the current topic for the time being, at least for that student, and for the “education” planned for that class period for any and all distracted students.
What can be done about this wayward-attention phenomenon? We might start by realizing that students own their attention and that we must negotiate with them successfully if we are to convince them to bring that attention to our offerings and to their duties as students. (Doesn’t that sound quaint?–Students have duties?)
With this in mind, we might spend more time explaining why what we are teaching in a given period on any given day is worth the attention we need from students. We can order them to pay attention (that doesn’t work), but we might be able to sell them on the chance that if they give their attention to what we are offering, it might prove to be worth their while.
We won’t sell the opportunity to every one, but some students might be grateful for the respect we pay to their ownership of their own minds and their own attention, and more of them might be willing to give us the benefit of the doubt and give our
presentations and plans their attention on a trial basis. (And some students will surely be influenced by the attention they see their peers giving to the work at hand…)
Then, if what we are teaching is as important and as interesting to us as we hope it will be to them, there is a chance (well-tested in experience) that they may indeed find it of interest to them as well, and they will be, in that subject perhaps, on their way to becoming educated, and more than that even, they might be on their way to deciding to teach themselves more about the subject as well. Thus are scholars born.
————————-
“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

National Civics, History Tests to Disappear

Haley Stauss

The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in civics, U.S. history, and geography have been indefinitely postponed for fourth and twelfth graders. The Obama administration says this is due to a $6.8 million sequestration budget cut. The three exams will be replaced by a single, new test: Technology and Engineering Literacy.
“Without these tests, advocates for a richer civic education will not have any kind of test to use as leverage to get more civic education in the classrooms,” said John Hale, associate director at the Center for Civic Education.
NAEP is a set of national tests of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders that track achievement on various subjects over time. Researchers collect data for state to state comparisons in mathematics, reading, science, and writing. The other subjects only provide national statistics and are administered to fewer students. The tests provide basic information about students but do not automatically trigger consequences for teachers, students, and schools.
Students have historically performed extremely poorly on these three tests. In 2010, the last administration of the history test, students performed worse on it than on any other NAEP test. That year, less than half of eighth-graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and only 1 in 10 could pick a definition of the system of checks and balance on the civics exam.
Science vs. Humanities
Since most civic education is taught to first-semester high school seniors, Hale said, not testing in twelfth grade creates a major gap of information.
“Is it possible to have a responsible citizenry if we don’t teach them civics, history, and the humanities?” said Gary Nash, a professor of history education (sic) at the University of California Los Angeles. Postponing the exams, typically administered every four years, does not mean classroom education in the humanities will be cut. But the cuts indirectly say we can do without civics and U.S. history, Nash said.
Trading the humanities tests for technology tests is necessary to measure “the competitiveness of U.S. students in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)-focused world,” said David Driscoll, chair of the NAEP Governing Board, in a statement. “The [Technology and Engineering Literacy] assessment, along with the existing NAEP science and mathematics assessments, will help the nation know if we are making progress in the areas of STEM education.”
Nash agrees the U.S. needs more engineers and scientists: “But what are they without humanities under their belt?” he said.
Excellence in one area flows into others
A summer report from the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences explained the need for these subjects this way: “The humanities and social sciences provide an intellectual framework and context for understanding and thriving in a changing world. When we study these subjects, we learn not only what but how and why.”
Nash pointed out that Franklin High School in the Los Angeles Unified School district is 94 percent Latino, and many families are immigrants. Without changing anything in science and math, the school began to emphasize humanities. The scores in science and math improved, testing almost on par with students in Beverly Hills. “It’s about increasing their passion for learning,” he says. Furthermore, giving students a context for learning helps them learn more.
Masters of Our Government
Students must be prepared “to think for themselves as independent citizens,” said Hale. “Civics and Government (& History) is (are) as generative as math; we are not born as great democratic citizens. We aren’t born knowing why everyone should have the right to political speech, even if it is intolerant speech.”
Consider the current events of the last few weeks, he said: the Supreme Court rulings on marriage and the Voting Rights Act, the National Security Administration’s data collection, and Congress debating immigration and student loan rates.
“Our leaders make decisions every day based on interpretations on the proper role of government; we have no way of knowing if these [decisions] are good or bad,” Hale continued. “We are supposed to be masters of our government, not servants of it.”
Cutting the civics tests indicates the government’s priorities, and priorities affect curriculum, Nash noted. He suggested danger for a country that must govern itself if children do not learn how.

—————————–
“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

On Serious Secondary School Scholarship

Patrick Bassett:

I’ve often said that all NAIS schools are “college-prep,” even the early childhood schools like The Children’s School (Connecticut) [age 2 through eighth grade], and the learning differences (LD) schools like Lawrence School (Ohio) [grades K – 12], and scores of other independent schools like them across the country. They, like their more traditional cousins in our membership, are college-prep because parents choose them with college in mind, believing, rightfully, that an independent school with a mission that matches their child’s needs and proclivities will be the surest path to success in secondary school and college. And all of our schools deliver on that expectation.
I’ve also often said that the early childhood programs in NAIS schools and our LD schools (or the LD “schools within a school” in the traditional school model) are often the most innovative, often the first to adopt the new thinking, the new technologies, and the new research (especially on brain-based learning and differentiated instruction). That said, we are collectively, in the independent school world, on the cusp of significant re-engineering of schools, and what it means to be an outstanding place to learn. This is exemplified by Grant Lichtman’s blogs on his journey across America to discover where innovation is sprouting up in independent schools. No better time, no better place for every independent school leader and teacher to think about where, and how, we will innovate at each of our schools.
While “Change is inevitable, growth optional” (John C. Maxwell), I’d like to note that a rapidly changing landscape does not mean that everything old should be subject to change. For me, character first is the defining quality that makes independent schools strong. The founders of the first independent schools in America knew that, as do the founders of our newest schools. For example, the constitutions of both Phillips Academy (Massachusetts) and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) include a charge to the masters (teachers) exhorting them to attend to the character of their wards: “[T]hough goodness without knowledge (as it respects others) is weak and feeble; yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous; and that both united form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”1 Have truer words ever been spoken? Or clearer insight into what makes great schools and successful (“good and smart”) graduates?
So, character first. And the adults are the moral mentors and models. But for college-prep schools, a second maxim should be “academics second,” meaning what one might call “serious scholarship.” While the means of conducting serious scholarship (video oral histories, crowd-sourcing, data mining via the Internet, etc.) are indeed changing, I like the case made by Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, that serious scholarship in the form of a substantial publication-worthy research paper is the entry ticket for future academic success (and selective college admissions).
The Concord Review, launched by Fitzhugh in 1987, is an excellent periodical of secondary school research in the subject of history. As Fitzhugh is fond of pointing out, The Concord Review is more “selective” than Princeton: one out of 20 submissions to the Review published vs. one out of 19 applicants to Princeton admitted. And the requirements of the paper would be daunting to all but the most ambitious student (typically 4,000 – 6,000 words, but sometimes much longer, 10,000 words or more).2 A quick scan of the research paper titles from the most recent issue of the Review reveals both the most esoteric and fascinating of subjects chosen by these young scholars.
I recommend that all teachers read (and perhaps weep about) any student essay from past Concord Review papers archived on the magazine’s website to find out what serious scholarship at the secondary school level looks, and sounds, like. (In fact, from what my college president colleagues tell me, much college student writing today wouldn’t have a chance of publication in The Concord Review.)

New Science Standards Put Global Warming at Core of Curriculum

Heather Mac Donald

One doesn’t need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K-12 science standards. Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy.
Students educated under the Next Generation Science Standards will begin their lifelong attention to climate change as soon as they enter school. Kindergartners will be expected to “use tools and materials to design and build a structure that will reduce the warming effect of sunlight on an area” (perhaps this is what used to be known as “building a fort”) and “develop understanding of patterns and variations in local weather and the purpose of weather forecasting to prepare for, and respond to, severe weather.” Things get even scarier by the third grade, when students should be asking such questions as: “How can the impact of weather-related hazards be reduced?” The standards don’t mention protesting the Keystone pipeline as a possible “real-world” answer to the question of how to reduce “weather-related hazards,” but rest assured that the graduates of America’s left-wing education schools will not hesitate to include such hands-on learning experiences in their global-warming-politics–oops, make that “science”–classes. By high school, students are squarely in the world of environmental policy-making, expected to “evaluate a solution to a complex real-world problem based on prioritized criteria and trade-offs that account for a range of constraints, including cost, safety, reliability, and aesthetics, as well as possible social, cultural, and environmental impacts.”
Hard as it may be for the groups such the Alliance for Climate Education, a purveyor of climate-change school programs and–surprise!–an enthusiastic backer of the new standards, there really are other important areas of knowledge and concern. As long as we’re picking and choosing among scientific problems, why not start kindergartners thinking about cell mutation or neural pathways so they can fight cancer and Alzheimer’s disease when they grow up?
But even without their preening obsession with climate, biodiversity, and sustainability, the standards are a recipe for further American knowledge decline. The New York Times reports that the standards’ authors anticipate the possible elimination of traditional classes such as biology and chemistry from high school in favor of a more “holistic” approach. This contempt for traditional disciplines has already polluted college education, but it could do far more damage in high school. The disciplines represent real bodies of knowledge that must be mastered before one can begin to be legitimately interdisciplinary.
The standards drearily mimic progressive education’s enthusiasm for “critical-thinking skills.” Fourth-graders sound like veritable geysers of high-level abstract reasoning, expected to “demonstrate grade-appropriate proficiency in asking questions, developing and using models, planning and carrying out investigations, analyzing and interpreting data, constructing explanations and designing solutions, engaging in argument from evidence, and obtaining, evaluating, and communicating information.” I’d be happy if they knew all the planets, continents, major oceans and rivers, and a few galaxies. Such fancy-ancy cognitive talk gives teachers an excuse to gloss over the hard work of knocking concrete facts into their students’ heads–and ignores the truth that mastering such facts can be a source of pleasure and pride.
Chinese students are not flooding into American Ph.D. programs because they have spent their high-school years pondering “a technological solution that reduces impacts of human activities on natural systems,” as the standards propose. They are filling the slots that Americans are unqualified for because they have spent years memorizing the Krebs cycle, the process of meiosis and mitosis, the periodic table, and the laws of thermodynamics and motion. The new science standards guarantee that we will look back on the years when Americans made up a piddling 50 percent of graduate-level science students as the high-water mark of American scientific literacy.

—————————–
“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

“Uncommonly Bad” (excerpt)

Jane Robbins – National Association of Scholars Academic Questions, Spring 2013, Volume 26, Number 1

The advent of the Common Core State Standards has prompted a new discussion
about how to produce students who are “college- and career-ready.” But this question differs from the one that governed education throughout most of our history. We used to ask, what should a student know to become an educated citizen? Education would prepare one for college or career, certainly, but, more broadly, for life. What vision of education are we now advancing? As with parents and state legislators, academia has been largely excluded from this discussion…
…Should students read entire books? This is generally unnecessary, apparently, to get the flavor of the work and to have something to think critically about. Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review notes this truncating feature of Common Core:

“Let us consider saving students more time from their fictional non-informational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the ‘gist’ of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, ‘grist’ for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills.”39

A member of the “Implementing Common Core Standards” team at the Center for Teaching Quality argues that excerpts can be as educational as complete works:
“Not every student needs to read every word of every work. We can pull essential excerpts and examine them in small chunks–words, phrases, sentences–asking students to wrestle meaning from the text.”40
It is unclear how students can “wrestle meaning” from “words” or “phrases” wrenched cleanly from their context.

=============
“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

Bend it Like Truman

In the United Kingdom the number of reports of the verbal and physical abuse of teachers is growing at a sad and steady rate. In the United States as well, a number of fine teachers say that they are leaving the profession primarily because of the out-of-control attitudes and behavior of poorly-raised children who will not take any responsibility for their own education and don’t seem to mind if they ruin the educational chances of their peers.
David McCullough tells us that when Harry Truman took over the artillery outfit, Battery ‘D’, “the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous (mis) conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them…At last he called ‘Dismissed!’ As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer….In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were ‘busted’ in rank…the First Sergeant was at the head of the list…Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. ‘I didn’t come here to get along with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now, and I’ll bust you back right now.”
Now, I do realize the classroom is not a military unit, and that students cannot be busted back to a previous grade, however their behavior suggests that they don’t belong in a higher grade. But Truman realized poor discipline would endanger the lives of the men in his unit, and teachers, however much they yearn to be liked, relevant, and even loved, need to realize and accept that poor discipline in their classes will destroy some of the educational opportunities of their students. As it turned out, his unit respected and loved Truman in time, and lined Pennsylvania avenue for his inauguration parade.
For years, the Old Battleaxe was offered as a stereotype of the stern, demanding teacher who represented the expectations of the wider community in the classroom and required students to meet her standards.
In The Lowering of Higher Education, Jackson Toby quotes the experience of one man with an Old Battleaxe:
“Professor Emeritus of Religion at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Benjamin, wrote about a demanding freshman English teacher, Dr. Doris Garey, whose course he had taken in 1946, in an article entitled ‘When an ‘A’ Meant Something.’ Professor Benjamin praised the memory of Dr. Garey and expressed gratitude for what her demanding standards had taught him.
‘Even though she had a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke and a doctorate from Wisconsin, Miss Garey was the low person in the department pecking order. And physically she was a lightweight–she could not have stood more than 4-foot-10 or weighed more than 100 pounds. But she had the pedagogical mass of a Sumo wrestler. Her literary expectations were stratospheric; she was the academic equivalent of my [Marine] boot camp drill instructor…The showboats (other instructors) had long since faded, along with their banter, jokes and easy grades. It was the no-nonsense Miss Garey whose memory endured.'”
In my view, too many of our teachers have been seduced by the ideas that they should be making sure their students have fun, and that their teaching should include “relevant” material from the evanescent present of her students, their egregiously temporary pop culture, and from current events of passing interest.
Once discipline and student responsibility for their own learning is established and understood, there can be a lot of interesting and even entertaining times in the classroom. Without them, classes are in a world of trouble. Samuel Gompers used to read aloud for their enjoyment to a room full of employees making cigars, but they continued to make the cigars while he did it.
In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.
A suburban high school English teacher in Pennsylvania wrote that: “My students are out of control,” Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. “They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying.” And one of her students commented: “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…It’s a teacher’s job, however, to give students the motivation to learn.”
As long as too many of us think education is the teacher’s responsibility alone, we will have failed to understand what the job of learning requires of students, and we will be unable to make sense of the outcomes of our huge investments in education.
————————-
“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

It’s the Students, Stupid

The billionaires’ club, with their long retinue of pundits, researchers, and other hangers-on, are giving their attention, some of the time, to education. But they are not paying attention to the academic work of students, or to their responsibility for their own education.
Mr. Gates spent nearly two hundred million dollars recently on a program for teacher assessment, but does he realize that in almost every class there are students as well, and that they have a lot to say about what the teacher can accomplish?
One pundit came to speak in Boston. When told that lots of good teachers were being driven out of the profession by the absence of discipline among students, he said, “They need better classroom management skills.” I don’t think he had ever “managed” a classroom, but I told him this story:
When Theodore Roosevelt was President, he had a guest one day in the oval office, and his daughter Alice came roaring through the room disturbing everything. The guest said, “Can’t you control Alice?” And Roosevelt said, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice, but not both.”
Lots and lots of teachers have students in their classes who have not been taught by KIPP, to “Work Hard, Be Nice.” Their inability to control themselves and behave with courtesy and respect for their teacher and their fellow students frequently degrades and can even disintegrate the academic integrity of the class, which damages not only their own chance to learn, but prevents all their classmates from learning as well.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed 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.” Nine years later that remains the problem with the Edupundits and their funders.
Of course, one problem for the edureformers is that you can fire teachers but you can’t fire students. If students fail, largely through their own poor attendance, inattention and destructive behavior in class, we can’t blame them. Only the teachers can be held to account. This is beyond stupid, verging on willful blindness.
The University of Indiana, in its most recent Survey of High School Student Engagement, interviewed 143,052 U.S. high school students and found that 42.5% of them spend an hour or less each week on homework and 82.7% spend five hours or less each week on their homework. The average Korean student spends fifteen hours a week on homework, and that does not include evening hagwon sessions of two or three hours. Can anyone see a difference here? And, by the way, American students spend 53 hours a week playing video games and using other sorts of electronic entertainment.
Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
While they play, and consume expensive products of the technology companies, students in other countries are studying hard, behaving in class, and taking their educational opportunities seriously so they can eat our lunch, which they are starting to do.
But let’s blame the teachers in the United States and ignore what their students are doing, in class and after class. That will work, won’t it?
Of course what teachers and all the other employees of our school systems do is important. But ignoring students and their work, and blaming teachers for poor student academic performance, would be like blaming a trainer if his boxer gets knocked out in the ring, while not noticing that the boxer stands in front of his opponent with his hands at his sides all the time.
We need high academic achievement, but we will not get it by blaming teachers and driving them out of the profession, while not noticing that students have an important, and even crucial, responsibility for their own learning.
Ignoring the role of our students in their own education, which at the “highest” levels of funded programs we do, is not only dumb, it will virtually consign all the other efforts to failure. Think about it.
The billionaires’ club, with their long retinue of pundits, researchers, and other hangers-on, are giving their attention, some of the time, to education. But they are not paying attention to the academic work of students, or to their responsibility for their own education.
Mr. Gates spent nearly two hundred million dollars recently on a program for teacher assessment, but does he realize that in almost every class there are students as well, and that they have a lot to say about what the teacher can accomplish?
One pundit came to speak in Boston. When told that lots of good teachers were being driven out of the profession by the absence of discipline among students, he said, “They need better classroom management skills.” I don’t think he had ever “managed” a classroom, but I told him this story:
When Theodore Roosevelt was President, he had a guest one day in the oval office, and his daughter Alice came roaring through the room disturbing everything. The guest said, “Can’t you control Alice?” And Roosevelt said, “I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice, but not both.”
Lots and lots of teachers have students in their classes who have not been taught by KIPP, to “Work Hard, Be Nice.” Their inability to control themselves and behave with courtesy and respect for their teacher and their fellow students frequently degrades and can even disintegrate the academic integrity of the class, which damages not only their own chance to learn, but prevents all their classmates from learning as well.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed 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.” Nine years later that remains the problem with the Edupundits and their funders.
Of course, one problem for the edureformers is that you can fire teachers but you can’t fire students. If students fail, largely through their own poor attendance, inattention and destructive behavior in class, we can’t blame them. Only the teachers can be held to account. This is beyond stupid, verging on willful blindness.
The University of Indiana, in its most recent Survey of High School Student Engagement, interviewed 143,052 U.S. high school students and found that 42.5% of them spend an hour or less each week on homework and 82.7% spend five hours or less each week on their homework. The average Korean student spends fifteen hours a week on homework, and that does not include evening hagwon sessions of two or three hours. Can anyone see a difference here? And, by the way, American students spend 53 hours a week playing video games and using other sorts of electronic entertainment.
While they play, and consume expensive products of the technology companies, students in other countries are studying hard, behaving in class, and taking their educational opportunities seriously so they can eat our lunch, which they are starting to do.
But let’s blame the teachers in the United States and ignore what their students are doing, in class and after class. That will work, won’t it?
Of course what teachers and all the other employees of our school systems do is important. But ignoring students and their work, and blaming teachers for poor student academic performance, would be like blaming a trainer if his boxer gets knocked out in the ring, while not noticing that the boxer stands in front of his opponent with his hands at his sides all the time.
We need high academic achievement, but we will not get it by blaming teachers and driving them out of the profession, while not noticing that students have an important, and even crucial, responsibility for their own learning.
Ignoring the role of our students in their own education, which at the “highest” levels of funded programs we do, is not only dumb, it will virtually consign all the other efforts to failure. Think about it.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

Driven to Distraction

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”–George Orwell
While we spend billions on standards for skill-building and the assessment of skills, we don’t seem to notice that our students, in general, are not doing any academic work. This assumes that there is a connection between the academic work of students and their academic achievement, but for most of those who study and comment on education that link seems not to be apparent.
The Kaiser Foundation reported in January 2010, that:
Over the past five years, there has been a huge increase in media use among young people. Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 61/2 hours (6:21) a day with media–and managed to pack more than 81/2 hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media. Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38–almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five. [53 hours a week]
If our students spend that much time, in addition to sports, being with friends, and other activities, like sleep, when do they do their academic work?
Indiana University’ High School Survey of Student Engagement found most recently that:
Among (U.S.) Public High School students:
82.7% spend 2-5 hours a week on homework.
42.5% spend an hour or less each week on their homework.
This may help to explain how they manage to free up 53 hours a week to play with electronic entertainment media, but is there any effect of such low academic expectations on our students’ engagement with the educational enterprise we provide for them?
Brandon Busteed, Executive Director of Gallup Education reported on January 7th of this year that:
Gallup research strongly suggests that the longer students stay in school, the less engaged they become. The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. We found that nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated in the poll are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students. And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged. Our educational system sends students and our country’s future over the school cliff every year.
The statement of the obvious which applies here would seem to be that we have driven our high school students to distraction, by asking them to do little or no homework and by spending billions of dollars to lead them to prefer electronic entertainment media to the academic work on which their futures depend.
On June 3, 1990, Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote in his regular New York Times column that:
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 with 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 they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time to take it seriously.
Despite my own bias for having students read history books and write history research papers, I think it may be argued that if we give students nothing to do academically, we clearly contribute to the disengagement which we now find.
If we don’t take their academic work seriously, neither will they. What we take seriously we have a chance of doing well, and when we don’t take something seriously, we have little chance of achievement there. Verbum Sap.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

THE SIX/FORTY-ONE/SIX Weekly Reading Plan for American Students

Carol Jago, Past President of NCTE, and Will Fitzhugh, penniless drudge at The Concord Review,
ARE pleased (proud, humble, thrilled, inspired, excited, etc.)
TO ANNOUNCE:
Their innovative, new, exciting, transformative, breakthrough:
THE SIX/FORTY-ONE/SIX Weekly Reading Plan for American Students
The Kaiser Foundation finds that Americans 8-18 spend 53 hours
a week (A WEEK) with electronic entertainment media.
Jago and Fitzhugh propose a bold new initiative, potentially in collaboration
with CCSSO, NGA, the College Board, NASSP, the Department of Education,
and others, which will ask students to spend SIX HOURS a week reading
a novel, SIX HOURS a week reading a history book, and that will still leave
them Forty-One HOURS a Week, or nearly six hours each day, for their electronic
entertainment media…
It could be called the 41/6/6/ Plan or the 6/6/41 Plan if either would appeal more to the media
covering this transformative and bold new and exciting innovative initiative.
Tweets and other comments on this exciting new initiative welcomed.
Will Fitzhugh

The Mind of Students

What is on the minds of our students? We mostly have no idea. The Edupundits all seem to agree that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality. But isn’t the most important variable in student academic achievement really student academic work in the end?
The teacher can know a lot about her subject, can speak well, tell wonderful stories, have good control over the class, and so on, but if the student is thinking about something else, what is the result?
I have known first-rate teachers whose students didn’t do any work academically and mediocre teachers who had some students who achieved a lot academically.
All those hundreds of people spending many millions of dollars and countless months of effort on teacher assessment never seem to wonder what is going on in the minds of our students in a given class. How many times has an evaluator, visiting a class to judge the work of a teacher, ever thought to ask a few students, in those moments, what they know about the current subject, or even what they are thinking about at the time?
The Hindus say the mind is like a drunken monkey, and even a sober mind is pulled in many directions at once, by memories, worries, ideas, desires, impressions of all kinds, and even, occasionally, by the subject matter of the class the student is sitting in. But the point is that while we are teaching, even though we may get a student question from time to time, or we may ask a student for a comment from time to time, during the vast majority of the time we spend teaching, we have not the slightest insight into what is occupying the minds of almost all of our students while we are teaching our brains out.
A recent study found (mirabile dictu) that students who don’t come to class learn less than students who do. But the fact is that even when students do come to class, their attention and their minds may very well be absent from class. There are countless objects of interest to distract the minds of students from the current work of any class as presented by the teacher.
This is not to say that wonderful teachers cannot draw and hold the attention of almost all the students in their class for amazingly long stretches. But students have many concerns, both personal and academic. Not only the next athletic event, or personal relationship, but even the subject matter of the next class or the last class may occupy the minds of some or many of our students while we teach.
Teaching and learning are at least as subtle and complex as brain surgery, and the surgeon has one single anaesthetized patient, and the help of four or five other professionals, while the teacher may have thirty conscious high school students and no one to watch for signs of student distraction, if any…As every teacher knows it is ridiculously easy for a student to show every sign of serious attention while their mind is actually kilometers away on some other matter entirely.
Stitching knowledge and ideas into the existing mental and memory frameworks of students is a lot more difficult and intricate an undertaking than most of those designing teacher assessment projects even want to think about, but it is the actual daily venture of our teachers.
My main interest and experience are with history at the high school level, so I am not sure what bearing my suggestions would have for calculus, chemistry, or Chinese language courses. But I believe that the attention of our history students can be captured and rewarded by asking them to read at least one good complete history book each year, and to write one serious Extended Essay-type history research paper each year while they are in high school.
If they read and report on a good history book, the chances are that they will have given it their attention, and learned some history from it. If they write a 6,000-word history research paper (and I am regularly publishing 8,000-15,000-word papers by secondary students from 46 states and beyond), they will clearly have had to give the historical subject of their research their attention, and they will have learned some history (see: student academic achievement) in the process.
Of course, we should continue to try to recruit and retain the top 5% of college graduates as our school teachers, and we should encourage them to teach their hearts out. But unless we begin to look more closely in an effort to discover what, academically, is going on in the minds of students, we will continue to ignore the main engines of academic work in our schools. I hope one or two of our more elite and well-funded Edupundits may give this idea a passing thought or two.
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“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

Common Core: The Totalitarian Temptation

Jonah Goldberg
Liberal Fascism
New York: Doubleday, 2007, pp. 326-327
…Progressive education has two parents, Prussia and John Dewey. The kindergarten was transplanted into the United States from Prussia in the nineteenth century because American reformers were so enamored of the order and patriotic indoctrination young children received outside the home (the better to weed out the un-American traits of immigrants). One of the core tenets of the early kindergarten was the dogma that “the government is the true parent of the children, the state is sovereign over the family.” The progressive followers of John Dewey expanded this program to make public schools incubators of a national religion. They discarded the militaristic rigidity of the Prussian model, but retained the aim of indoctrinating children. The methods were informal, couched in the sincere desire to make learning “fun,” “relevant,” and “empowering.” The self-esteem obsession that saturates our schools today harks back to the Deweyan reforms from before World War II. But beneath the individualist rhetoric lies a mission for democratic social justice, a mission Dewey himself defined as a religion. For other progressives, capturing children in schools was part of the larger effort to break the backbone of the nuclear family, the institution most resistant to political indoctrination.
National Socialist educators had a similar mission in mind. And as odd as it might seem, they also discarded the Prussian discipline of the past and embraced self-esteem and empowerment in the name of social justice. In the early days of the Third Reich, grade-schoolers burned their multicolored caps in a protest against class distinctions. Parents complained, “We no longer have rights over our children.” According to the historian Michael Burleigh, “Their children became strangers, contemptuous of monarchy or religion, and perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors…Denunciation of parents by children was encouraged, not least by schoolteachers who set essays entitled ‘What does your family talk about at home?'”
Now, the liberal project Hillary Clinton represents is in no way a Nazi project. The last thing she would want is to promote ethnic nationalism, anti-Semitism, or aggressive wars of conquest. But it must be kept in mind that while these things were of enormous importance to Hitler and his ideologues, they were in an important sense secondary to the underlying mission and appeal of Nazism, which was to create a new politics and a new nation committed to social justice, radical egalitarianism (albeit for “true Germans”), and the destruction of the traditions of the old order. So while there are light-years of distance between the programs of liberals and those of Nazis or Italian Fascists or even the nationalist progressives of yore, the underlying impulse, the totalitarian temptation, is present in both.
The Chinese Communists under Mao pursued the Chinese way, the Russians under Stalin followed their own version of communism in one state. But we are still comfortable observing that they were both communist nations. Hitler wanted to wipe out the Jews; Mussolini wanted no such thing. And yet we are comfortable calling both fascists. Liberal fascists don’t want to mimic generic fascists or communists in myriad ways, but they share a sweeping vision of social justice and community and the need for the state to realize that vision. In short, collectivists of all stripes share the same totalitarian temptation to create a politics of meaning; what differs between them–and this is the most crucial difference of all–is how they act upon that temptation.

============
“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

Abolish Social Studies

Michael Knox Beran, via Will Fitzhugh:

Emerging as a force in American education a century ago, social studies was intended to remake the high school. But its greatest effect has been in the elementary grades, where it has replaced an older way of learning that initiated children into their culture [and their History?] with one that seeks instead to integrate them into the social group. The result was a revolution in the way America educates its young. The old learning used the resources of culture to develop the child’s individual potential; social studies, by contrast, seeks to adjust him to the mediocrity of the social pack.
Why promote the socialization of children at the expense of their individual development? A product of the Progressive era, social studies ripened in the faith that regimes guided by collectivist social policies could dispense with the competitive striving of individuals and create, as educator George S. Counts wrote, “the most majestic civilization ever fashioned by any people.” Social studies was to mold the properly socialized citizens of this grand future. The dream of a world regenerated through social planning faded long ago, but social studies persists, depriving children of a cultural rite of passage that awakened what Coleridge called “the principle and method of self-development” in the young.
The poverty of social studies would matter less if children could make up its cultural deficits in English [and History?] class. But language instruction in the elementary schools has itself been brought into the business of socializing children and has ceased to use the treasure-house of culture to stimulate their minds. As a result, too many students today complete elementary school with only the slenderest knowledge of a culture that has not only shaped their civilization but also done much to foster individual excellence.
In 1912, the National Education Association, today the largest labor union in the United States, formed a Committee on the Social Studies. In its 1916 report, The Social Studies in Secondary Education, the committee opined that if social studies (defined as studies that relate to “man as a member of a social group”) took a place in American high schools, students would acquire “the social spirit,” and “the youth of the land” would be “steadied by an unwavering faith in humanity.” This was an allusion to the “religion of humanity” preached by the French social thinker Auguste Comte, who believed that a scientifically trained ruling class could build a better world by curtailing individual freedom in the name of the group. In Comtian fashion, the committee rejected the idea that education’s primary object was the cultivation of the individual intellect. “Individual interests and needs,” education scholar Ronald W. Evans writes in his book The Social Studies Wars, were for the committee “secondary to the needs of society as a whole.”
The Young Turks of the social studies movement, known as “Reconstructionists” because of their desire to remake the social order, went further. In the 1920s, Reconstructionists like Counts and Harold Ordway Rugg argued that high schools should be incubators of the social regimes of the future. Teachers would instruct students to “discard dispositions and maxims” derived from America’s “individualistic” ethos, wrote Counts. A professor in Columbia’s Teachers College and president of the American Federation of Teachers, Counts was for a time enamored of Joseph Stalin. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1929, he published A Ford Crosses Soviet Russia, a panegyric on the Bolsheviks’ “new society.” Counts believed that in the future, “all important forms of capital” would “have to be collectively owned,” and in his 1932 essay “Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?,” he argued that teachers should enlist students in the work of “social regeneration.”
Like Counts, Rugg, a Teachers College professor and cofounder of the National Council for the Social Studies, believed that the American economy was flawed because it was “utterly undesigned and uncontrolled.” In his 1933 book The Great Technology, he called for the “social reconstruction” and “scientific design” of the economy, arguing that it was “now axiomatic that the production and distribution of goods can no longer be left to the vagaries of chance–specifically to the unbridled competitions of self-aggrandizing human nature.” There “must be central control and supervision of the entire [economic] plant” by “trained and experienced technical personnel.” At the same time, he argued, the new social order must “socialize the vast proportion” of wealth and outlaw the activities of “middlemen” who didn’t contribute to the “production of true value.”
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government–one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
Rugg himself set to work composing the “new materials of instruction.” In An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, his 1931 social studies textbook for junior high school students, Rugg deplored the “lack of planning in American life”:
“Repeatedly throughout this book we have noted the unplanned character of our civilization. In every branch of agriculture, industry, and business this lack of planning reveals itself. For instance, manufacturers in the United States produce billions’ of dollars worth of goods without scientific planning. Each one produces as much as he thinks he can sell, and then each one tries to sell more than his competitors. . . . As a result, hundreds of thousands of owners of land, mines, railroads, and other means of transportation and communication, stores, and businesses of one kind or another, compete with one another without any regard for the total needs of all the people. . . . This lack of national planning has indeed brought about an enormous waste in every outstanding branch of industry. . . . Hence the whole must be planned.
Rugg pointed to Soviet Russia as an example of the comprehensive control that America needed, and he praised Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, which resulted in millions of deaths from famine and forced labor. The “amount of coal to be mined each year in the various regions of Russia,”
Rugg told the junior high schoolers reading his textbook,
“is to be planned. So is the amount of oil to be drilled, the amount of wheat, corn, oats, and other farm products to be raised. The number and size of new factories, power stations, railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, and radio stations to be constructed are planned. So are the number and kind of schools, colleges, social centers, and public buildings to be erected. In fact, every aspect of the economic, social, and political life of a country of 140,000,000 people is being carefully planned! . . . The basis of a secure and comfortable living for the American people lies in a carefully planned economic life.”
During the 1930s, tens of thousands of American students used Rugg’s social studies textbooks.
Toward the end of the decade, school districts began to drop Rugg’s textbooks because of their socialist bias. In 1942, Columbia historian Allan Nevins further undermined social studies’ premises when he argued in The New York Times Magazine that American high schools were failing to give students a “thorough, accurate, and intelligent knowledge of our national past–in so many ways the brightest national record in all world history.” Nevins’s was the first of many critiques that would counteract the collectivist bias of social studies in American high schools, where “old-fashioned” history classes have long been the cornerstone of the social studies curriculum.
Yet possibly because school boards, so vigilant in their superintendence of the high school, were not sure what should be done with younger children, social studies gained a foothold in the primary school such as it never obtained in the secondary school. The chief architect of elementary school social studies was Paul Hanna, who entered Teachers College in 1924 and fell under the spell of Counts and Rugg. “We cannot expect economic security so long as the [economic] machine is conceived as an instrument for the production of profits for private capital rather than as a tool functioning to release mankind from the drudgery of work,” Hanna wrote in 1933.
Hanna was no less determined than Rugg to reform the country through education. “Pupils must be indoctrinated with a determination to make the machine work for society,” he wrote. His methods, however, were subtler than Rugg’s. Unlike Rugg’s textbooks, Hanna’s did not explicitly endorse collectivist ideals. The Hanna books contain no paeans to central planning or a command economy. On the contrary, the illustrations have the naive innocence of the watercolors in Scott Foresman’s Dick and Jane readers. The books depict an idyllic but familiar America, rich in material goods and comfortably middle-class; the fathers and grandfathers wear suits and ties and white handkerchiefs in their breast pockets.
Not only the pictures but the lessons in the books are deceptively innocuous. It is in the back of the books, in the notes and “interpretive outlines,” that Hanna smuggles in his social agenda by instructing teachers how each lesson is to be interpreted so that children learn “desirable patterns of acting and reacting in democratic group living.” A lesson in the second-grade text Susan’s Neighbors at Work, for example, which describes the work of police officers, firefighters, and other public servants, is intended to teach “concerted action” and “cooperation in obeying commands and well-thought-out plans which are for the general welfare.” A lesson in Tom and Susan, a first-grade text, about a ride in grandfather’s red car is meant to teach children to move “from absorption in self toward consideration of what is best in a group situation.” Lessons in Peter’s Family, another first-grade text, seek to inculcate the idea of “socially desirable” work and “cooperative labor.”
Hanna’s efforts to promote “behavior traits” conducive to “group living” would be less objectionable if he balanced them with lessons that acknowledge the importance of ideals and qualities of character that don’t flow from the group–individual exertion, liberty of action, the necessity at times of resisting the will of others. It is precisely Coleridge’s principle of individual “self-development” that is lost in Hanna’s preoccupation with social development. In the Hanna books, the individual is perpetually sunk in the impersonality of the tribe; he is a being defined solely by his group obligations. The result is distorting; the Hanna books fail to show that the prosperous America they depict, if it owes something to the impulse to serve the community, owes as much, or more, to the free striving of individuals pursuing their own ends.
Hanna’s spirit is alive and well in the American elementary school. Not only Scott Foresman but other big scholastic publishers–among them Macmillan/McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt–publish textbooks that dwell continually on the communal group and on the activities that people undertake for its greater good. Lessons from Scott Foresman’s second-grade textbook Social Studies: People and Places (2003) include “Living in a Neighborhood,” “We Belong to Groups,” “A Walk Through a Community,” “How a Community Changes,” “Comparing Communities,” “Services in Our Community,” “Our Country Is Part of Our World,” and “Working Together.” The book’s scarcely distinguishable twin, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s We Live Together (2003), is suffused with the same group spirit. Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s textbook for third-graders, Our Communities (2003), is no less faithful to the Hanna model. The third-grade textbooks of Scott Foresman and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (both titled Communities) are organized on similar lines, while the fourth-grade textbooks concentrate on regional communities. Only in the fifth grade is the mold shattered, as students begin the sequential study of American history; they are by this time in sight of high school, where history has long been paramount.

Today’s social studies textbooks will not turn children into little Maoists. The group happy-speak in which they are composed is more fatuous than polemical; Hanna’s Reconstructionist ideals have been so watered down as to be little more than banalities. The “ultimate goal of the social studies,” according to Michael Berson, a coauthor of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt series, is to “instigate a response that spreads compassion, understanding, and hope throughout our nation and the global community.” Berson’s textbooks, like those of the other publishers, are generally faithful to this flabby, attenuated Comtism.
Yet feeble though the books are, they are not harmless. Not only do they do too little to acquaint children with their culture’s ideals of individual liberty and initiative; they promote the socialization of the child at the expense of the development of his own individual powers. The contrast between the old and new approaches is nowhere more evident than in the use that each makes of language. The old learning used language both to initiate the child into his culture and to develop his mind. Language and culture are so intimately related that the Greeks, who invented Western primary education, used the same word to designate both: paideia signifies both culture and letters (literature). The child exposed to a particular language gains insight into the culture that the language evolved to describe–for far from being an artifact of speech only, language is the master light of a people’s thought, character, and manners. At the same time, language–particularly the classic and canonical utterances of a people, its primal poetry–[and its History?] has a unique ability to awaken a child’s powers, in part because such utterances, Plato says, sink “furthest into the depths of the soul.”
Social studies, because it is designed not to waken but to suppress individuality, shuns all but the most rudimentary and uninspiring language. Social studies textbooks descend constantly to the vacuity of passages like this one, from People and Places:
“Children all around the world are busy doing the same things. They love to play games and enjoy going to school. They wish for peace. They think that adults should take good care of the Earth. How else do you think these children are like each other? How else do you think they are like you?”
The language of social studies is always at the same dead level of inanity. There is no shadow or mystery, no variation in intensity or alteration of pitch–no romance, no refinement, no awe or wonder. A social studies textbook is a desert of linguistic sterility supporting a meager scrub growth of commonplaces about “community,” “neighborhood,” “change,” and “getting involved.” Take the arid prose in Our Communities:
“San Antonio, Texas, is a large community. It is home to more than one million people, and it is still growing. People in San Antonio care about their community and want to make it better. To make room for new roads and houses, many old trees must be cut down. People in different neighborhoods get together to fix this by planting.”
It might be argued that a richer and more subtle language would be beyond third-graders. Yet in his Third Eclectic Reader, William Holmes McGuffey, a nineteenth-century educator, had eight-year-olds reading Wordsworth and Whittier. His nine-year-olds read the prose of Addison, Dr. Johnson, and Hawthorne and the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Southey, and Bryant. His ten-year-olds studied the prose of Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Sterne, Hazlitt, and Macaulay [History] and the poetry of Pope, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Milton.
McGuffey adapted to American conditions some of the educational techniques that were first developed by the Greeks. In fifth-century BC Athens, the language of Homer and a handful of other poets formed the core of primary education. With the emergence of Rome, Latin became the principal language of Western culture and for centuries lay at the heart of primary- and grammar-school education. McGuffey had himself received a classical education, but conscious that nineteenth-century America was a post-Latin culture, he revised the content of the old learning even as he preserved its underlying technique of using language as an instrument of cultural initiation and individual self-development. He incorporated, in his Readers, not canonical Latin texts but classic specimens of English prose and poetry [and History].
Because the words of the Readers bit deep–deeper than the words in today’s social studies textbooks do–they awakened individual potential. The writer Hamlin Garland acknowledged his “deep obligation” to McGuffey “for the dignity and literary grace of his selections. From the pages of his readers I learned to know and love the poems of Scott, Byron, Southey, and Words- worth and a long line of the English masters. I got my first taste of Shakespeare from the selected scenes which I read in these books.” Not all, but some children will come away from a course in the old learning stirred to the depths by the language of Blake or Emerson. But no student can feel, after making his way through the groupthink wastelands of a social studies textbook, that he has traveled with Keats in the realms of gold.
It might be objected that primers like the McGuffey Readers were primarily intended to instruct children in reading and writing, something that social studies doesn’t pretend to do. In fact, the Readers, like other primers of the time, were only incidentally language manuals. Their foremost function was cultural: they used language both to introduce children to their cultural heritage [including their History] and to stimulate their individual self-culture. The acultural, group biases of social studies might be pardonable if cultural learning continued to have a place in primary-school English instruction. But primary-school English–or “language arts,” as it has come to be called–no longer introduces children, as it once did, to the canonical language of their culture; it is not uncommon for public school students today to reach the fifth grade without having encountered a single line of classic English prose or poetry. Language arts has become yet another vehicle for the socialization of children. A recent article by educators Karen Wood and Linda Bell Soares in The Reading Teacher distills the essence of contemporary language-arts instruction, arguing that teachers should cultivate not literacy in the classic sense but “critical literacy,” a “pedagogic approach to reading that focuses on the political, sociocultural, and economic forces that shape young students’ lives.”
For educators devoted to the social studies model, the old learning is anathema precisely because it liberates individual potential. It releases the “powers of a young soul,” the classicist educator Werner Jaeger wrote, “breaking down the restraints which hampered it, and leading into a glad activity.” The social educators have revised the classic ideal of education expressed by Pindar: “Become what you are” has given way to “Become what the group would have you be.” Social studies’ verbal drabness is the means by which its contrivers starve the self of the sustenance that nourishes individual growth. A stunted soul can more easily be reduced to an acquiescent dullness than a vital, growing one can; there is no readier way to reduce a people to servile imbecility than to cut them off from the traditions of their language [and their History], as the Party does in George Orwell’s 1984.
Indeed, today’s social studies theorists draw on the same social philosophy that Orwell feared would lead to Newspeak. The Social Studies Curriculum: Purposes, Problems, and Possibilities, a 2006 collection of articles by leading social studies educators, is a socialist smorgasbord of essays on topics like “Marxism and Critical Multicultural Social Studies” and “Decolonizing the Mind for World-Centered Global Education.” The book, too, reveals the pervasive influence of Marxist thinkers like Peter McLaren, a professor of urban schooling at UCLA who advocates “a genuine socialist democracy without market relations,” venerates Che Guevara as a “secular saint,” and regards the individual “self” as a delusion, an artifact of the material “relations which produced it”–“capitalist production, masculinist economies of power and privilege, Eurocentric signifiers of self/other identifications,” all the paraphernalia of bourgeois imposture. For such apostles of the social pack, Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Milton’s and Tennyson’s “soul within,” Spenser’s “my self, my inward self I mean,” and Wordsworth’s aspiration to be “worthy of myself” are expressions of naive faith in a thing that dialectical materialism has revealed to be an accident of matter, a random accumulation of dust and clay.
The test of an educational practice is its power to enable a human being to realize his own promise in a constructive way. Social studies fails this test. Purge it of the social idealism that created and still inspires it, and what remains is an insipid approach to the cultivation of the mind, one that famishes the soul even as it contributes to what Pope called the “progress of dulness.” It should be abolished.

The Chosun News; Seoul, South Korea; 19 November 2012: “For College and Jobs, Practice your Non-fiction Writing skills”

“The Secrets to Good Writing” from the editor of The Concord Review [TCR]
Increase time spent on research, hone the quality of your writing
Stay away from “How to Write Well” books
Serious writing is no longer the specialty of a scholar. Ever since writing essays have become an important part of the college admission process, high schools have become in the grip of “writing fever.” Also known as the “Olympiad of History,” TCR is the first organization to put the publication of high school students’ essays into practice. Since 1987, TCR has published history papers by 1044 students in 39 countries around the world. Of all the participants, 36% (371) of them have been admitted to an Ivy League university. The rest have been admitted to Stanford, MIT, Oxford and Cambridge. Delicious Study held an interview on November 12th with Mr. Will Fitzhugh, the founder of TCR, and two students, Han Jae Hyuk (Seoul International School, Senior) and Lee Seon Woo (Asia Pacific International School, Sophomore), who are preparing for applying to colleges in the States. With the invitation from the Asian representative of TCR, Caroline Lee, Mr. Fitzhugh visited Korea for the first time. The following article describes what Mr. Fitzhugh had told the students about “Writing for College.”
The Quality of Writing comes from the Strong Facts
For each issue of The Concord Review, Mr. Fitzhugh reads at least 140 essays every 3 months. His “criteria for a good paper” were rather simple. “An interesting history paper is a good paper. However, for a paper to be enjoyable to read, the writer must have a genuine interest in the topic. In essays, for example, an interesting work has both a unique stance on a topic and a solid support of evidence. No matter how original one’s perspective is, without evidence, the essay is empty. It’s rare to find sources of evidence that fit perfectly with your interpretations. In fact, some students who have published essays in TCR have spent 18 months writing the essay. Had these students not been interested in what they were writing, they could not have put in such an effort.”
Then, Lee Sun Woo pointed out a difficulty many students faced: “Even with interest in a topic, it can be difficult to connect that to a topic one can write about.” Mr. Fitzhugh responded with an anecdote. “A student in an international school in Hong Kong sent an essay about the Needham Question (1900~1995). Cambridge Professor Joseph Needham studied why Chinese science had stopped advancing ahead of Western Science in 1500 as it had been until the 16th century. To satisfy his curiosity about Needham, Jonathan Lu organized an answer in essay form. He was able to connect the familiar topic of China with an unfamiliar one, science, through history. It’s a good example.”
Read First…Write Later
Throughout the interview, Mr. Fitzhugh continued to emphasize the importance of reading. From finding an interesting subject to research, reading has to be continually done. However, it is not necessary to read books that surpass one’s reading level. “How to Write Well” tutorials will jeopardize the genuineness of your writing and only the fancy phrases and diction will stand out.” Pertaining to writing, Han Jae Hyuk raised a concern whether “Other forms of communication (debating for example) can be as helpful as writing.” “Well,” Mr. Fitzhugh simply answered, “the main way to improve one’s writing skills is to write more.” “Writing a 1,000-word paper is much harder than speaking for the same amount. Of course, during the process of preparing for a speech, you encounter knowledge that you can use for a paper. However, without writing a single word, there will be no improvement in one’s writing aptitude.” He added, “What is needed for high school students today is practice in non-fiction writing.” “Today’s American high school students are given fiction-writing assignments to test and expand their creativity. However, even those who receive such assignments will one day attend college and encounter a variety of non-fiction writing. Because there is such a big gap between reality and today’s high school education, some companies spend $3 billion dollars each year in remedial writing courses for their employees. I’m assuming that the situation in Korea is not so different.”
The Concord Review
The only journal in the world that publishes papers written by high school history students (American school standard 9th to 12th grade). Under the principle “writing skill is a valuable asset,” TCR publishes 11 essays in each online issue every 3 months. Created by Mr. Will Fitzhugh in 1987. Funded by donations and subscriptions. Chooses 5 exceptional essays (of 44) each year for the Emerson Prize. The number of Koreans who have published in the journal is 22. With a payment of $40 (43,000 won), any high school can submit an essay for consideration.
——————————-
“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

Is There an Echo in Here? The Making of a Relic

In the March 14, 2001, issue of Education Week, Victor Henningsen, director of the history department at Phillips Academy in Andover, had this to say about term papers: “There’s no substitute for the thrill that comes from choosing a topic of your own and wrestling with a mass of evidence to answer a question that you have posed, to craft your own narrative and your own analysis. We’ve been teaching kids to write research papers here for a long time. Kids don’t remember the advanced placement exam, but they do remember the papers they have written, and so do I.”
Teacher Magazine
March 1, 2002
It seems likely that the history research paper at the high school level is now an endangered species. Focus on creative writing, fear of plagiarism, fascination with PowerPoint presentations, and lack of planning time have been joined by a notable absence of concern about term papers in virtually all of the work on state standards. As a result, far too many American high school students never get the chance to do the reading and writing that a serious history paper requires. They then enter college with no experience in writing papers, to the continual frustration of their professors, and of the employers who later hire them. The Ford Motor Co., for example, had to institute writing classes to ensure that their people are able to produce readable reports, memos, and the like.
A few years ago, a survey of English and social studies standards by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation showed that term papers are, indeed, ignored. The Pew Charitable Trust’s Standards for Success program, with its focus on high school and college articulation of standards and expectations, likewise includes no term papers. Neither has the American Diploma Project in Washington, D.C., working to define the expectations of high schools, colleges, and employers, yet found a place in its deliberations for history research papers. One problem for these groups and others, of course, is that serious term papers cannot be assessed in a one-hour objective test. But their impact on students and the consequences of never having done one can be incalculable.
In the early 1980s, while I was teaching American history to high school sophomores in Concord, Massachusetts, each of my students had to write a biographical paper on a U.S. president. One student chose John F. Kennedy, and I lent him a copy of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days. The boy took a look at the rather large book, and told me, “I can’t read this.” I said, “Yes, you can,” and eventually, he was able to finish it. Five or six years later, out of the blue, I got a letter from the student. He was now a Junior at Yale, and he wanted to thank me for making him read Schlesinger’s book. It was the first serious work of nonfiction he had ever read, and being able to get through it had done something for his self-confidence. Of course, he was the one who had forced himself to read the book, but the anecdote points up one of the great advantages of working on a history term paper. The experience often will mark the first time a high school student discovers that he or she is capable of reading a book on an important topic.
When I was an alumni interviewer for Harvard College, I asked one high school boy what he thought he might major in. History, he replied. I had said nothing about my own interest in the subject, and all he knew about me was that I was an alum. But after he gave me his answer, I naturally asked what his favorite history book was. Before long, it became clear that, while this student had achieved good grades and advanced placement scores, he had studied only textbooks. No one had ever handed him a good history book and encouraged him to read it, apparently. More than likely, he had never had to write a serious history paper either. If he had, he might have been forced to read a book or two in the field.
In the March 14, 2001, issue of Education Week, Victor Henningsen, director of the history department at Phillips Academy in Andover, had this to say about term papers; “There’s no substitute for the thrill that comes from choosing a topic of your own and wrestling with a mass of evidence to answer a question that you have posed, to craft your own narrative and your own analysis. We’ve been teaching kids to write research papers here for a long time. Kids don’t remember the advanced placement exam, but they do remember the papers they have written, and so do I.”
Since 1987, I have been the editor of The Concord Review, a quarterly journal of history research papers written by high school students. We’ve published 528 [1,044] papers (averaging 5,000 words, including endnotes and bibliography) by students from 42 [46] states and 33 [38] foreign countries. Out of some 22,000 public and private high schools in the United States, we receive about 600 essays a year, from which we publish 11 in each issue. If you do the calculation, that means that more than 21,000 high schools do not even submit one history essay for consideration in a given year. While this may not prove that exceptional history essays are not being written at those schools, it is not an encouraging sign.
As for what teachers expect in their high school history classes in lieu of research papers, I have only anecdotal evidence. I met with the head of the history department at a public high school in New Jersey once, a man very active in the National Council for History Education, and asked him why he never sent papers from his best students to The Concord Review. He said he didn’t have his students do research papers anymore; they make PowerPoint presentations and write historical fiction instead. When I asked the now-retired head of history at Scarsdale High School in New York, why, even though he subscribed to The Concord Review, he never submitted student papers for consideration, he too said he no longer assigned papers. After the AP exam, he would hold what he called the Trial of James Buchanan for his role in helping to precipitate the Civil War. His students would then write responses on that subject instead.
After I published her paper on the Women’s Temperance Union, the class valedictorian at a public high school on Staten Island wrote me to say she felt weak in expository writing and offered some reasons. Here are her words: “I attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop their talents in this field. It is assumed students will learn how to write in college.” I feel confident in saying that, on the college side, there is the expectation that students will learn at least the rudiments of putting together a research paper while they are still in high school. College humanities professors, slow to learn perhaps, are routinely surprised when they find that this is not the case. And rightly so. What is at work here?
For one thing, creative writing often rules at the high school level (and earlier in many cases). Even the director of Harvard’s Expository Writing program for undergraduates has said she thinks that teenagers don’t get enough chances to write about their feelings, anxieties, hopes, and dreams, and that they shouldn’t be pushed to work on research papers until college. The National Writing Project in Berkeley, California, a program that reaches hundreds of teachers each year, takes a postmodern approach to what it calls “Literatures,” and never comes within a mile of considering that students could use some work on research skills and expository writing.
I have actually seen what teenagers can do, and it is more like the following, an excerpt from an essay published a few years back in The Concord Review. (more examples at www.tcr.org) This passage concludes an essay by a high school Junior who went on to major in civil engineering at Princeton, get a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at Stanford, and she is now an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell.
As is usually the case with extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, putting blacks and women against each other at a time when each needed the other’s support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the disagreements within the woman suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream.
High school kids are fully capable of writing long, serious history papers. And they will get a lot out of doing so, not only in terms of reading nonfiction, but also in learning to write nonfiction themselves. These days, too many of our students are not given that chance to grow. Colleges may continue doing what they can to help teenagers master the rudiments of expository writing, but much of what these high school students have lost can never be recouped in remedial coursework.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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™
blog: www.tcr.org/blog

Adults Only

I may be one of a tiny minority who think that schools are for student academic work.
Of course, sports, concerts, social programs, dances, and all sorts of other youth activities are important, but students don’t need schools to do them in.
My view is that without student academic work, all the buildings, bond issues, budgets, school boards, teacher unions, superintendent and teacher training programs, Broad/Gates/WalMart grants, local-state-federal education departments, NCLB, RTT, CC, CCSSO, Schools of Education, standards projects, legislation, regulations, and all the rest of the Adults Only paraphernalia surrounding education in this country these days are just a waste of money and time.
The Education Punditocracy, including blogs, magazines, newspapers, foundations, Finn/Hess/Petrilli, etc., and even my friend and inspiration, Diane Ravitch, among hundreds and hundreds of others, are completely preoccupied with and absorbed in their consideration of what Adults are doing in education. The actual academic work of students takes place at much too low a level to attract their notice. They seem to be making the assumption that if they can just fix all the Adults Only stuff, then somehow student academic work will take care of itself. But they don’t pay any attention in the meantime to whether students are actually doing any academic work or not. And they have not learned that the students, and the students alone, have the power to determine whether they will do any academic work, and also what its quality will be.
To reiterate: without student academic work, all the rest of the bustle, noise, commentary, and the hundreds of billions of dollars spent will amount to nothing, so it should be important to pay attention to student academic work, should it not?
I came to understand this because for the last 25 years in particular, and for about 10 years before that, I have been fully engaged in efforts that completely depend upon good student academic work, and I have been fascinated to discover how few Education people seem to be involved with that, and that just about every one of them, though laboring away quite seriously and conscientiously, seems to spend all their time on the Adults Only matters, and to have almost no interest, other than to give it lip service and quickly move on, in the serious academic work of students.
If that should somehow change, and if student academic work were to become the central focus of what we pay attention to in education, there is a chance we might see more of it, and that its quality might improve too. But if we continue to ignore it and focus on Adults Only, that most assuredly is not going to happen. As the Hindus say: “Whatever you give your Attention to grows in your life,” and we have been giving, IMHO, far too much attention (almost all of it) to the Adults Only aspects of education and far too little to student academic work.
To test what I am saying, if a kind Reader would go back over articles, books, blogs, and speeches on education in recent years, please do let me know if you find any that talk about student science projects, the complete nonfiction books they are reading, or the serious history research papers they are writing. I believe if you look closely, almost all that you find will show people caught up in what Adults Only are doing, should do, will do, must do, or might do, and there will be little to no attention to the actual academic work of students in our schools. But please prove me mistaken, with evidence, if you would be so kind.
—————————-
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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™
blog: www.tcr.org/blog

Scholars or Customers?

Diane Senechal, Ph.D., has written a book (The Republic of Noise–2012) about the virtues of solitude for young people living in our mad, mad, Wired World.
I fear she may be insufficiently aware that every moment one of our high school students spends in reflection, musing, thinking, contemplation, meditation or indeed in solitude, unless those moments are product-focused, can grow, over time, into a huge barrier to sales of computers, software, games, and other products of our marketing efforts in technology. After all, the business of education is business, right?
To put it plainly, thinking, and other sorts of reflection, constitute a serious threat to all efforts to meet hardware/software sales quotas, especially in the huge and growingly lucrative education market.
This should make it clearer why the companies which are the commercial engines of our economy, especially the technology companies which are concentrating on education for a large portion of their consumer marketing and sales, are so opposed to having students read actual nonfiction books or spend time working on history research papers while they are in high school.
While it may be true that having students read one or more complete history books while they are still in high school may not only teach them some history, but will also help them to get ready for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read in the college, and that any work they do in high school on serious history research papers will better
prepare them for college writing tasks, it must be borne in mind that both of those activities can seriously cut into their use of social media and associated products, and limit the time they will spend buying and using video games and other important products!
We have to decide if we want our high school students to be scholars or customers! Apple Computer did not spend $650 million or thereabouts to persuade our students to read books and write papers to further their education, but instead to buy iPhones and iMacs to help distract them from homework and other obstacles to buying products. As Mark Bauerlein noted in The Dumbest Generation, one sign in an Apple store promised that the MacBook would be “the only book you will ever need.”
There has been attention recently given to the disadvantages of colleges inflating grades and doing other things in their attempts to attract paying customers, because treating students as customers interferes with the essential responsibility of Upper Education to serve and challenge them as students.
But even in Lower Education, the multi-multi-billion market in digital equipment and software has employed major efforts to induce students to spend 53 hours a week with electronic entertainment media, according to the Kaiser Foundation, while most of them spend no more than 3 or 4 hours a week on homework.
There are always a few people who don’t get the Word of course. Since 1968, the International Baccalaureate Program has required a 4,000-word (16-page) Extended Essay for candidates for the Diploma, and that may very well have resulted in some students reading nonfiction books.
In addition, the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board, while it has not yet managed to include a serious term papers (a small pilot experiment is now underway), nevertheless has not exiled some teachers who go ahead and assign them anyway, a good number of which have been published in The Concord Review since 1987. In fact a special issue of AP history essays was published by The Concord Review in 1995, and this issue is available on the the website at www.tcr.org. But those teachers (and students) have always been outside the mainstream with their efforts.
A few high school students, in some cases inspired by the exemplary work of their peers published in The Concord Review have worked to read for and write their serious history term papers as independent studies, some ranging from 8,000 words (24 pages) up to 15,000 words (60 pages), but without any encouragement from the electronic entertainment, computer/software and STEM communities, these scholarly “mountaineers” have not been numerous over the years.
If we continue to value sales over education for our students, we will sell a lot of products, but we will also naturally continue to have students in need of extensive remediation and to produce unemployable graduates. However, if we decide to relax our visa barriers for skilled immigrants, we can continue to count on them to carry our civilization forward or at least keep it going by making use of the benefits they bring with them from the non-commercial educations still available in other countries in South and East Asia and elsewhere.
“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

Why Are We Afraid to Show Off Our Brightest Students’ Work?

[Atlantic Editor: High school athletes are the pride of their communities. But if we want to inspire kids to write well, we should be putting the exemplary work of our best young high school scholars on display.]
As the editor of The Concord Review, I have been glad to publish more than 1,000 exemplary high school history research papers by students from 46 states and 38 other countries since 1987. Yet I have long been aware that little “personal” essays have killed off academic expository writing in most of our schools.
For generations, American children in our schools have had their writing limited to short pieces about themselves, from primary school up through their “college essays” (those little 500-word “personal” narratives). As long as English teachers have borne all the responsibility for reading and writing in the schools, the reading has been fiction, the writing personal and “creative.” Lately a genre has emerged called “creative nonfiction,” but that turns out to be just more solipsistic autobiography.
Most of our students never read a single history book and they very rarely write a serious term paper before graduating from high school. They learn to write without learning anything beyond their own feelings and the events of their present lives, and their teachers are able to grade that work without knowing much either.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, put it very well in August this year: “The single biggest complaint from college teachers and employers is that high school graduates cannot write as well as they need to.” As a result, the member companies of the Business Roundtable have been saddled with a $3 billion bill for remedial writing courses every year, not only for their hourly hires but for their current and new salaried employees.
There are a few exceptions, of course. For decades, the International Baccalaureate has required a 4,000 (16-page) Extended Essay for the Diploma, and thousands of American students have done that. Even the College Board has begun to think of a small pilot program on term papers as well.
The New Common Core standards, a set of reforms that will soon be applied by most states, talk about nonfiction reading, but that category seems to include more memos, short speeches, brochures, and technical articles than anything like a complete history book. The standards also mention something about nonfiction writing, but all of the examples in the Appendix seem to be only more two-page efforts that will far from challenge the capability of our students in academic writing.
By publishing Peg Tyre’s story “The Writing Revolution,” The Atlantic is doing a great service for our students who need to learn to do some serious academic expository writing while they are still in high school. However, I would add that students also benefit from seeing exemplary expository essays written by their peers.
At The Concord Review, I’ve seen many examples of first-rate academic writing on historical topics. Students are startled, challenged, and inspired when they see this kind of work by people their own age. “When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it,” one New Jersey public school girl wrote to me. “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.”
It may be objected that this is a letter from a good student. Where are the letters from struggling students? I would respond that in sports, we are quite happy to present other students with the very best public performances of their most athletic peers. But when it comes to academics, we seem afraid to show students the exemplary work of their peers, for fear of driving them away. This dichotomy has always seemed strange to me.
Of course we must pay attention to our least able students, just as we must pay attention to the those who have the most difficulty in our gym classes. But it would’t hurt, in my view, to dare to recognize and distribute some of our students’ best academic work, in the hopes that it may challenge many others of them to put in a little more effort. Surely that is worth a try.
—————————-
“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

Why Are We Afraid to Show Off Our Brightest Students?

[Atlantic Editor: High school athletes are the pride of their communities. But if we want to inspire kids to write well, we should be putting the exemplary work of our best young high school scholars on display.]
As the editor of The Concord Review, I have been glad to publish more than 1,000 exemplary high school history research papers by students from 46 states and 38 other countries since 1987. Yet I have long been aware that little “personal” essays have killed off academic expository writing in most of our schools.
For generations, American children in our schools have had their writing limited to short pieces about themselves, from primary school up through their “college essays” (those little 500-word “personal” narratives). As long as English teachers have borne all the responsibility for reading and writing in the schools, the reading has been fiction, the writing personal and “creative.” Lately a genre has emerged called “creative nonfiction,” but that turns out to be just more solipsistic autobiography.
Most of our students never read a single history book and they very rarely write a serious term paper before graduating from high school. They learn to write without learning anything beyond their own feelings and the events of their present lives, and their teachers are able to grade that work without knowing much either.
Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, put it very well in August this year: “The single biggest complaint from college teachers and employers is that high school graduates cannot write as well as they need to.” As a result, the member companies of the Business Roundtable have been saddled with a $3 billion bill for remedial writing courses every year, not only for their hourly hires but for their current and new salaried employees.
There are a few exceptions, of course. For decades, the International Baccalaureate has required a 4,000 (16-page) Extended Essay for the Diploma, and thousands of American students have done that. Even the College Board has begun to think of a small pilot program on term papers as well.
The New Common Core standards, a set of reforms that will soon be applied by most states, talk about nonfiction reading, but that category seems to include more memos, short speeches, brochures, and technical articles than anything like a complete history book. The standards also mention something about nonfiction writing, but all of the examples in the Appendix seem to be only more two-page efforts that will far from challenge the capability of our students in academic writing.
By publishing Peg Tyre’s story “The Writing Revolution,” The Atlantic is doing a great service for our students who need to learn to do some serious academic expository writing while they are still in high school. However, I would add that students also benefit from seeing exemplary expository essays written by their peers.
At The Concord Review, I’ve seen many examples of first-rate academic writing on historical topics. Students are startled, challenged, and inspired when they see this kind of work by people their own age. “When I first came across The Concord Review, I was extremely impressed by the quality of writing and the breadth of historical topics covered by the essays in it,” one New Jersey public school girl wrote to me. “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.”
It may be objected that this is a letter from a good student. Where are the letters from struggling students? I would respond that in sports, we are quite happy to present other students with the very best public performances of their most athletic peers. But when it comes to academics, we seem afraid to show students the exemplary work of their peers, for fear of driving them away. This dichotomy has always seemed strange to me.
Of course we must pay attention to our least able students, just as we must pay attention to the those who have the most difficulty in our gym classes. But it would’t hurt, in my view, to dare to recognize and distribute some of our students’ best academic work, in the hopes that it may challenge many others of them to put in a little more effort. Surely that is worth a try.
—————————-
“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

Most students not proficient in writing, test finds

Christine Armario, Associated Press

Just a quarter of eighth and 12th grade students in the United States have solid writing skills, even when allowed to use spell-check and other computer word-processing tools, according to results of a national exam [NAEP} released Friday.
Twenty-seven percent of students at each grade level were able to write essays that were well-developed, organized, and had proper language and grammar-3 percent were advanced and 24 percent were proficient. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.
“It is important to remember this is first draft writing,” said Cornelia Orr, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation’s Report Card tests. “They did have some time to edit, but it wasn’t extensive editing.”
Students who took the writing test in 2011 had an advantage that previous test takers did not: a computer with spell-check and thesaurus. Previously, students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test had to use pencil and paper, but with changes in technology, and the need to write across electronic formats, the decision was made to switch to computers.
Orr said students use technology and tools like spell-check on a daily basis. “It’s as if we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser,” she said.
She said word processing tools alone wouldn’t result in significantly better writing scores if students didn’t have the core skills of being able to organize ideas and present them in a clear and grammatical fashion.
Still, students in both grades who used the thesaurus and the backspace more frequently had higher scores than those who used them less often. Students in the 12th grade who had to write four or five pages a week for English homework also had higher scores.
Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, 33 percent of eighth grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.
The results at both grade levels showed a continued achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students.
There was also a gender gap, with girls scoring 20 points higher on average than boys in the eighth grade and 14 points higher in 12th grade. Those who qualified for free and reduced price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, also had lower scores than those who did not; there was a 27 point difference between the two at the eighth grade.
For the 2011 exam, laptops were brought into public and private schools across the country and more than 50,000 students were tested to get a nationally representative sample. Students were given prompts that required them to write essays that explained, persuaded, or conveyed an experience.
Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor at Florida State University who served on the advisory panel for the test, said one factor is that research show most students in the United States don’t compose at the keyboard.
“What they do is sort of type already written documents into the machine, much as we used to do with typewriters four decades ago,” she said.
Yancey said for this reason there was some concern about having students write on the computer as opposed to by hand.
Likewise, having the advantage of spell-check assumes student know how to use it. And in some schools and neighborhoods, computers are still not easily accessible.
“There are not so many students that actually learn to write composing at the keyboard,” she said.
Yancey added that many students who do have access to computers are not necessarily using them to write at school, but to take standardized tests and filling in bubbles.
“Digital technology is a technology,” she said. “Paper and pencil is a technology. If technology were the answer, that would be pretty simple.”

————————
“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

Turnabout

The New Common Core Standards call for a 50% reduction in “literary” [aka fictional noninformational texts] readings for students, and an increase in nonfiction informational texts, so that students may be better prepared for the nonfiction they will encounter in college and at work.
In addition to memos, technical manuals, and menus (and bus schedules?), the nonfiction informational texts suggested include The Gettysburg Address, Letter from Birmingham Jail, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, and perhaps one of the Federalist Papers.
History books, such as those by David Hackett Fischer, James McPherson, David McCullough, Ron Chernow, Paul Johnson, Martin Gilbert, etc. are not among the nonfiction informational texts recommended, perhaps to keep students from having to read any complete books while they are still in high school.
In the spirit of Turnabout, let us consider saving students more time from their fictional noninformational text readings (previously known as literature) by cutting back on the complete novels, plays and poems formerly offered in our high schools. For instance, instead of Pride and Prejudice (the whole novel), students could be asked to read Chapter Three. Instead of the complete Romeo and Juliet, they could read Act Two, Scene Two, and in poetry, instead of a whole sonnet, perhaps just alternate stanzas could be assigned. In this way, they could get the “gist” of great works of literature, enough to be, as it were, “grist” for their deeper analytic cognitive thinking skill mills.
As the goal is to develop deeply critical analytic cognitive thinking skills, surely there is no need to read a whole book either in English or in History classes. This will not be a loss in Social Studies classes, since they don’t assign complete books anyway, but it may be a wrench for English teachers who probably still think that there is some value in reading a whole novel, or a whole play, or even a complete poem.
But change is change is change, as Gertrude Stein might have written, and if our teachers are to develop themselves professionally to offer the new deeper cognitive analytic thinking skills required by the Common Core Standards, they will just have to learn to wean themselves from the old notions of knowledge and understanding they have tried to develop from readings for students in the past.
As Caleb Nelson wrote in 1990 in The Atlantic Monthly, speaking about an older Common Core at Harvard College:
The philosophy behind the [Harvard College] Core is that educated people are not those who have read many books and have learned many facts but rather those who could analyze facts if they should ever happen to encounter any, and who could ‘approach’ books if it were ever necessary to do so….
The New Common Core Standards are meant to prepare our students to think deeply on subjects they know practically nothing about, because instead of reading a lot about anything, they will have been exercising their critical cognitive analytical faculties on little excerpts amputated from their context. So they can think “deeply,” for example, about Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, while knowing nothing about the nation’s Founding, or Slavery, or the new Republican Party, or, of course, the American Civil War.
Students’ new Common academic work with texts about which they will be asked to Think & Learn Deeply, may encourage them to believe that ignorance is no barrier to useful thinking, in the same way that those who have written the Common Core Standards believe that they can think deeply about and make policy for our many state education systems, without having spent much, if any time, as teachers themselves, or even in meeting with teachers who have the experience they lack.
It may very well turn out that ignorance and incompetence transfer from one domain to another much better than deeper thinking skills do, and that the current mad flight from knowledge and understanding, while clearly very well funded, has lead to Standards which will mean that our high school students [those that do not drop out] will need even more massive amounts of remediation when they go on to college and the workplace than are presently on offer.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
24 August 2012

Skip the Knowledge!

Poor James Madison, back in the day, spending endless hours reading scores upon scores of books on the history of governments, as he prepared to become the resident historian and intellectual “father” of the United States Constitution in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia! If he had only known what we know now thanks to the new Common Core, he could have saved the great bulk of that time and effort if he had only acquired some Thinking Skills instead!
Our schools of education have long understood that if a student teacher [sideguider] can acquire enough pedagogicalistical sophistication and the right Thinking Skills, she will be able to teach [sideguide] anything, from Mandarin to European History to Calculus to Home Economics, to classes with any number of students.
The Harvard College faculty wasted many hours in the 1980s trying to derive a Common Core of knowledge which every undergraduate ought to acquire. No one on the faculty wanted to allow any other member of the faculty to tell her/him what knowledge students needed to learn at Harvard, and none wished to give up teaching what he/she was currently studying to devote any time to a survey course in the general knowledge of their field or any other field. So they agreed, thirty-odd years ago, on a Common Core of Thinking Skills instead.(1)
It is not clear whether the knowledge-free curricula of the graduate schools of education, or the Core experiences at Harvard College, in any way guided the authors of our new Common Core in their achievement of the understanding that it is not knowledge of anything that our students require, but Thinking Skills. They took advantage of the perspective and arguments of a famous cognitive psychologist at Stanford in designing the history portion of the Core. Just think how much time they saved by not involving one of those actual historians, who might have bogged down the whole enterprise in claiming that students should have some knowledge of history itself, and that such knowledge might actually be required before any useful Thinking Skills could be either acquired or employed. If we had followed that path, we might actually be asking high school students to read real history books–shades of the James Madison era!!
Just think of all the time and effort that was expended by Professor Hirsch and all those who worked to develop, and are now working to offer, a Core Knowledge curriculum to thousands of our students. If they had only had the benefit of the cognitive psychology undergirding at least the history portion of the new Common Core, they could have skipped all that and gone straight to the Core Thinking Skills now being promoted across the country.
The whole idea that knowledge is so important, or should precede thinking about anything, is so antedeluvian (which means–oh, never mind–just more of that knowledge stuff!). What is the value of being 21st Centurians and right up-to-date, if we can’t ignore the past and skip over its history?
Our advance into the brave new world of thinking skills was anticipated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which, as far as I can tell by looking over the research interests of the faculty, long ago left behind such mundane matters as the chemistry, foreign languages, history, literature and mathematics that students used to (and some still do, I suppose) study in our high schools. The Education faculty has moved boldly on beyond all that academic knowledge to, in addition to lots of psychology/diversity/poverty/sociology/disability studies, the new bare essentials of Thinking Skills.
During the discussions over Harvard’s Common Core decades ago, one physics professor pointed out that in order to think like a physicist it is important to know quite a bit of physics, but then, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He had spent his whole career in the pursuit of a knowledge of physics, so naturally he would think that knowledge is more important than Thinking Skills, or, at least, should come first in the study of physics or anything else.
We have finally come to realize that, after all, Google has all the knowledge we will ever need, and so, with keyboarding skills, and some time in Common courses on Thinking Skills, our students will be well prepared to launch their careers as ignoramuses, and make their own unique contributions to the disappearance of knowledge, understanding and wisdom in the United States, and to the decline of our civilization (which means–oh, never mind–just look it up!).
Let those history-minded Asian countries continue to ask their students to acquire lots of knowledge. Our students will have their new Common Core Thinking Skills, and all the pride and self-esteem that the ignorance we have given them can support.
(1) Caleb Nelson, Harvard Class of ’88 (Mathematics) “Harvard’s Hollow Core,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1990
=================
“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

Common Core Anyone? Anyone?

The totalitarian left has been similarly clear that decision-making power should be confined to a political elite–the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the leader of a “master race,” or whatever the particular phrase that might become the motto of the particular totalitarian system. In Mussolini’s words, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”
Thomas Sowell
Intellectuals and Society
New York: Basic Books, 2011, pp. 104-106
…Reliance on systemic processes, whether in the economy, the law, or other areas, is based on the constrained vision–the tragic vision–of the severe limitations on any given individual’s knowledge and insight, however knowledgeable or brilliant that individual might be, compared to other individuals. Systemic processes which tap vastly more knowledge and experience from vastly more people, often including traditions evolved from the experience of successive generations, are deemed more reliable than the intellect of the intellectuals.
By contrast, the vision of the left is one of surrogate decision-making by those presumed to have not only superior knowledge but sufficient knowledge, whether these surrogates are political leaders, experts, judges or others. This is the vision that is common to varying degrees on the political left, whether radical or moderate, and common also to totalitarians, whether Communist or Fascist. A commonality of purpose in society is central to collective decision-making, whether expressed in town-meeting democracy or totalitarian dictatorship of other variations in between. One of the differences between the commonality of purpose in democratic systems of government and the totalitarian systems of government is in the range of decisions infused with that commonality of purpose and in the range of decisions reserved for individual decision-making outside the purview of government.
The free market, for example, is a huge exemption from government power. In such a market, there is no commonality of purpose, except among such individuals and organizations as may choose voluntarily to coalesce into groups ranging from bowling leagues to multinational corporations. But even these aggregations typically pursue the interests of their own respective constituents and compete against the interests of other aggregations. Those who advocate this mode of social decision-making do so because they believe that the systemic results of such competition are usually better than a society-wide commonality of purpose imposed by surrogate decision-makers superintending the whole process in the name of “the national interest” or of “social justice.”
The totalitarian version of collective surrogate decision-making by government was summarized by Mussolini, who defined “totalitarianism” in the motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside of the State, nothing against the State.” Moreover, the state ultimately meant the political leader of the state, the dictator. Mussolini was know as Il Duce–the leader–before Hitler acquired the same title in German as the Führer.
Democratic versions of collective surrogate decision-making by government choose leaders by votes and tend to leave more areas outside the purview of government. However, the left seldom has any explicit principle by which the boundaries between government and individual decision-making can be determined, so that the natural tendency over time is for the scope of government decision-making to expand, as more and more decisions are taken successively from private hands, since government officials constantly have incentives to expand their powers while the voters’ attention is not constantly focussed on maintaining limits on those powers.
Preferences for collective, surrogate decision-making from the top down are not all that the democratic left has shared with the original Italian Fascists and with the National Socialists (Nazis) of Germany. In addition to political intervention in economic markets, the democratic left has shared with the Fascists and the Nazis the underlying assumption of a vast gap in understanding between ordinary people and elites like themselves. Although both the totalitarian left–that is, the Fascists, Communists and Nazis–and the democratic left have widely used in a positive sense such terms as “the people,” “the workers” or “the masses,” these are the ostensible beneficiaries of their policies, but not autonomous decision-makers. Although much of the rhetoric on both the democratic left and the totalitarian left has long papered over the distinction between ordinary people as beneficiaries and as decision-makers, it has long been clear in practice that decision-making has been seen as something reserved for the anointed in these visions.
Rousseau, for all his emphasis on “the general will,” left the interpretation of that will to elites. He likened the masses of the people to “a stupid, pusillanimous invalid.” Godwin and Condorcet, also on the eighteenth century left, expressed similar contempt for the masses. Karl Marx said, “The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing”–in other words, millions of human beings mattered only if they carried out his vision. George Bernard Shaw included the working class among the “detestable” people who “have no right to live.” He added: “I should despair if I did not know that they will die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves.” As a young man serving the U.S. Army during the First World War, Edmund Wilson wrote to a friend: “I should be insincere to make it appear that the deaths of this ‘poor white trash’ of the South and the rest make me feel half so bitter as the mere conscription or enlistment of any of my friends.”
The totalitarian left has been similarly clear that decision-making power should be confined to a political elite–the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the leader of a “master race,” or whatever the particular phrase that might become the motto of the particular totalitarian system. In Mussolini’s words, “The mass will simply follow and submit.”
—————————
“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

Bound Hand & Foot

In ancient China, upper-class women had their feet tightly bound as children, preventing the bones from growing normally, so that they could be hindered in their walking, and only capable of cute little “feminine” steps around the house.
We don’t do that, of course. What we do instead with all our young people is see to it that they do not read a single complete history book in school (maiming their knowledge of history) and we confine their writing mostly to fiction, compositions about themselves, or brief little five-paragraph “essays” about something else (doesn’t matter what), which cripples their ability to write.
Even when we ask them to apply to college and show us their writing, admissions officers ask only for 500-word pieces in which they talk about themselves and their lives.
In Boston the Boston Globe has a competition that asks young people to write about courage. But is it the courage of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or John Quincy Adams, or James Otis, or Patrick Henry or John Paul Jones, or Florence Nightingale that they want to hear about? Not a chance. They want the youngsters to write about their own courage, for instance perhaps when they spoke to a fellow student who was not popular, etc.
Thus we bind their learning and their imagination, and we try to prevent their access to knowledge of history and the achievements of mankind, and we try to keep them from learning how to write a serious term paper or read a substantial history book.
Why is this happening? One example of the problem is a writing consultant from Teachers’ College, Columbia, who was given a $50,000,000 (yes, $50 million) contract to teach students reading and writing in New York City. When I asked her if she would be having the students write about history, she told me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” So, naturally, the students her grant enabled her to “work” with probably didn’t get into content that much either.
Mark Bauerlein wrote (The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future) that on the NAEP history test 57 percent scored “Below Basic.” To score “Basic,” the student has to know who George Washington was. To score “Below Basic” the student has to know that Scooby-Doo was never President, but they probably could not name anyone who ever was President. “Of those taking the exam, a majority, 52 percent, when asked to identify a U.S. Ally during World War II selected a member of the Axis powers–Germany, Italy, and Japan–rather than the Soviet Union” [or Great Britain].
We hear lots of complaints from many quarters that our kids are ignorant of history and cannot write. It would have made as much sense to criticize upper-class Chinese women in the Imperial days because they had such poor times in the 100-yard dash.
If we continue to keep history books away from our students, and limit their writing to brief solipsistic exercises, then we can only expect that they will continue to demonstrate the damage we have done to them, when we test them and look over the writing they are able to produce for us.
==============
“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

A cure for bad teaching of writing

Jay Matthews:

Forty-five years ago, I married the best editor I have ever known. Most of the reasons I love Linda have nothing to do with writing, but it’s useful to have her around when wrestling with a difficult column.
I’m lucky. Few people are willing to and capable of helping others produce engaging and instructive prose. Many editors of my books were helpful, but I still remember the one who did not change a word, good for my ego but not for the book. Newspaper editors, at The Washington Post and elsewhere, have more stories to deal with than ever before, but no more time to fix them.
This problem is particularly acute in our schools, where almost all of us learn to write. I got little instruction before a required composition class my sophomore year of college. The situation has gotten worse since then. Few teachers have enough experience and training to show students what is good writing and what is not. Those who have that skill lack the time to share it with all their students and still have lives.
In a recent column, Michael Shaughnessy of EducationViews.org discussed this with Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review publishes exemplary high school research papers. They agreed that writing instruction is in crisis. The latest solution – letting computers grade papers – is a dead end.
“These programs don’t care if you are writing an ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ or an ‘Ode to an iPhone,’ ” Fitzhugh said. “The content is of no interest to the robo-graders. They are programmed only to ‘worry’ about a small circumscribed set of writing skills, and the subject of your composition counts for nothing. You can write a dull composition, which amply displays ignorance, and still get a good score from the computers.”
To be fair to the software that reads essays, and the people who created it, in most cases at least one human being also assesses the writing when the grade means something. Rachel Toor, a former editor who is an associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University, acknowledged in a piece she wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education that a student can be helped by an Apple program that points out clichés, wordy phrases and needlessly complex words, such as “conceptualizing” instead of “thinking.”
But the rest of Toor’s essay was chilling. She cares about improving her students’ writing. She finds that most college professors won’t or can’t do it. At a party, she met a political scientist with an Ivy League education who teaches at a good liberal arts college. He told her he never commented on his students’ writing. “It’s simply not part of his grading process,” she wrote. “He assesses their ideas, he says, not the prose.”
When she asked how he could separate the ideas from their expression, he said “he didn’t feel that he had the expertise to comment on their writing,” she wrote. “He wouldn’t know, he said, what good writing looked like.” She asked whether he thought he was a good writer. “He said yes, because he’s been published,” she wrote.
That suggests that it is better to teach writing in high school. I know several fine, if marginally employed, journalists who could do it. Writing is often mentioned as one of the premier 21st century skills, and it can be taught without exhausting the teachers.
Require students to take at least one semester of reading and writing instead of their regular English class. A paper is due each Monday. In class, students read whatever they like or work on next week’s essay while the teacher calls them up in turn and edits their papers as they watch.
At the end of the day, there are no stacks of student papers to ruin the instructor’s home life. Each student gets personal attention. Even Linda Mathews might be persuaded to teach that class.

A cure for bad teaching of writing

Jay Matthews:

Forty-five years ago, I married the best editor I have ever known. Most of the reasons I love Linda have nothing to do with writing, but it’s useful to have her around when wrestling with a difficult column.
I’m lucky. Few people are willing to and capable of helping others produce engaging and instructive prose. Many editors of my books were helpful, but I still remember the one who did not change a word, good for my ego but not for the book. Newspaper editors, at The Washington Post and elsewhere, have more stories to deal with than ever before, but no more time to fix them.
This problem is particularly acute in our schools, where almost all of us learn to write. I got little instruction before a required composition class my sophomore year of college. The situation has gotten worse since then. Few teachers have enough experience and training to show students what is good writing and what is not. Those who have that skill lack the time to share it with all their students and still have lives.
In a recent column, Michael Shaughnessy of EducationViews.org discussed this with Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review publishes exemplary high school research papers. They agreed that writing instruction is in crisis. The latest solution — letting computers grade papers — is a dead end.

Down in Lower Education

In 1893, when the Committee of Ten published its recommendations for high school education, Upper Education and Lower Education academics were still talking to each other. Harvard president Charles William Eliot was the chairman, and the committee, Diane Ravitch reported in Left Back (Simon & Schuster, 2000), included four other college presidents, three high school principals, and a college professor. In 1918, when the NEA Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education issued its report, the chairman was, as Diane Ravitch wrote, “Clarence Kingsley, a former social worker, former teacher of mathematics at Brooklyn Manual Training High School, and–at the time of the report–supervisor of high schools in Massachusetts.” (Ravitch, pp. 42,123)
The main objectives for high school students in the NEA report were: “1. Health, 2. Command of fundamental processes, 3. Worthy home membership, 4. Vocation, 5. Citizenship, 6. Worthy use of leisure, and 7. Ethical character.” These “became famous among educators as ‘the Seven Cardinal Principles,’ the seven objectives based on the needs of life.” (Ravitch, p. 124)
With this new set of objectives in view, and with the transformation of the Normal Schools
into psychobabbling Graduate Schools of Education hostile to academic content, perhaps it is not surprising that college professors and other academics were increasingly estranged from the goings on in Lower Education. What professor of history or physics or Romance languages or nanotechnology could find common ground with those at the Lower Level who were dedicated to teaching secondary students the “worthy use of leisure”?
Nevertheless, as the number of high schools grew, along with the number of colleges, one Upper Education group formed a growing interest in what people were doing in sports at the Lower Level. This would be college coaches, who saw in the strong interest in athletics at the high school level a vital breeding ground for the athletes they would need to recruit for their college programs. As a consequence, college coaches began to keep track of the progress of especially promising high school athletes in a variety of sports, and in their Lower Education Level coaches. In fact, friendly relations were often formed between high school coaches and college coaches, so that news about really good athletes could get to the Upper Level in time to enable recruiting to begin (now at about the 10th grade).
Coaches in colleges recognized that success in their jobs depended in part on their ability to locate good candidates and persuade them to come to their place of work to be athletes after high school. Lower Education coaches understood that their work and their opinions were valued by those in the Upper Education reaches of their sports.
Meanwhile, among teachers of academic subjects in Lower Education, a very different situation could be found. Teachers who identified and prepared promising students of history or physics or literature realized that their counterparts in Upper Education did not want to know them or to hear about their students. Upper Education professors left recruitment of great candidates in their disciplines completely up to the Upper Education Admissions Committees.
By contrast, Upper Education coaches have decided not to depend on the Admissions people to find the best athletes for them. In fact, they typically bring the Admissions Committees lists of the athletes who they would like to have admitted to meet the needs of their teams. Upper Education professors rarely, if ever, come to the Admissions Committees with names of scholars from the high schools they wanted admitted to strengthen their academic departments.
Of course there are many differences in the reward systems for Upper Level coaches and for Upper Level professors. If the coaches do not get good athletes they will not be able to win games, matches, or other athletic competitions and before long their jobs will be in jeopardy. On the other hand, most Upper Education professors believe they lose nothing by simply ignoring their Lower Education colleagues, their students, and their curricula. Their jobs depend on their research and publications, for the most part, and they are content to let the Admissions Committees select their students for them. When the students arrive in their courses, they often complain that these recruits are ignorant and unable to do serious Upper Education academic work, but that never seems to increase their interest in meeting Lower Education teachers or finding out what academic work is being done at that Lower level.
One result of this situation is that Lower Education teachers and scholars are aware that Upper Education academics don’t much care about what they do, while Lower Education coaches and athletes (often the same people) are quite sure that Upper Education coaches are very interested in what they are doing, to the extent, in some cases of forming good relationships between them. It is understood that Upper Education coaches may even wish to visit promising high school athletes in their homes in an effort to recruit them for their programs. It is beyond imagination that an Upper Education professor would do anything like that.
In their battles against anti-intellectualism, Lower Education people can expect little or no interest or assistance from their Upper colleagues, and the professors in Upper Education will no doubt continue to bemoan the level of preparation of their students, especially in reading and writing, without wondering, it seems, if that is the result in part of anything they have failed to do.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
17 July 2012

Upper Education Myopia

Not long ago, an associate professor of Creative Writing (the most popular subject in which is now not Ozymandias or Dover Beach or Westminster Bridge, but “ME”)…at an Upper Education institution west of the Mississippi wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, bemoaning the incompetence and/or indifference of her Upper peers in evaluating, correcting or coaching the academic writing of their students:
“…And since there’s little room in most graduate curricula to focus on writing, many future faculty members simply never learn. The truth is, everyone thinks whoever went before him or her was responsible for the job of teaching writing: College instructors believe students learned the mechanics in high school; graduate advisers assume their students learned as undergraduates what they needed to know about style and argumentation.
By the time people become professors, they have no one to turn to for help with their writing. Some hope or pray that editors will save them; sometimes that happens. But most acquisitions editors don’t have the time or energy to do line-editing, and they assume that the copy editors will clean up the prose…And so, bad prose gets published and bad models proliferate….
…What, then, to make of the political scientist who didn’t think he had the expertise to comment on his students’ writing? I believe he’s shirking an important aspect of his job…If professors don’t tell students that the writing matters, who will? If professors don’t know what good writing looks like, who does?”
I followed up this welcome interest in academic writing at the Upper Education level by sending her information about The Concord Review, which, for 25 years has been working to encourage, distribute and, with the National Writing Board, to assess, serious academic expository writing by high school students around the world (Lower Education Level).
The replies I got from the Upper Education personage were:
“I got a whole bunch of messages that I don’t think were meant for me. You might check your computer for viruses.”
When I sent more information, she replied that she had seen material about these efforts when she was in Admissions at an Upper Education place in the Southeast but:
“What made a big impression on me is that there was (as I recall) a submissions fee. At Duke, I saw a lot of ‘honors’ that came with a price tag. That troubles me.”
So, of course, she never inquired further. (And yes, Duke takes an admissions fee…)
Now, so as not to charge all Upper Education people with having the same dim or poor vision about writing at the Lower Education Level, here is a letter I got from a physicist at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study…
INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY
Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
22 June 2000
Mr. Will Fitzhugh, President
National Writing Board
The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776
Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,
I recently came across The Concord Review, and I would like to express my appreciation for your leadership role and your continuous dedication to this endeavor. Not only am I impressed with the high quality of the history articles that appear in the Review, but I am also impressed with the very idea of a publication which provides a forum for the academic work of high school students in history.
As a physicist, I am accustomed to the many initiatives, such as math competitions and physics olympiads, instituted to recognize and promote interest and talent in the sciences among high school students. However, I have always felt that there was no equivalent mechanism to encourage and nurture students in the humanities, and to recognize their accomplishments. The Concord Review strikes me as a simple yet brilliant idea to help fill that gap, and as a very effective way to promote high standards and excellence in the humanities.
Sincerely,
Chiara R. Nappi
Theoretical Physicist
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
12 July 2012

Level of Expectations

It has become an educational cliché to say that “students will rise to the level of expectations.” But how do we explain the students whose work rises well above our level of expectations? Mostly, we just ignore them. In the local media, coverage of high school sports “blanks” any and all accounts of exemplary academic work by high school students.
In the mid-1980s, when I was teaching (as I thought) United States History to Sophomores at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I assigned, following the advice of my colleagues, history papers of just 5-7 pages, but I did tell the students that the title page did not count as one of the pages.
One quiet student, who I did not know at all, turned in a 28-page paper on the current balance of nuclear/thermonuclear weapons between the United States and the USSR. He later graduated summa cum laude from Tufts in economics. Why did he do that paper? He didn’t need to, and he didn’t do it for me. He was “rising” to the level of his own expectations. As Laurence Steinberg wrote in Beyond the Classroom: “Within a system that fails (flunks) very few students, then, only those students who have high standards of their own–who have more stringent criteria for success and failure–will strive to do better than merely to pass and graduate.”
In the last 25 years I have published more than 1,000 history research papers by crazy motivated secondary students like that from 46 states and 38 other countries. (I am happy to provide pdfs of some of these exemplary history research papers on request to fitzhugh@tcr.org).
Since the 1960s, the International Baccalaureate has been expecting students to complete a 4,000-word Extended Essay to qualify for the Diploma. In 2011, I published an 11,000-word (Emerson Prize) paper on the stagnation in science and technology in China for five centuries after 1500, and the student had to cut it down to 4,000 words to meet the expectations for the Extended Essay and the IB Diploma. ACT and the College Board have not yet included an expectation for that sort of academic expository writing.
Often we work to limit what students do academically. Several years ago, when The Concord Review was receiving submissions of high school history research papers of 6,000, 8,000, and 10,000 words, I asked the Executive Director of National History Day, which has as one option for competitors a 2,500-word history paper, if they had considered accepting essays that were longer. She said that no, they didn’t want any paper that took more than 10 minutes to read.
Recently when I published a 108-page (Emerson Prize) paper on the War of Regulation in North Carolina in the 18th century by a student from an independent school west of the Mississippi, I found out that she had to reduce it to 9 pages, without endnotes, to enable her to win first place nationally in the National History Day competition.
One student whose (Emerson Prize) work I published went to her teacher and said: “My paper is going to be 57 pages, is that all right?” And the teacher (may his tribe increase) said, “Yes.”
Five or six years ago I received a paper (Emerson Prize) on the history of economic reform in China in recent years from a student at a public high school in Ohio. Like high schools generally, hers expected her to complete their requirements in four years. Instead she did it in two and spent the next two years as a full-time student at The Ohio State University before applying to Harvard as a freshman. She recently graduated from there with high honors in mathematics, with an economics minor.
I should say that, even though Asian students have the highest academic achievement of any group in the United States, not all of the students I have published have been Asian, nor did the high level of expectations for their own academic work all come from the Confucian influence of their parents.
When it comes to academics, we seem to give the vast majority of our attention to, and spend the bulk of our efforts on, students whose efforts fall far below our expectations, those who, if not among the 25-30% who fail to finish high school, may enter community college reading at the fifth-grade level, and more than half of whom will drop out from there. Naturally we want to help those who are doing poorly in school. Still, we do want our most brilliant students to start companies, become scientists, be our judges, diplomats, and elected officials, teach history, write good books, and otherwise work to sustain and advance our civilization. But our basic attitude is–let them manage on their own.
How different it is for our promising young athletes, for whom we have the highest expectations, on whom we keep the most elaborate statistics, and to whom we dedicate the most voluminous local media coverage, as well as nationally-televised high school football and basketball games.
If we matched for them the expectations we have for our students’ academic work, we might be asking them to run just one lap, do two pushups, and spend most of their time helping out in gym classes, or playing video games, instead of practicing their sport. But our young people, being the way they are, would no doubt “cheat,” as some do in academics, by deriving higher standards from their own ambition and from seeing the achievements of their peers, and the athletes for whom we might try to set such low expectations, like the young scholars for whom we do, would continue to rise above them, and to astonish us with their accomplishments. Dumb Lucky us.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
25 June 2012

Education Interruptus

Back in the day, it was possible to go to a movie theater and watch the whole movie right through, without having unrelated matter introduced at various times. Now, with 21st Century presentation customs, a movie on television will be broken into a number of times for five or six advertisements for widely unrelated products and services.
This sort of fragmentation is not only present in education, but welcomed as a brave new way of motivating students and trying to retain their attention. A number of experts, seeing the popularity of video games, with their changes in level and constant supply of “rewards,” recommend that the curricula we offer students should benefit from constant interruptions as well. With Milton’s “On His Blindness”–
When I consider how my light is spent
E’re half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodg’d with me useless….
Deep Reading practice suggests that students should often break into their own reading at some point to “interrogate” the material, asking questions about the relationship of text to text, text to world, text to self, and the like. So, for instance, in starting to read Milton’s sonnet, they might pause to inquire, “Do you know anyone who is seeing-impaired?” “Is there a connection in the text between ‘light’ and ‘dark?'” “How do you feel about the services for the blind in your community?”
…Though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light deny’d, I fondly ask?
Here again it would be possible to ask “Have you ever been chided for something?” “How did that change your feelings at the time?” “What sort of community service have you been involved in lately?” “What have you made that you feel most proud of?” “Is there a God?” These interruptions are recommended to help retain the students’ attention and to support their motivation to continue reading, which, it appears, John Milton’s sonnet could no longer do without such modern pedagogical aids.
Similarly, other academic matters may be modernized by introducing frequent scores, levels of difficulty, and, of course, extensive visual and auditory stimulation. Modern students who have watched hundreds of thousands of hours of chopped-up television shows, and played hundreds of thousands of hours of fragmented video games just cannot be expected to pay attention for any extended periods to any “text” or academic task, without the sort of interruptions on which they have become dependent. Alexander Hamilton, Federalist #1–
…It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved
for the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide
the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or
not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or
whether they are forever destined to depend for their political
constitutions on accident and force…
Deep Reading here might lead the student down the “labyrinthine ways” of questions about the use of force in society or the frequency of accidents on our highways?
Some might argue that this history of shattered attention has led to a kind of addiction to interruption which it should be education’s mission to help students overcome. They would point to the research that shows that multitasking means each task will receive less attention and be done less well, and argue that students, instead of being encouraged (required) to break into their own attention with interrogatories, should be shown ways to sustain a focus on the academic works before them.
However, those who believe that nothing in what civilization has to offer can hold the attention of students today without the regular intrusion of pedagogical gimmicks and process techniques to jolt them with scores, questions, rewards, counts of the # of “reading minutes” and the like, might simply say that fragmented attention is not only a good thing, but it must be rewarded so that students will not drop out of school and sit slumped at home watching various media and playing digital games.
The Kaiser Foundation recently found that the average young person in the United States now spends about 53 hours a week with various electronic entertainment activities, so many educators (and hardware and software sales professionals) have come to the conclusion that unless we bring interrupted education into the newly digital 21st Century classroom, we will not have adapted successfully to the scattered brains of our young people today.
————————–
“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

Speed Kills

Modern man (and woman?) is very interested in speed, on land and sea and in the air, but also in “scoring” student writing, it appears. Educational Testing Service recently praised its computer program’s ability to score 16,000 samples of writing in 20 seconds.
I should probably explain my bias against too much speed, and not just where it helps to kill thousands of people on the highway. Several decades ago, I took a speed reading course from Xerox Learning Systems. They gave a pre-test on reading and comprehension, and the tests after the course showed that I had doubled my reading speed and cut my comprehension in half.
The arguments in favor of grading student writing by computer program are that it saves money and time and allows huge volumes of student responses-to-a-prompt to be “addressed,” as they would say.
I am not sure whether Abraham Lincoln wrote The Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope on the train to Pennsylvania or not, but if he had taken one of the new bullet trains, no doubt the speech would have been shorter and quite possibly less immortal.
Other writers have found inspiration watching the land pass by their train windows, but that again has become less common, no doubt, as the speed of travel has increased. The Dreamliner may make it easier to sleep during the flight, but there is not much to see out the window.
E.T.S. may be able to make some serious money in “assessing” student writing at 21st century speeds, but the comprehension of that work will have been cut to zero, I am quite sure, because, as you understand, the computer program, and perhaps some of those who are promoting this scoring by machine, have no idea what the student is saying in any case.
Assessing short writing samples at blinded speeds may lead to encouraging more teachers to assign such brief pieces to their students, thus saving them from having to take the time in coaching and evaluating writing that could be spent on watching videos and talking about the Twilight series or The Hunger Games in class. Thus, students’ greatest writing efforts in high school could be devoted to their 500-word “college essay,” instead of, for example, a 4,000-word Extended Essay such as they would need to do for the International Baccalaureate Diploma.
It should be noted that the College Board has recently announced a new Capstone Writing Initiative, by which they plan to introduce academic expository writing, over a three-year Pilot program into a select few of our high schools. At first, papers will be produced by groups on limited topics, but perhaps in a few more years, students of this new AP program will be allowed to attempt the sort of serious history research paper that The Concord Review has published by more than 1,000 secondary students from 39 countries over the last 25 years.
I would caution the AP, however, that if they are going to ask teachers and students to work on serious academic papers, they may very well have to slow down the assessments, unless, of course, computers have advanced enough in the next three or four years so that they can not only “evaluate” such papers at a rapid pace, but also begin the understand the very first thing of what the students are writing about (i.e. the subject matter). After all, Deep Blue did well at Jeopardy, didn’t it? So a future program, with hundreds of thousands of history books in its memory banks, may be able to make connections to allow it to at least seem to understand some of the history that the student has derived from their own reading and thinking.
These advances could make it easier at last to assign and assess serious student academic expository writing at the secondary level, at least enough to satisfy the College Board and those who buy the Capstone Project, but I am sorry to say that, for the student, the process of reading history and writing about it will be just as slow, and just as valuable, as it was for Thucydides and Tacitus and Edward Gibbon back in the day, and for David McCullough in our own day.
At a recent conference, David McCullough, who spent 10 years writing Truman, said that he is often asked how he divides his time between research and writing. He said no one every asks him how much time he spends thinking. The new computer scoring programs don’t waste any time thinking about the content of the work they are evaluating, and, in their rush to do a lot of writing “assessments” real fast and very cheaply, perhaps those promoting those programs don’t spend a lot of time on that part either.
————————-
“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

Robo Essay Grading

“But Will Fitzhugh, the publisher of the Sudbury, Mass.-based Concord Review, a quarterly scholarly journal that publishes secondary students’ academic writing, said he is skeptical of whether there is any application of automated essay graders that would enhance students’ educational experience.”
Ian Quillen:

Education Week: Published Online: April 24, 2012
Published in Print: April 25, 2012
Study Supports Essay-Grading Technology
But researchers raise concerns about some conclusions
By Ian Quillen
After a recent study that suggested automated essay graders are as effective as their human counterparts in judging essay exams, “roboreaders” are receiving a new wave of publicity surrounding their possible inclusion in assessments and classrooms.
But while developers of the technology are happy to have the attention, they insist the high profile has more to do with timing of policy changes such as the push to common standards than with any dramatic evolution in the essay-grading tools themselves.
“What’s changed is the claims people are willing to make about it. … [I]t’s not because the technology has changed,” said Jon Cohen, an executive vice president of the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, one of nine organizations developing software that participated in the study.
“I think, over time, a mixture of technologies will make this really good not only for scoring essays,” but also for other assignments, said Mr. Cohen, the director of AIR’s assessment program. “But we really need to be clear about the limits of the applications we are using today so we can get there.”
Human vs. Machine
The study, underwritten by the Menlo Park, Calif.-based William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, is driven by the push to improve assessments related to the shift to the Common Core State Standards in English/language arts and math, and is based on the examination of essays written specifically for assessments. (The Hewlett Foundation also provides support to Education Week for coverage of “deeper learning.”)
Essay Graders
A recent study examined essay-grading software developed by the following organizations:
American Institutes for Research
www.air.org/focus-area/educational-assessment
Carnegie Mellon University
www.hcii.cmu.edu
CTB/Mcgraw-Hill
www.ctb.com
Educational Testing Service
www.ets.org
Measurement Inc.
www.measurementinc.com
MetaMetrics
www.metametricsinc.com
Pacific Metrics
www.pacificmetrics.com
Pearson Knowledge Technologies
kt.pearsonassessments.com
Vantage Learning
www.vantagelearning.com
SOURCE: “Contrasting State of the Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis”
Each developer’s software graded essays from a sample of 22,000 contributed by six states, using algorithms to measure linguistic and structural characteristics of each essay and to predict, based on essays previously graded by humans, how a human judge would grade a particular submission. All six states are members of one of two state consortia working to develop assessments for the new standards.
By and large, the scores generated by the nine automated essay graders matched up with the human grades, and in a press release, study co-director Tom Vander Ark, the chief executive officer of Federal Way, Wash.-based Open Education Solutions, a blended-learning consulting group, said, “The demonstration showed conclusively that automated essay-scoring systems are fast, accurate, and cost-effective.”
Mr. Cohen of AIR cautioned that interpretation could be too broad.
“I think the claims being made about the study wander a bit too far from the shores of our data,” he said.
Mark Shermis, the dean of the college of education at the University of Akron, in Ohio, and a co-author of the study, said the paper doesn’t even touch on the most exciting potential of automated essay graders, which is not their ability to replace test scorers (or possibly teachers) with a cheaper machine, but their ability to expand upon that software to give students feedback and suggestions for revision.
‘Inspiring Composition‘
Two vendors in the study–the Princeton, N.J.-based Educational Testing Service and Vantage Learning, with headquarters in Yardley, Pa.–already have offered for most of the past decade software that gives students some basic feedback on the grammar, style, mechanics, organization, and development of ideas in their writing, Mr. Shermis said.
“It’s designed to be a support, so that a teacher can focus him- or herself completely on inspiring composition of writing or creative composition of writing,” he said. “It’s possible that an administrator will say, ‘I’m just going to throw it all to the computer,’… but that’s not what we would ever recommend.”
Further, one entrant in the study, the LightSIDE software developed by Teledia, a research group at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was created as an extension of research its developers say is only loosely related to automated essay graders.
Their examination of natural language processing, or the science of how computers interact with human language, has focused on the idea that software could help students hold more-productive collaborative discussions about any range of academic subjects, said Carolyn P. Rose, an associate professor of language technology and human-computer interaction.
For example, one project involves using artificial intelligence to drive discussions on an online platform provided by the university to secondary students in the 25,000-student Pittsburgh public schools. A computer-generated persona interacts as one of several participants in an online discussion, asking questions of the students and at times even interjecting humor into a tense situation among students involved in the discussion.
Creating an automated essay grader based on that research came out of a curiosity to see whether the researchers’ methods of evaluating student discussion could transfer to assessment of student composition, said Elijah Mayfield, a doctoral candidate in language and information technology working with Ms. Rose. Commercial vendors involved in the study did not possess a similar background in studying student interaction, perhaps because they couldn’t afford to do so from a business standpoint, he said.
“I think it gets caught up between what machine learning is aiming for and what is commercially feasible,” Mr. Mayfield said.
Smarter Computers
John Fallon, the vice president of marketing with Vantage Learning, said that using current policy momentum–including the drive for the creation of new, more writing-intensive assessments–will only help drive improvements in all realms of natural-language-processing study. That includes projects like those at Carnegie Mellon, as well as those at his own company.
“A lot of it comes down to, the more submissions we get, the smarter the [computer] engine gets,” said Mr. Fallon, who asserts that his company’s offerings are able not only to score student writing, but also to give those students feedback for improvement.
“The transition to the common core and what that’s going to require is really bringing a much stronger focus for writing,” he said. “And the challenge has always been how can we get teachers to get students to write more and maintain interaction at the student level.”
But Will Fitzhugh, the publisher of the Sudbury, Mass.-based Concord Review, a quarterly scholarly journal that publishes secondary students’ academic writing, said he is skeptical of whether there is any application of automated essay graders that would enhance students’ educational experience.
Contrary to those concerned about how the technology would change the roles of teachers, Mr. Fitzhugh said the greater issue is that such software encourages the assignment of compositions to be written in class and the use of assessments in which learning the content before writing about it is undervalued.
And he disputes the notion that understanding organization, sentence structure, and grammar alone is enough to give students the writing command they’ll need in future careers.
“The idea that the world of business or the world of whatever wants you to write something you know nothing about in 25 minutes is just a mistake,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “I haven’t looked deeply into what the computer is looking at, but I don’t think they are capable of understanding what the student is actually saying.”

Narrow, Misguided and Uncorrected !

To Kathleen Porter Magee, via email:
“Of course, teachers should carefully consider how they can best hit the targets laid out in the Common Core. Obviously the vision outlined by Coleman and Pimentel isn’t the only path to implementation. Careful analysis is needed to determine how best to drive achievement in this new environment. However, in this case, it’s obvious from the outset that Chaffee and his colleagues were impervious to change. Unless the presenter was going to mirror back to them exactly the kinds of things that they’ve always done–perhaps with some tweaks, but certainly within the narrow constraints of their own vision of excellence–they were not open to the ideas. That is not the pathway to meaningful reform.
Worse, the particulars of Chaffee’s criticisms are often misguided (and apparently went uncorrected).”
============
“HELP IS ALWAYS DEFINED BY THE RECIPIENT”
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…”
=====================
“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

The Headless Horseman (Teacher-Proof Rides Again)

Jeremehia Chafee:

The high school English department in which I work recently spent a day looking at what is called an “exemplar” from the new Common Core State Standards, and then working together to create our own lessons linked to that curriculum. An exemplar is a prepackaged lesson which is supposed to align with the standards of the Common Core. The one we looked at was a lesson on “The Gettysburg Address.”
The process of implementing the Common Core Standards is under way in districts across the country as almost every state has now signed onto the Common Core, (some of them agreeing to do in hopes of winning Race to the Top money from Washington D.C.). The initiative is intended to ensure that students in all parts of the country are learning from the same supposedly high standards.
As we looked through the exemplar, examined a lesson previously created by some of our colleagues, and then began working on our own Core-related lessons, I was struck by how out of sync the Common Core is with what I consider to be good teaching. I have not yet gotten to the “core” of the Core, but I have scratched the surface, and I am not encouraged.
Here are some of the problems that the group of veteran teachers with whom I was with at the workshop encountered using the exemplar unit on “The Gettysburg Address.”
—
Each teacher read individually through the exemplar lesson on Lincoln’s speech. When we began discussing it, we all expressed the same conclusion: Most of it was too scripted. It spelled out what types of questions to ask, what types of questions not to ask, and essentially narrowed any discussion to obvious facts and ideas from the speech.
In some schools, mostly in large urban districts, teachers are forced by school policy to read from scripted lessons, every day in every class. For example, all third-grade teachers do the same exact lessons on the same day and say exactly the same things. (These districts often purchase these curriculum packages from the same companies who make the standardized tests given to students.)
Scripting lessons is based on several false assumptions about teaching. They include:

• That anyone who can read a lesson aloud to a class can teach just as well as experienced teachers;
• That teaching is simply the transference of information from one person to another;
• That students should not be trusted to direct any of their own learning;
• That testing is the best measure of learning.

Put together, this presents a narrow and shallow view of teaching and learning.
Most teachers will tell you that there is a difference between having a plan and having a script. Teachers know that in any lesson there needs to be some wiggle room, some space for discovery and spontaneity. But scripted cookie-cutter lessons aren’t interested in that; the idea is that they will help students learn enough to raise their standardized test scores.
Yet study after study has shown that even intense test preparation does not significantly raise test scores, and often causes stress and boredom in students. Studies have also shown that after a period of time, test scores plateau, and it is useless, even counter-productive educationally, to try to raise test scores beyond that plateau.
—
Another problem we found relates to the pedagogical method used in the Gettysburg Address exemplar that the Common Core calls “cold reading.”
This gives students a text they have never seen and asks them to read it with no preliminary introduction. This mimics the conditions of a standardized test on which students are asked to read material they have never seen and answer multiple choice questions about the passage.
Such pedagogy makes school wildly boring. Students are not asked to connect what they read yesterday to what they are reading today, or what they read in English to what they read in science.
The exemplar, in fact, forbids teachers from asking students if they have ever been to a funeral because such questions rely “on individual experience and opinion,” and answering them “will not move students closer to understanding the Gettysburg Address.”
(This is baffling, as if Lincoln delivered the speech in an intellectual vacuum; as if the speech wasn’t delivered at a funeral and meant to be heard in the context of a funeral; as if we must not think about memorials when we read words that memorialize. Rather, it is impossible to have any deep understanding of Lincoln’s speech without thinking about the context of the speech: a memorial service.)
The exemplar instructs teachers to “avoid giving any background context” because the Common Core’s close reading strategy “forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all.” What sense does this make?
Teachers cannot create such a “level playing field” because we cannot rob any of the students of the background knowledge they already possess. Nor can we force students who have background knowledge not to think about that while they read. A student who has read a biography of Lincoln, or watched documentaries about the Civil War on PBS or the History Channel, will have the “privilege” of background knowledge beyond the control of the teacher. Attempting to create a shallow and false “equality” between students will in no way help any of them understand Lincoln’s speech.
(As a side note, the exemplar does encourage teachers to have students “do the math:” subtract four score and seven from 1863 to arrive at 1776. What is that if not asking them to access background knowledge?)
Asking questions about, for example, the causes of the Civil War, are also forbidden. Why? These questions go “outside the text,” a cardinal sin in Common Core-land.
According to the exemplar, the text of the speech is about equality and self-government, and not about picking sides. It is true that Lincoln did not want to dishonor the memory of the Southern soldiers who fought and died valiantly. But does any rational person read “The Gettysburg Address” and not know that Lincoln desperately believed that the North must win the war? Does anyone think that he could speak about equality without everyone in his audience knowing he was talking about slavery and the causes of the war? How can anyone try to disconnect this profoundly meaningful speech from its historical context and hope to “deeply” understand it in any way, shape, or form?
—
Here’s another problem we found with the exemplar: The teacher is instructed in the exemplar to read the speech aloud after the students have read it to themselves; but, it says, “Do not attempt to ‘deliver’ Lincoln’s text as if giving the speech yourself but rather carefully speak Lincoln’s words clearly to the class.”
English teachers love Shakespeare; when we read to our classes from his plays, we do not do so in a dry monotone. I doubt Lincoln delivered his address in as boring a manner as the Common Core exemplar asks. In fact, when I read this instruction, I thought that an interesting lesson could be developed by asking students to deliver the speech themselves and compare different deliveries in terms of emphasis, tone, etc.
The exemplar says, “Listening to the Gettysburg Address is another way to initially acquaint students with Lincoln’s powerful and stirring words.” How, then, if the teacher is not to read it in a powerful and stirring way? The most passionate speech in Romeo and Juliet, delivered poorly by a bad actor, will fall flat despite the author’s skill.
—
Several years ago, our district, at the demand of our state education department, hired a consultant to train teachers to develop literacy skills in students. This consultant and his team spent three years conducting workshops and visiting the district. Much of this work was very fruitful, but it does not “align” well with the Common Core.
The consultant encouraged us to help students make connections between what they were reading and their own experience, but as you’ve seen, the Common Core exemplar we studied says not to.
Was all that work with the consultant wasted?
At one point during the workshop, we worked with a lesson previously created by some teachers. It had all the hallmarks of what I consider good teaching, including allowing students to make connections beyond the text.
And when it came time to create our own lessons around the exemplar, three colleagues and I found ourselves using techniques that we know have worked to engage students — not what the exemplar puts forth.
The bottom line: The Common Core exemplar we worked with was intellectually limiting, shallow in scope, and uninteresting. I don’t want my lessons to be any of those things.

THE MUDPIE CURRICULUM

What happened on the Ides of March? Oh, something historical, I suppose–it doesn’t matter. But I want to take note of the huge breakthrough that is the introduction of nonfiction informational texts into American high school classrooms.
According to Education Week this week, “employers and college instructors found students weak at comprehending technical manuals, scientific and historical journals, and other texts pivotal to their work in those arenas.” So the decision was made to break the fiction monopoly in American high school classrooms, so that our high school graduates might have some knowledge of something or other when they move on to work or college.
To help me envision this huge change, I have tried to imagine a parallel educational universe, where, for example, high school students might read two or three complete history books each year, write a 5,000-word history research paper each year, and do their reading of novels on their own outside of school. But a problem in this universe would arise if college instructors and employers discovered that they knew nothing about science and/or technology.
So, perhaps like ours, their mammoth Educational Leviathan would move into action in that “dull, heavy, busy, bold and blind” way that ours does, to introduce those subjects into the schools. Of course they couldn’t jump right into math, chemistry and physics, any more than ours could jump into actual history books when considering nonfiction informational texts.
So they would have to start at the beginning, perhaps with curriculum development, assessment strategies, and teacher professional development programs to prepare for a unit in, perhaps, “small drying earth mounds.” This could introduce students to the ideas of water and earth and the processes of wetting and drying, and later perhaps the flaking of dried earth under pressure (aka “The Mudpie Curriculum”).
After a number of innovative units like this one, the curriculum could gradually venture into the ideas of preparing meals as a kind of chemistry, the bouncing of balls as a start on the idea of quantum physics, and of course the introduction of counting on fingers and toes as a start on advanced calculus.
As with our parallel ventures into nonfiction informational texts, the progress of students in science and math would be slow, easily blamed on demographics and insufficient funding for education, and students would graduate with only a smattering, if that is not too strong a word, of the rudiments, if that is not too strong a word, of math and the physical sciences. But the educational establishment in that other universe could honestly claim to have started to remedy the problems caused by the absence of science and math in the schools, and student ignorance in those areas.
Back in our universe, the nonfiction informational texts are planned to include, in addition to the all-important bus schedules, “brochures, catalogs, menus, and other text types” so that students and their parents can not, in all fairness, say that they had never seen any nonfiction offered in our schools.
Nevertheless, our nonfiction equivalent of that parallel universe’s breakthrough Mudpie Curriculum would leave our students in the future in the same spot they are in now, never having read a single nonfiction book in high school, knowing no more history than they did in the second grade, and completely unprepared for college nonfiction book reading lists, not to mention college term papers (also nonfiction).
But we would have been true to our anti-academic, anti-knowledge, anti-intellectual educational traditions, and we would once again have successfully defeated an attempt to introduce significant amounts of knowledge for our students into the schools and once again prevented them from acquiring any worthwhile degree of academic competence.
We will be criticized of course, but that will be, as usual, water off a duck’s back, and after all, it cannot be denied that we were asked to provide nonfiction informational texts and we provided them. Perhaps bus schedules, brochures and menus are not everyone’s idea of worthwhile nonfiction informational texts, but we made a start, and no doubt succeeded in blocking the introduction of complete history books into our nation’s public high schools for perhaps another generation. So don’t say we did nothing for all that extra money!
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
March 15, 2012

Writing Tips for the Gifted Student

Perhaps the first caution to note on this subject is that when giving advice to the gifted, it is wise to remember that they are gifted, and should not be loaded up with unnecessary advice. In fact, my own first preference in encouraging gifted students to do academic expository writing (e.g. history research papers) is to give them the papers of other gifted students to read. This way the goal becomes clear in a way that it often does not when one starts with buckets and bags of technical advice on “How To Write a Paper.”
One problem is that by the time one has gone through all the advice about footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, plagiarism, etc., any motivation to write a paper will very sensibly have evaporated, in all likelihood.
Like other people, gifted students like to see if there is any point in doing something, in this case, writing a long serious academic research paper. I believe that the point is best illustrated by showing them what the finished product looks like, and, by having them read some exemplary papers by their peers, showing them how very interesting serious history can be, even to people their age.
To follow my own advice, and to do unto you as I would have you do unto gifted students, allow me to place a sample of such writing here (from a 6,904-word paper written by a New York ninth-grader who later graduated from Harvard):

“Within this nineteenth-century intellectual context, Cesare Lombroso’s work greatly influenced how Europe’s criminologists and jurists perceived criminals. L’Uomo Delinquente (“The Criminal Man”), published in 1876, was the most influential of his many publications. It was so popular and well regarded that it grew from two hundred pages in its first edition to over three thousand in its fifth. A later work, Le Crime, Causes et Rémédies, ‘Crime, Its Causes and Remedies,’ published in 1899, was also highly influential. By the 1880s he had gained world renown through his studies and theories in the field of characterology, the relation between mental and physical characteristics, criminal psychopathy, the innate tendency of individuals toward sociopathy and criminal behavior. Lombroso’s conclusions stimulated debate among academics, lawyers, judges, prison directors, all those interested in public policy, as well as the general public. In fact, criminal anthropology, the field Lombroso created, received such attention that it was the focus of an international conference every four years for over three decades before World War I.
Extraordinary amounts of documentation in the form of pages of statistics and illustrations strongly influenced readers to believe “that many of the characteristics found in savages and among the coloured races are also to be found in habitual delinquents.” Lombroso used statistics so well that many scientists accepted his conclusion that criminality is biological. Although Lombroso’s theories have now been discredited, they had mass appeal at the turn of the century.
While his ideas were widely popular, Lombroso’s many credentials helped to establish his influence with professional colleagues. Cesare Lombroso, born on November 6, 1835, in Verona, Italy, studied at the universities of Padua, Vienna, and Paris (1862-1876). In 1876 he became a professor of psychiatry, forensic medicine, and hygiene at the University of Pavia. Moving to the University of Turin, he held professorships in psychiatry from 1896 and in criminal anthropology from 1906. He also directed a mental asylum in Pesaro, Italy. Lombroso died on October 19, 1909, in Turin, Italy.
Originally, Lombroso became involved with the classification of criminals after being assigned to do a post-mortem on a criminal named Vilella, who had died in the insane asylum in Pavia. While examining Vilella’s skull, Lombroso discovered an abnormality common to lower apes, rodents, and birds. Lombroso named this abnormality the “median occipital fossa.” Later, Lombroso recognized the importance of his discovery…”

And for those of you who got interested in the story, as I did when I was publishing this paper, here is the conclusion:

“Lombroso may have been refuted by science, but his influence on popular culture remains.
Why does this pseudo-science from the nineteenth century remain so powerful at the end of the twentieth century? Lombroso gave society a visual key for identifying people it feared. It is likely that Lombroso’s descriptions caused “nice people” to avoid tattoos, gentlemen to be either clean-shaven or to have well-kept beards, and good citizens to avoid obviously excessive drinking. Perhaps part of the 1960s antagonism to the hippie movement came from Lombrosian antagonism to unkempt hair and tattoos, especially on women. These were also easy visual signals to identify “bad” people. Even today, people want easy visual keys to identify villains. For instance, after Littleton, many school districts have banned the wearing of black trenchcoats, as if trenchcoats have anything to do with murder. Lombroso’s influence remains because people look for easy answers to complex problems.
Darwin’s The Origin of Species had an extraordinary effect on nineteenth-century attitudes toward man, society, and science. His empirical model required observations over many examples to test hypotheses and to come to validated conclusions that support overall theoretical claims. While Darwin’s work has become influential for many modern sciences from biology to geology to physics, Lombroso’s is no longer considered valid. On the other hand, the questions Lombroso sought to answer–and those which arose from his studies–remain very modern concerns. As Tolstoy wrote in Resurrection in 1899:
‘He also came across a tramp and a woman, both of whom repelled him by their half-witted insensibility and seeming cruelty, but even in them he failed to see the criminal type as described by the Italian school of criminology….’
He bought the works of Lombroso, Garofalo, Ferri, Liszt, Maudsley, and Tarde, and read them carefully. But as he read, he became more and more disappointed…He was asking a very simple thing: Why and by what right does one class of people lock up, torture, exile, flog, and kill other people when they themselves are no better than those whom they torture, flog, and kill? And for answer he got arguments as to whether human beings were possessed of free will or not. Could criminal propensities be detected by measuring the skull, and so on? What part does heredity play in crime? Is there such a thing as congenital depravity?
It is a hundred years since Tolstoy’s hero posed these questions, a hundred years in which we have sought ways to use science to identify criminals and prevent crime. Our understanding of science has dramatically increased and Lombroso’s fame has largely died, but answers to these questions remain just as pressing.”
(endnote citations removed–Ed.)

In my view, the chances of getting a student to write to a history/story/analysis like this, by starting with the mechanics of the well-written essay, are slim to less than slim. I can’t see any historian beginning any history with a study or review of the techniques of the properly-constructed history book.

This is not to throw out those babies of some instructional value with all the bathwater of pedagogical technique. Of course it is important for students to have an outline, take notes in their readings, construct their endnotes and bibliographies in the accepted (Chicago) manner, and so on.
It is my contention that, in order to inspire students to do the hard work of research and writing necessary to produce a good, scholarly, readable history paper, one should start by encouraging them to read history, perhaps starting with some of the better work of others their age who have written successful history papers already.

Too often, it seems to me, the step of having students read history to find out how interesting it can be, and the next step of having them read about a topic in history on which they think they might want to write a paper are the most important ones.
After the motivation to read and report on some historical topic is in place, and a strong first draft is written, then the gods of Rhetorical Correctness can descend and do their duties. But it is not possible to repair a paper written with little research and no enthusiasm, using writing pedagogy alone.
I once talked to a Teachers College expert on reading and writing about the importance of content (knowledge, subject matter, et al) in writing, and she, who had been called, in a national publication, “The Queen of Reading and Writing,” said to me: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” Here beginneth the death of academic expository writing in the schools.
Educators in the United States talk a lot about “critical thinking,” but I, along with others, believe it is easier to learn and practice thinking of any sort if there is something to think about. If the student has almost no knowledge, then they have almost nothing to think about. When it comes to writing a research paper, if the students has learned a lot about their subject, then when they see whether they have done a good job of presenting what they have learned, that will inspire them to think more about it, and to re-write their paper so it does the job they wanted to do better.
Another difficulty in the United States is that reading and writing in the schools is almost universally in the hands of the English Department, and that means the reading will be fiction and the writing will be personal, creative, or the five-paragraph essay. This set of practices tends to shrink the educators’ vision of the capacities of high school students, so when they see the sort of writing in the following excerpt (from a 7,900-word paper by a New York tenth-grader who later graduated from Harvard and Cambridge), they regard it as the work of some freak and decide it surely has no bearing on the level of expectations in writing they have for their own students:

“Keynes also discusses in The General Theory the danger of excessive saving (which he had emphasized earlier in his Treatise on Money). If an individual saves a greater amount than can be invested by businesses, he or she is failing to return income to the community and the result will be a contraction of the incomes even further. Because of the marginal propensity to consume, everyone else’s savings will also contract. The result will not even be a gain in total savings. Because savings and investment are carried out by different groups in our society, it is often possible that individuals will save more than can be invested. Therefore, thriftiness could lead to a decline in total savings.
The discussions in The General Theory of the marginal propensity to consume, the multiplier, and savings all point to the fact that investment must be increased to increase income and employment. According to Keynes, investment is determined by two considerations–the expected yield of the investment and the rate of interest on the money borrowed for the investment. Economists before Keynes (and also Keynes in his Treatise on Money) believed that excess savings will bring down interest and encourage investment. But Keynes makes the crucial observation that a shortage in investment will cause a decrease in income and, because of marginal propensity to consume, a decrease in savings, which will raise interest rates and further discourage investment. If there is insufficient investment, people will not be able to save as much as they had in the past; in fact, they will begin to use up their past savings. Because of this, even before The General Theory, Keynes advocated the reduction of interest rates by the government to both reduce savings and raise investment. But for Keynes, in The General Theory, even that reduction of interest rates would not be enough to reduce savings or stimulate investment sufficiently. According to Keynes, if certain conditions exist, especially in a depression, a reduction in interest will have little effect on savings. If there was a rise in liquidity preference (people’s desire for cash), such as might be brought about by falling prices, savings would not be reduced no matter how low the interest was. And decreased interest rates would not have a great effect on investment because of the second consideration that affects investment–expectation. The expected yield of the investment is extremely unpredictable. Keynes said of the factors that influence output and employment, “of these several factors it is those which determine the rate of investment which are most unreliable, since it is they which are influenced by our views of the future about which we know so little.” Keynes’s conclusions that neither interest rates nor expected proceeds could sufficiently encourage investment led him to his final conclusion that unemployment could exist at equilibrium–unemployment would not fix itself, and government intervention was necessary to increase employment.
In The General Theory, Keynes contrasts his main arguments with the traditionally held “classical” beliefs. The General Theory is filled with passages in which Keynes shows the inadequacies of what he calls the “postulates of the classical theory.” According to Keynes, “the classical economists” is a name traditionally given to Ricardo, James Mill, and economists before them. Keynes, however, says that he has also come to call more recent economists who “adopted and perfected the theory of Ricardian economics” classical. These economists include John Stuart Mill, and closer to Keynes’s time, Alfred Marshall and Arthur Pigou. Unlike some heretical economists of the past, Keynes had been brought up on classical ideas and had, in fact, remained consistent with them in most of his writings before The General Theory. Keynes’s father, John Neville Keynes, was a noted economist at Cambridge University. And when Keynes attended King’s College at Cambridge, he was a student of Marshall and Pigou, whom Keynes included in his definition of classical economists. Thus Keynes was doubtless taught classical theory from his childhood through the time that he was a student…” (endnote citations removed–Ed.)

It should be said again that these are quite brief excerpts from history papers of 6,000 to almost 8,000 words by students in the ninth and tenth grades. I have published 791 (1,000) such papers by high school students from 35 (39) countries in the last 20 (25) years, and these students have greatly exceeded the expectations I started with in 1987. However, if I had decided to publish the standard five-paragraph essays or the short little “college essays” required by college admissions officers, naturally I would never have discovered what high school students could do.
Which leads me to state another caution when dealing with gifted students. It is important not to try to decide in advance what they are capable of doing. If, in the case of history research papers at the high school level, the choice of topic is left up to the student and there is no specified length, the result will be, in my experience, a huge variety of interesting and serious historical topics, and the longest paper I have published, by a twelfth-grader in this case, was a bit over 22,000 words.
Educators who are accustomed to defining assignments in advance might want to consider my experience, especially when suggesting work for gifted students. Of course, 22,000-word papers take much longer for the teacher to read and comment on, but we might want to make assignments that test the academic efforts and capacities of students rather than choosing them for their demands on us.
Another thing to keep in mind about these gifted students, while we wonder how much to teach them about outlining, note-taking, endnotes and bibliography, is that these are the same students who are taking honors physics and chemistry and preparing for Calculus BC exams. They are not stupid, and they can pick up what they need to know about endnotes et al, in a few moments, especially if they have models in front of them.
They do not need a semester of Writing Techniques Instruction before they pick a topic and start reading about it. We must remind ourselves not to load them up with our own limitations. In addition, they are quite capable of asking questions to find out what they need to do when presenting a research paper. They have been doing that (asking questions), often to the irritation of the adults around them, since they were little kids, after all.
It is also important, at least when working with gifted high school students doing history research papers, to stay out of their way.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

GM’s Education

In the winter of 1959-1960, before I went into the Army, I worked at a Gulf Station (now gone) in Harvard Square. The owner of the franchise at the time refused to service VWs and other foreign cars because he said they were just a fad. At about the same time (before we had decided to put a man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth), General Motors and other American car manufacturers had the attitude that the public would buy whatever vehicles they wanted to make.
Fast forward to the present, and, to a great extent American educators now believe that employers will hire whoever they give diplomas to. But foreign cars were not a fad, and employers in the second decade of the 21st century often do not want to hire the graduates of our high schools because they are not well-educated and they require quite a bit of not just on-the-job training, but basic remediation before they can become good employees. There are hundreds of thousands of American jobs which cannot be filled by Americans because they are not able to do them.
General Motors and its American peers, after many decades and many billions of dollars in losses, did wake up, and American cars are starting to compete again. Sales and profits are growing, after a long dry spell.
There is insufficient sign that American educators realize the crisis they are facing. After reading Marc Tucker’s Surpassing Shanghai, the strongest impression with which I came away was that in this country we are not really serious about education. Now, how can that be, when we have recently spent, as Susan D. Patrick reports, $60 billion on technology for the schools and we are completely awash in edupundits, reform initiatives, school improvement programs, federal initiatives, and professional development? Aren’t we doing all that could possibly be required to compete with our peers in other countries?
No, we aren’t. To take one very crucial first step as an example. In Finland, Singapore, and other successful educational systems, nine out of ten people who want to be teachers are not accepted for training. They want only the best, sort of the way we do when we select and train Navy SEALS. But in this country, just about anyone who thinks they want to try teaching can be accepted into the profession, even when we find that 50% leave within five years.
In South Korea, the country nearly shuts down the day of the very very important high school graduation exam, while in this country we really don’t think there should be one. We claim that anyone and everyone should go on to college, whether they have any chance of knowing enough or studying enough to reach graduation or not (and most don’t). We are being told that everyone who goes to our high schools should also go to our colleges, and our colleges should graduate them, whether they know anything or can do anything or not. They may be uneducated, but, by golly, they will be our college graduates!
How can I say such things, when there are so many diligent people trying to raise educational standards in so many states and so many school districts across the nation? Let me suggest one test. Where is there one public high school in the United States which has said, we will give up our sports and other extracurricular programs entirely until we can make sure that our graduates are truly well-educated and as competent as the best in any other country in the world?
This would be considered not an example of real seriousness, but an example of egregious folly and near-insanity, by our sports fan parents and alums, and immediate plans would follow for the termination of any educator who suggested it, while arrangements were being made to ride them out of town on a rail.
We love our academic mediocrity, because there is so much of it, and it is so very difficult to give up. We do not just have an obesity problem physically in the United States, we have too may fatheads who are addicted to educational junk food, and even in the face of innumerable fad diets, we just refuse to trim ourselves or raise our student accomplishments in education to current international educational standards.
I believe we can do it. We got 12 men to the Moon and brought them back, even during the decade of our American Red Guards yelling and screaming and trying to shut down our universities, with the help of an excited media cheering section.
But of course we cannot make sure all our high school graduates are well-educated, employable, and capable of completing a serious college program if they choose to do one, if we do not take education more seriously than we do now. And we need to start by paying more attention to what other countries are already doing if we are to make the necessary changes in good time.
———————————
“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

Teachers are Not Dentists

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 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.
—————————
“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

Dancing Around the Numbers

We all want our Navy SEALS to be the best, but that means that a lot of people who might want to be SEALS don’t get to be. We want our NFL quarterbacks and other players to be the best, but that means that a lot of player wannabes either don’t get drafted or get cut along the way.
We want the best teachers for our students, but in the Quality Counts report on international benchmarking to find the best in educational practice in other countries, we dance around the fact that in Finland, Singapore and elsewhere, nine out of ten who want to be teachers are not accepted into training.
We seem to have conflicting goals in the United States. We want the best teachers, but we apparently also want just about everyone who wants to be a teacher to get to be one. So our schoolteachers, instead of coming from the top ten percent of their college classes academically, come, in most cases, from the bottom third of their classes, and half of them quit after five years.
If we want equality of educational opportunity for all our students, we may have to begin rejecting ninety percent of those who apply to be trained as teachers. That is what our more successful international peers are doing. They have larger classes as one result sometimes, but their students have a much better chance of being in those classes with a top-drawer teacher.
All those who continue to argue that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality should be willing to consider that in order to ensure teacher quality here it may be necessary to make it much harder to become a teacher for our students.
Of course all the vested interests in United States educational enterprises will resist this idea, but at least we should not be afraid to look at what our competitors are doing with it, and perhaps a few of us will be able to wonder how we can have the first-rate teachers we want for our students without selecting one out of ten candidates instead of seven or eight out of ten, or whatever our current rate is.
Education Week, in examining international practices among our competitors in the most recent Quality Counts report, seems to have danced away from those questions completely. And if in fact teacher quality is what makes the most difference for our students, dancing around the selection issue will not help to make that difference work for our students.
“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

Third Rail

“Student responsibility is the third rail of the accountability movement.” Walt Gardner
If Mr. Gardner is correct, then is that why have we decided to leave student effort and their responsibility for their own learning and academic achievement out of our considerations of the reasons for such results as the 2010 NAEP history exam, which found that fifty-five percent of our high school seniors scored Below Basic?
Japan, South Korea and Singapore are quite forthright in their views that students must work hard, even very hard, in order to do well in their studies. (see Surpassing Shanghai, Harvard 2011, edited by Marc Tucker).
For our part, just about everyone, from journalists to legislators to edupundits of all sorts and degrees, holds everyone else responsible for student academic failure here. They blame legislation, governors, school boards, superintendents, unions, teachers and all other adults working in education, but they never seem to include student responsibility and effort into their calculations.
Anyone who suggests students may have a part to play in whether they learn anything or not risk being called racists, or supporters of poverty, or prejudiced against immigrants and those whose primary language is other than English.
Immigrants have been coming to this country, learning English, and doing well since the earliest days of our country, but lately we seem to enjoy pretending that these tasks are something new and the burden must be place on all the adults in our educational systems to make things easier. They may not realize that Albert Shanker spoke only Yiddish when he entered the New York public schools, and they conveniently ignore the children of Vietnamese boat people, and many others, some of whom come to this country knowing no English and before long are valedictorians of their high school graduating classes.
Of course it is nearly impossible to create educators without compassion, sympathy, even pity as part of their make-up, but at some point making excuses for students who are not trying and making an effort to lift all responsibility from their shoulders turns out to be cruelty of another kind.
Martin Luther King never said that minority children should not be asked to take their share of the load in becoming educated citizens, just that they have a fair chance, and perhaps some extra help.
In fact, some of those who once believed that discrimination and racism could account for the failure of African-American children in our schools began before too long to have difficulty reconciling those notions with the manifest academic success of too many Asian-American children, some of whose parents had been interned in this country, some of whom came here with no knowledge of the country or the language, and often from an even longer history of oppression and discrimination behind them (e.g. the Japanese Burakumin immigrants).
It is interesting that when American black athletes achieve unprecedented success and achievement and multi-million-dollar salaries, no one rushes to explain that result as the outcome of centuries of unpaid labor, rampant racism and discrimination. For some reason it is acceptable to expect, and common to find, outstanding effort and achievement among black athletes, but it is not thought suitable to expect serious academic effort from black students in our schools.
If coaches thought all the effort in sports was their job, and expected nearly nothing from their athletes, we might see the same failure in sports that we have in academics. And we would find that most athletes were less inclined to try their hardest and to take responsibility for their effort and success in sports.
As long as we put all the onus on adults in our education systems, we deprive our students of all kinds of the challenges they need, as we try to disguise from them the fact that their achievement will always in life depend mostly on their own efforts for which they alone have to take the responsibility.
Call me names, if that makes you feel better, but all our students are waiting to be treated more like the responsible human beings they, in fact, are.
————————————-
“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

Science Envy

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.
————————
“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

ROOTLESSNESS

Two of our overriding efforts in Lower Education in recent years have been: 1) raising the low math and reading scores of black and Hispanic students, and 2) increasing the number of our high school and college graduates capable of employment in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics [STEM}.
Very recently evidence has been allowed to surface pointing out that while students in the bottom 10% of academic performance have indeed improved, students in the top ten percent of academic performance have stagnated, where they have not dropped out from boredom. Related evidence now suggests that complacency with secondary public education in our more affluent suburbs may have been quite misplaced as well.
As Thomas Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum point out in their recent book, That Used To Be Us, “average is over.” That is to say, students in other cities (Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and countries (Finland, South Korea, Japan) take their educations so much more seriously than our students (and teachers) do that their economies are achieving gains on our own that are truly startling, if we take the time to notice.
If we are to retain good jobs, restart our manufacturing, and otherwise decide to compete seriously with others who seem to take both education and work more seriously than we have come to do, it might be wise to increase the interest of our students in STEM fields. According to the Kaiser Foundation, our students aged 8-18 are spending, on average, more than seven hours a day with electronic entertainment media.
Now of course we want our young people to buy our electronic entertainment hardware and software and we definitely want them to have a good time and be happy, but probably we would like them to be employable some day as well. Friedman and Mandelbaum point out that not only blue collar jobs and white collar jobs, but increasingly sophisticated professional work can be done to a high standard at a much lower cost in other countries than it can be done here.
Having our students spend 53 hours a week on their electronic entertainment media, while their high school homework tops out, in many cases, according to ACT, at three to four hours a week, is not a plan that will enable us to resume our competitive position in the world’s economies.
So perhaps we should assign students in high school 15 hours a week of homework (which would reduce their media time to a mere 38 hours a week) and pass on to them the information that if they don’t start working to a much much higher academic standard they will probably face a more depressing future in a greatly diminished nation than they currently imagine they will have.
But, is STEM enough? I remember the story told about a visit Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made to the gleaming new Salk Laboratory in La Jolla. A young biologist, thrilled to be a guide to the Nobel Prize-winner, was very proud to be able to show off all the bright new spotless expensive state-of-the-art research equipment. When they finished the tour, the young man could not stop himself from saying, “Just think, Sir Alexander, with all this equipment, what you could have discovered!” And Sir Alexander said, “not penicillin.”
Because the discovery of penicillin relied on serendipity and curiosity. Fleming found some petri dishes contaminated by something that had come in, probably, through one of the dirty old badly-closed windows in his lab in England. Instead of washing the dishes so he could start over with them, as most scientists would have done, he asked himself what could have killed off those bacteria in the dishes. And a major breakthrough was made possible.
Just in passing, amid the rush for more STEM, I would like to put in a word for serendipity, which often fuels creativity of many kinds, by making possible the association of previously unrelated ideas and memories when in contact with a new fact or situation not deliberately sought out.
I argue that serendipity is more likely to occur and to be fruitful if our students also have a lot of experience with the ROOTS of civilization, that is, the history, literature, art, music, architecture and other fields which have provided the background and inspiration for so much that we find worthwhile in human life. Steve Jobs found his course in calligraphy useful when he came to think about Macintosh software, but there are countless examples of important discoveries and contributions that have been, at least in part, grounded in the ROOTS of civilized life. So let us push for more STEM, by all means, but if, in the process we neglect those ROOTS, our achievements will be fewer, and our lives will be the poorer as a result, IMHO.
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review

Dissident Prof (Mary Grabar, Ph.D.)

Will Fitzhugh
Editor’s Note: Once again, I have to thank NAS for providing the opportunity for meeting contributor Will Fitzhugh. Will has an AB in English Literature and Ed.M. in Guidance from Harvard. After a number of years in industry, he taught high school for ten years in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1987 he started The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, which has now published 978 history essays from 44 states and 38 other countries. These essays truly are examples of outstanding writing and scholarship. Most of us who teach at the college level wish all high school teachers would heed Will’s advice.
What follows below is a speech given at the 2010 meeting of NACAC, prefaced by his introductory note.
by Will Fitzhugh
At the 2010 Conference of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors, the primary organization for admissions professionals, I spoke about the way the emphasis on little 500-word personal “college” essays erodes students’ chances to learn to do actual academic term papers at least once before they get to college.
“The College Essay”
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 high school 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.
Does anybody read any more?
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 high school, 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 [by ACT] 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 978 essays by secondary students from 44 states and 38 other countries over the last 25 years.
Start young!
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 college admissions officers ask 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 would arrive ready for college work.
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.
Will Fitzhugh’s website is www.tcr.org, and he can be reached at Fitzhugh@tcr.org

Our Enemy, the Book

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 busyiness, 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.
—————————–
“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

Athletic Hours Sample

I recently received a history paper submitted by a high school Junior who was kind enough
to enumerate the hours he has spent on athletics in a recent year:
Football: 13 hours a week, 13 weeks per year. (169 hours)
Basketball: 12 hours a week, 15 weeks per year. (180 hours)
Lacrosse: 12 hours a week, 15 weeks per year. (180 hours)
Summer Lacrosse: 10 hours per week, 15 weeks per year. (150 hours)
This yields a total, by my calculations, of
169 + 180 + 180 hours = 529 hours + 150 in the summer, for a new total of 679 hours.
We are told that there is no time for high school students to write serious history research papers, which they need to do to prepare themselves for college academic requirements. It seems likely that this young man will be better prepared in athletics
than in academics.
If it were considered important for all students to read history books and to write a serious history research paper, 679 hours (84 eight-hour days) might just be enough for them to manage that.
This particular young man made the time on his own to write a 28-page history research paper with a bibliography and 107 endnotes and submit it to The Concord Review, but this was not his high school requirement.
===============
“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

Please Don’t Study So Much!

High School Students–please study less, if you can. As you should know, jobs and our economy depend on consumers buying goods and services, and the time you spend reading and writing, doing math and science problems, and the like, is simply time spent out of the economy and contributes nothing to the effort to sell products and provide jobs for the American people.
You could consider your time away from studying as part of your community service, putting the needs of the economy ahead of your own selfish desire to learn and grow by doing homework for yourself alone. By spending more time buying and using goods produced by America’s workers, you are making a contribution to the community in which you live.
If you have to do three or four hours of homework a week, at least do it using a computer and software which you or your family have purchased. If you do it that way, naturally you will find it easier to play the games you have bought, spend time with social media, and to listen to the songs you paid for at the same time, and you can also surf the Web for products on which you may wish to spend more money in the future.
While in the short term you may do less well in school by combining your schoolwork with your commercial obligations, at least you will be helping to keep our economy going and providing jobs for our unemployed workers.
It is possible that when it comes time for you to look for a job, you may not have the knowledge, skills, and general educational background to qualify for the ones on offer, but that is not your problem in the present.
If you need to learn something in the future, there will always be digital learning and online classes for you to buy. There will be no need to go to the library or read on your own. We expect young people to make sacrifices and to do community service, and refraining from studying is one painless and very useful way for you to work on behalf of those in your country who need jobs now, so that our economy can get help in its recovery on the backs of those of our students who have decided to study even less than they usually do.
The main thing is not to let your schoolwork interfere with your own purchases or with influencing as much as possible the purchases of your parents and friends.
As our President has told us, we need more jobs right now, and if you spend too much time on reading books, writing term papers, and stuff like that, you will be basically just more of a drag on our economy than you should be, so please study less, or if possible, not at all, and help keep our economy growing. You will learn less, but someone somewhere in our economy will thank you for spending more time away from those old printed school books and term papers!
——————————
“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

The Education Our Economy Needs: We lag in science, but students’ historical illiteracy hurts our politics and our businesses

Norm Augistine:

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.
In fact, students who are exposed to more modern methods of history education–where critical thinking and research are emphasized–tend to perform better in math and science. As a case in point, students who participate in National History Day–actually a year-long program that gets students in grades 6-12 doing historical research–consistently outperform their peers on state standardized tests, not only in social studies but in science and math as well.
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.
Now is a time to re-establish history’s importance in American education. We need to take this opportunity to ensure that today’s history teachers are teaching in a more enlightened fashion, going beyond rote memorization and requiring students to conduct original research, develop a viewpoint and defend it.
If the American economy is to recover from the Great Recession–and I believe it can–it will be because of a ready supply of workers with the critical thinking, creative problem-solving, technological and communications skills needed to fuel productivity and growth. The subject of history is an important part of that foundation.
Mr. Augustine, a former Under Secretary of the Army, is the retired Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin.

“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

Breakthrough

TEACHERS NOT ENOUGH? WHO KNEW?
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…
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(r)
www.tcr.org/blog

Senate Hearing on College Readiness (Imaginary)

on the 17th of never, 2011
Senator, please allow me to express my thanks for including me in these vital hearings on the readiness of our high school graduates for college work.
It would be my sad duty to report to you that if high school football coaches no longer ask their athletes to learn to block and tackle, that would fail to prepare them for college teams. Oh–wait, Senator, that is not correct. (Shuffles papers, starts over).
It would be my sad duty to report that if our high school basketball coaches no longer taught their athletes to dribble, pass, and shoot baskets, then they too would fail at basketball in college.
Oh–my apologies, Senator, that is not my testimony–just a little bad joke. Of course our high school coaches take athletics much too seriously to allow that sort of thing to happen to our kids. In fact, The Boston Globe has more than 100 pages a year on high school athletes. No, Senator, there is no coverage for high school academic achievement.
But I am sorry to have to report that our History and English teachers at the high school level no longer ask our students to read complete nonfiction books or to write substantial research papers, and naturally, this unfits them for the nonfiction books they will be asked to read and the substantial research papers they will be asked to write at the postsecondary level, in what we might call Upper Education.
The famous and influential American educator, John Dewey, wrote in 1896 that: “The centrality of reading and writing was ‘one of education’s great mistakes.'” In following in his footsteps, many of our educators have pushed academic reading and writing so far to the periphery of the curriculum that, for too many of our high school students, they might just as well have fallen off the edge of the flat earth of American secondary education.
The California State College System recently reported that 47% of their Freshmen were required to take remedial reading courses. Of course they can’t handle nonfiction books as they have never been assigned one in their whole high school career.
I have had the privilege of publishing 956 serious (average 6,000 words) history research papers by secondary students from all over this country and from 38 other countries, and I have formed the opinion in the process that high school students are fully capable of reading complete nonfiction books and of writing serious research papers.
But it should be no surprise that so long as our educators never assign nonfiction books or ask students for research papers, they will continue to believe that their students may be able somehow to manage Calculus, European history, Latin, Chemistry, British Literature and the like, but they must still not be able, for some unexplained reason, to read a history book or write a real term paper.
While our colleges do complain, persistently, about the poor preparation in reading and writing of the students who come to them, what do they do in setting requirements for admission?
Senator, hard as it may be to believe, all the writing that colleges ask for is a 500-word “college” essay about the life of the applicant. It is hard to conceive of a more nonacademic task than that, or one more likely to retard the assignment of serious reading and writing at the high school level.
When we celebrate athletes and ignore scholars in our high schools, and when we set such low standards for the high school diploma and for college admission, we should not be surprised that more than one million of our high school graduates need to be in remedial courses when they get to college every year, and that more than half of those will never graduate.
Yes, Senator, I believe that until we take reading and writing more seriously at the secondary level, we can continue to push more and more students into college, but more and more of them will be sadly unprepared to take advantage of that academic opportunities there, and more and more of them will drop out before they graduate from college.
Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss these problems.
===============
“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

CNN Feature on US History in Schools 7.26.2011 @ 8:00a.m. EST

I understand that CNN plans to broadcast a feature on U.S. History in the schools at 8am EST on Tuesday, July 26, 2011.
This will include interviews with some of the high school authors whose history research papers were published by The Concord Review in recent issues.
“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 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
Varsity Academics® www.tcr.org/blog

Who cares about American history?

Jeff Jacoby

WHEN THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION last week released the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress — “the Nation’s Report Card” — the bottom line was depressingly predictable: Not even a quarter of American students is proficient in US history, and the percentage declines as students grow older. Only 20 percent of 6th graders, 17 percent of 8th graders, and 12 percent of high school seniors demonstrate a solid grasp on their nation’s history. In fact, American kids are weaker in history than in any of the other subjects tested by the NAEP — math, reading, science, writing, civics, geography, and economics.
How weak are they? The test for 4th-graders asked why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure in US history and a majority of the students didn’t know. Among 8th-graders, not even one-third could correctly identify an advantage that American patriots had over the British during the Revolutionary War. And when asked which of four countries — the Soviet Union, Japan, China, and Vietnam — was North Korea’s ally in fighting US troops during the Korean War, nearly 80 percent of 12th-graders selected the wrong answer.
Historically illiterate American kids typically grow up to be historically illiterate American adults. And Americans’ ignorance of history is a familiar tale.
When it administered the official US citizenship test to 1,000 Americans earlier this year, Newsweek discovered that 33 percent of respondents didn’t know when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, 65 percent couldn’t say what happened at the Constitutional Convention, and 80 percent had no idea who was president during World War I. In a survey of 14,000 college students in 2006, more than half couldn’t identify the century when the first American colony was founded at Jamestown, the reason NATO was organized, or the document that says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Numerous other surveys and studies confirm the gloomy truth: Americans don’t know much about history.
Somewhere in heaven, it must all make Harry Truman weep.
He never attended college and had no formal intellectual credentials, but Truman was an avid, lifelong student of history. As a boy he had devoured Plutarch’s Lives and Charles Horne’s four-volume Great Men and Famous Women, developing an intimacy with history that would later become one of his greatest strengths. “When Truman talked of presidents past — Jackson, Polk, Lincoln — it was as if he had known them personally,” the historian David McCullough wrote in his landmark biography of the 33rd president.
Truman may have been exaggerating in 1947 when he told Clark Clifford and other White House aides that he would rather have been a history teacher than president. Yet imagine how different the NAEP history scores would be if more teachers and schools in America today routinely imparted to their students a Trumanesque love and enthusiasm for learning about the past.



Alas, when it comes to history, as Massachusetts educator Will Fitzhugh observes, the American educational system imparts a very different message.
While the most promising high school athletes in this country are publicly acclaimed and profiled in the press and recruited by college coaches and offered lucrative scholarships, there is no comparable lauding of outstanding high school history students. A former public school history teacher, Fitzhugh is the publisher of The Concord Review, a journal he began in 1987 to showcase the writing of just such exceptional student scholars. The review has printed 924 high-caliber research papers by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations, The New York Times reported in January, winning a few “influential admirers” along the way.
But this celebration of what Fitzhugh calls “Varsity Academics®” amounts to just drops of excellence in the vast sea of mediocrity that is American history education. Another kind of excellence is represented by the National History Club that Fitzhugh launched in 2002 in order to encourage middle and high school students to “read, write, discuss, and enjoy history” outside the classroom. Beginning with a single chapter in Memphis, the club has grown into an independent national organization, with chapters in 43 states and more than 12,000 student members involved in a rich array of history-related activities.
“Our goal,” says Robert Nasson, the club’s young executive director, “is to create kids who are life-long students of history.” He and Fitzhugh have exactly the right idea. But as the latest NAEP results make dismally clear, they are swimming against the tide.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).
— ## —
———————–
“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

Knowing How to Know

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.”

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
17 June 2011

UK Students Often Unprepared for University Academic Writing

Louise Tickle:

The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren’t comfortable with and sometimes aren’t prepared for academic writing.
Whether the cause is an unsatisfactory education prior to enrollment or a long layoff since a student last studied formally, writing improvement is a priority.
Daphne Elliston cried the first time she had to write an assignment. She put it bluntly:
“I just didn’t know what I was doing.”
The Guardian highlights a serious problem both in the United Kingdom and the United States: students aren’t comfortable with and sometimes aren’t prepared for academic writing.
Hurdles include understanding content and vocabulary unique to academic writing, which can be a stumbling block to understanding the assignment itself. Research, too, is difficult when a student is having trouble with language.
And then they must analyze it, process it and put it into their own words to write the paper. It can be a daunting combination, but colleges and universities are trying to rectify it.
Daphne Ellison said she thought a gap in her education was the reason for her trouble with writing–she continued higher education after many years out of school–but Margi Rawlinson, an academic coordinator at Edge Hill University, says it’s an epidemic not confined to non-traditional students:
“We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic writing,” she says.
“I think one of the issues at A-level is that they’re not being taught to research independently, and [with essays] it’s not just the writing–that’s only part of it.”
Rawlinson isn’t alone in her assessment. Helena Attlee, a writer in residence at Worcester University and a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund echoes Rawlinson’s diagnoses:
“It seems to me there’s a lack of interface between A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very good A-levels isn’t equipping them to do what is required to get a degree.”
A variety of support systems are in place for struggling writers, from one-on-one instruction to more detailed irection on particular assignments from professors themselves. School officials are hopeful that increased attention and support can improve an adult student’s poor writing skills. Professor Wayne Martin, when askked whether students can really improve, sums it up:
“Yes, incredibly. And the biggest improvement is generally in the first five weeks,” he says.
—————————
“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

Highs & Lows

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.”

————–
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.”

—————-
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.”

—————-
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.”

—————-
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.”

—————–
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?”

————
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]
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
19 April 2011

DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS

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.
============
“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

Pushout

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 been virtually 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.
———————-
“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

Audience Participation

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 opportunity really, to do the 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.
——————-
“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

NOMENCLATURA

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 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 literature, languages, math and science. But in their efforts they will have received at best no help (or at least no interference) from the nomenclatura, and the Edupundits who are lost in their wake.
———————–
“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

No High School Scholars Need Apply

Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12×22-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 HS, in 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, receive 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 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.
—————————
“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

Ask Students

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 High School 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 (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 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.
“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

PEREMPTORY CHALLENGES

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, 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 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.
“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

Reminder from 1996: “Beyond the Classroom

Will Fitzhugh, via email:

“…Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own–who have more stringent criteria for success and failure–will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate.”
“…Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students’ beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort.”
“Beyond the Classroom,” Laurence Steinberg
Beyond the Classroom, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996, pp. 183-187
For nearly fifteen years now, educators and policy-makers have been engaged in a nationwide effort to solve the problem of low student achievement in America. In one blue-ribbon bipartisan commission report after another, the American public has been told that if we change how we organize our schools, how and what we teach in the classrooms, and how we select, train, and compensate our teachers, we will see improvements in our children’s educational performance. In response to these reports, government agencies and private foundations have spent massive amounts of money on research designed to transform America’s schools. Although we hear occasional success stories about a school here or a program there that has turned students’ performance around, the competence of American students has not improved.
It is time we faced the music: fifteen years of school reform has not really accomplished anything. Today’s students know less, and can do less, than their counterparts could twenty-five years ago. Our high school graduates are among the least intellectually competent in the industrialized world. Contrary to widespread claims that the low achievement of American students is not real–that it is merely a “statistical artifact”–systematic scientific evidence indicates quite compellingly that the problem of poor student achievement is genuine, substantial, and pervasive across ethnic, socioeconomic, and age groups.
The achievement problem we face in this country is due not to a drop in the intelligence or basic intellectual capability of our children, but to a widespread decline in children’s interest in education and in their motivation to achieve in the classroom; it is a problem of attitude and effort, not ability. Two decades ago, a teacher in an average high school in this country could expect to have three or four “difficult” students in a class of thirty. Today, teachers in these same schools are expected to teach to classrooms in which nearly half of the students are uninterested. And only a very small proportion of the remaining half strives for excellence.
Given the findings of our study, it is not difficult to understand why so many students coast through school without devoting very much energy to schoolwork. As things stand, there is little reason for the majority of students to exert themselves any more than is necessary to avoid failing, being held back, or not graduating. Within an educational system in which all that counts is promotion to the next level–in which earning good grades is seen as equivalent to earning mediocre ones, and worse yet, in which actually learning something from school is seen as equivalent to not learning anything at all–students choose the path of least resistance. Getting by, rather than striving to succeed, has become the organizing principle behind student behavior in our schools. It is easy to point the finger at schools for creating this situation, but parents, employers, and the mass media have been significant participants in this process as well.
Our findings suggest that the sorry state of American student achievement is due more to the conditions of students’ lives outside of school than it is to what takes place within school walls. In my view, the failure of the school reform movement to reverse the decline in achievement is due to its emphasis on reforming schools and classrooms, and its general disregard of the contributing factors that, while outside the boundaries of the school, are probably more influential. In this final chapter, I want to go beyond the findings of our study and discuss a series of steps America needs to take if we are to successfully address [solve] the problem of declining student achievement.
Although we did not intend our study to be a study of ethnicity and achievement, the striking and consistent ethnic differences in performance and behavior that we observed demand careful consideration, if only because they demonstrate that some students are able to achieve at high levels within American schools, whatever our schools’ shortcomings may be. This does not mean, of course that our schools are free of problems, or that all students would be performing at high levels “if only” they behaved like their successful counterparts from other ethnic groups. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest that there may be something important to be learned by examining the behaviors and attitudes of students who are able to succeed within American schools as they currently exist, and that something other than deficiencies in our schools is contributing to America’s achievement problem.
By identifying some of the factors that appear to contribute to the remarkable success of Asian students (and Asian immigrants in particular), or that impede success among African-American and Latino students (and especially among Latinos whose families have been living in the United States for some time), we were able to ask whether these same factors contribute to student achievement in all groups. That is, we asked whether the factors that seem to give an advantage to Asian students as a group are the same factors that facilitate student achievement in general, regardless of a youngster’s ethnic background. The answer, for the most part, is yes.
Across all ethnic groups, working hard in school is a strong predictor of academic accomplishment. One clear reason for the relative levels of performance of the various ethnic groups is that Asian students devote relatively more effort to their studies, and Black and Latino youngsters relatively less. Compared with their peers, Asian youngsters spend twice as much time each week on homework and are significantly more engaged in the classroom. Students from other ethnic groups are more likely to cut class, less likely to pay attention, and less likely to value doing well in school. Black and Latino students are less likely to do the homework they are assigned than are White or Asian students.
Second, successful students are more likely than their peers to worry about the potential negative consequences of not getting a good education. Students need to believe that their performance in school genuinely matters in order to do well in the classroom, but students appear to be more strongly motivated by the desire to avoid failure than by actually striving for success. Because schools expect so little from students, however, it is easy for most of them to avoid failing without exerting much effort or expending much energy. Within a system that fails very few students, then, only those student who have high standards of their own–who have more stringent criteria for success and failure–will strive to do better than merely to pass their courses and graduate.
Asian students are far more likely to be worried about the possibility of not doing well in school and the implications of this for their future; this, then, is the second reason for their superior performance relative to other youngsters. Contrary to popular stereotype, African-American and Latino students are not especially pessimistic or cynical about the value of schooling, but, rather are unwisely optimistic about the repercussions of doing poorly in school. Either these students believe they can succeed without getting a good education or they have adopted this view as a way of compensating psychologically for their relatively weaker performance. In either case, though, their cavalier appraisal of the consequences of doing poorly in school is a serious liability.
Third, there are important differences in how students view the causes of their successes and failures, and these differences in students’ beliefs have important implications for how they actually perform in school. Successful students believe that their accomplishments are the result of hard work, and their failures the consequence of insufficient effort. Unsuccessful students, in contrast, attribute success and failure to factors outside their own control, such as luck, innate ability, or the biases of teachers. The greater prevalence of the healthful attributional style we see among Asian students in this country is consistent with what other researchers have found in cross-cultural comparisons of individuals’ beliefs about the origins of success. Americans, in general, place too much emphasis on the importance of native ability, and too little emphasis on the necessity of hard work. This set of views is hurting our children’s achievement in school.
Regardless of ethnic background, success in school is highly correlated with being strongly engaged in school emotionally. The factors that contribute to the relative success of Asian students–hard work, high personal standards, anxiety about doing poorly, and the belief that success and failure are closely linked to the amount of effort one exerts–are keys to academic success in all groups of students. The superior performance of Asian students in American schools, then, is not mysterious, but explainable on the basis of their attitudes, values, and behavior.

Why Students Don’t Write Research Papers in High School

Catherine Gewertz via Will Fitzhugh:

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 retired history teacher, he runs the Concord Review, the only journal 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.

2002 History Research Paper Study:

Among those teachers who do not assign research papers, the predominant factor is time. Namely, the time it takes to correct and grade the assigned papers and the time research papers can take away from other curriculum priorities.
The majority (82%) of teachers say it is difficult to find adequate time to devote to reading and grading the research papers they assign. Almost half (49%) of teachers say that is very difficult to find the time, one third (33%) say that it is somewhat difficult.
Underscoring that difficulty is that grading papers cuts into teacher’s personal time–more than six in ten specify non-school time, or personal time, as the place where they grade papers. Specifically, one in five (20%) grades papers at home or outside of school, 10% do so on weekends and 15% on their own time, 8% say they use evenings or late nights, 3% use time in the early morning and 1% assign papers over a holiday or break.
Since time is such an important consideration, it is not surprising that teachers value the timeliness of paper submission. On a scale of one to ten, 70% ranked submitting the paper on time as a “9” or a “10.” In terms of grading importance, timeliness is followed by the quality of written expression and a well-defined, important thesis or hypothesis.

“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

EDUPUNDIT MYOPIA

Will Fitzhugh, via email:

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.
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.

NAS Unearths Censored Study on High School Research Papers

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published a long-buried study on the state of the history research paper in American high schools. The 2002 study sponsored by The Concord Review (TCR) went unpublished when its benefactor, the Albert Shanker Institute, found the results unflattering to high school teachers.
In commissioning the study, TCR founder Will Fitzhugh sought to find out why American high schools aren’t doing a better job of teaching students to write–specifically, why so few teachers assign major research papers. 95 percent of teachers surveyed believed that research papers are important, but 62 percent never assigned extended-length essays.
According to the report, the biggest barriers to teachers are time and class size. Most teachers said that grading papers took too much personal time, and that not enough time was provided for this in the school day. Teachers surveyed taught an average of 80 students each. Assigning a 20-page paper then means having 1,600 pages to grade. The Concord Review urged high schools to support teachers by providing more time for them to grade papers.
Fitzhugh considered what may be lost if most high school history teachers never assign a long research paper:

It may very well mean that a majority of our high school students never read a complete nonfiction book on any subject before they graduate. They may also miss the experience of knowing a fair amount about some important topic–more, for instance, than anyone else in their class. They may also miss a fundamental step in their preparation for demanding college work.

“This is an important study, even eight years later,” said Peter Wood, NAS president. “It sheds light on a problem that keeps getting worse and reverberates through college and employment. American high schools should take heed from this study to change their ways and make research paper-writing a priority.” In an introduction to the study, Wood wrote, “[NAS’s] interest in this is part of our broader goal of rebuilding the basis for genuine liberal arts education in the United States.”
The National Association of Scholars advocates for higher education reform. To learn more about NAS, visit www.nas.org.

66th NACAC Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, October 1, 2010

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 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 depressing, 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.
==============
“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

Books and Papers

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,
Bill
William R. Fitzsimmons
Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid
WRF:oap
Administrative Office: 86 Brattle Street • Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
——————————-
“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

No Nonfiction Books, No Research Papers

From the Ed.Gov Toolbox Executive Summary (C. Adelman)
“The academic intensity of the student’s high school curriculum still counts more than anything else in precollegiate history in providing momentum toward completing a bachelor’s degree. At the highest level of a 31-level scale describing this academic intensity (see Appendix F), one finds students who, through grade 12 in1992, had accumulated:
3.75 or more Carnegie units of English
3.75 or more Carnegie units of mathematics
highest mathematics of either calculus, precalculus, or trigonometry
2.5 or more Carnegie units of science or more than 2.0 Carnegie units of core
laboratory science (biology, chemistry, and physics)
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of foreign languages
more than 2.0 Carnegie Units of history and social studies
1.0 or more Carnegie Units of computer science
more than one Advanced Placement course
no remedial English; no remedial mathematics
These are minimums. In fact, students who reached this level of academic curriculum intensity accumulated much more than these threshold criteria (see table F1), and 95 percent of these students earned bachelor’s degrees (41 also percent earned master’s, first professional, or doctoral degrees) by December 2000.
Provided that high schools offer these courses, students are encouraged or required to take them, and, in the case of electives, students choose to take them, just about everybody could accumulate this portfolio…..”
——————–
[How is it that the reading of complete nonfiction books (which will be asked for in college) and
the writing of serious research papers (which will be asked for in college), never seem to penetrate
these maxims about Recommended Curriculum for College and Career Readiness? (At least the International
Baccalaureate Curriculum requires an Extended Essay for the Diploma…)
The world wonders.
Will Fitzhugh
“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

Harvard Education School

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, 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?
===============
“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

Long papers in high school? Many college freshmen say they never had to do one.

Jay Matthews:

Kate Simpson is a full-time English professor at the Middletown, Va., campus of Lord Fairfax Community College. She saw my column about Prince George’s County history teacher Doris Burton lamenting the decline of research skills in high school, as changing state and local course requirements and grading difficulties made required long essays a thing of the past.
So Simpson gave her freshman English students a writing assignment.
Simpson noted my complaint that few American high-schoolers, except those in International Baccalaureate programs, were ever asked to do a research project as long as 4,000 words. Was I right or wrong? Did her students feel prepared for college writing? The timing was good because her classes had just finished a three-week research writing project in which they had to cite sources, do outlines, write and revise drafts.
She said she discovered that 40 percent of her 115 students thought that their high schools had not prepared them for college-level writing. Only 23 percent thought they had those writing skills. Other responses were mixed.

Will Fitzhugh has been discussing this issue for decades….

Incomplete Standards

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 several reasons it has become 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 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.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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
http://www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog

Literacy kudzu

Will Fitzhugh via Valerie Strauss:

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 United States 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.”

HERESY

A Boston High School Senior, Chrismaldy Morgado, writing an Op-Ed in The Boston Globe today, 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.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

Multiple Distractions

Co-education is bad enough, with its ability to make it very hard indeed to pay attention to what the teacher/professor is saying, but a recent piece by two medical school professors brings me to write about the follies of those who defend the attractions of digital learning and multi-tasking.
These professors say that their students have indicated to them that they (the professors) are digital immigrants, while the students themselves are digital natives, used to attending to multiple sources of information at once. Students did not indicate whether in these multiple digital processes they felt they were engaging several or all of their multiple intelligences at the same time or not, but their main argument was that the professors, if they hoped to teach the digital natives what they needed to know about medicine, needed to “get with it, Daddy-O” in the vernacular of another generation of teens who believed they belonged to a different (better, smarter, cooler) future than their (old) teachers.
The professors (this was an article in a medical journal, and I don’t have the citation) came to believe that indeed they were employing old-fashioned methods like reading, speaking, and writing, to bring medical knowledge to their students, and they expressed an awakening to their need to learn about this new digital culture of multi-tasking and so on.
In my own view, it is instead the students who are, in fact, the immigrants to the study of medicine and they would be wise to attempt some humility in the face of their own plentiful ignorance of the field, instead of trying to influence their teachers to provide them with more stimulation and better entertainment.
The first example of harmful multi-tasking that comes to my mind is the elevated accident rate of those drivers who think they can manage traffic and chat (or text!) on their cell phones at the same time. They can’t, and the accident numbers for those who try to manage those two tasks at the same time demonstrate that the net result is a minus not a plus.
The Kaiser Foundation, in a ten-year study of the use of electronic entertainment media by young people, found that on average they spend more than six hours a day with instant messaging, facebooking, twittering, music, chat, video games, and other forms of digital distraction, adding up to more than 48 hours a week. Young people believe they can do several of these activities at once, but the chances are that their competence in each task suffers with the addition of one more new task attempted at the same time.
According to the American College Testing program, more than half of high school students report spending three to four hours a week on homework, and it is not unlikely that the quality of even this small amount of homework is diminished by students multi-tasking with entertainment media while they do it.
These distractions do not all occur at home, or while driving, of course. Laura Mortkowitz reports in The Washington Post [April 25, 2010} that “The trend of laptop-banning seems strongest at law schools,” although a number of college professors have banned them from their classes as well.
Laptops were originally thought to provide an opportunity for students to take better notes and to absorb the learning their professors were offering even more profoundly, but as it has turned out, for far too many students, the laptop has opened a window on pure distraction, allowing the student to wander off into the Web, and multitask their social life, completely missing the content of their college courses in the process.
I don’t know how many high school history teachers have been seduced into having their students prepare PowerPoint© presentations instead of reading books and writing papers, but the computer/software industries, in collaboration with trendy students, have put a lot of pressure on school systems all over the country, and succeeded in causing them to spend many many billions of dollars on equipment to allow them to enter the new new worlds of multi-tasking and digital learning.
It seems likely to me that if, as they report, 47% of the freshmen in California’s state college system have to take remedial English classes, there is a chance that the students may have multi-tasked and digitally-enhanced their way to a very expensive and time-wasting state of aliteracy.
Let us make an effort to resist the persuasive billions spent by Disney and Microsoft et al to lure us and our students away from the basic tasks of reading books (especially history books), writing serious research papers, and paying attention to their teachers. Change can be charming, and technology is lots of fun, but learning is now, and always has been, hard work, and we pretend we and they can slide by without that at our students’ peril.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

271 Literacy: Backward Mapping

“The Review embodies Will Fitzhugh’s idea about how to get students thinking and writing. In supporting him, you would be helping a person who is building what should and can become a national education treasure.” Albert Shanker, 1993
“What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put The Concord Review on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon.” Denis P. Doyle, 2010

Denis Doyle:

With recent NAEP results (holding steady) and the RTTT announcements (DE and TN are the two finalists in this round) everyone’s eye continues to focus on the persistent problem of low academic achievement in math and English Language Arts. And that’s too bad; it’s time for a change.
Instead of looking exclusively at the “problem,” it’s time to see the promise a solution holds. It’s time to “backward map” from the desired objective–universal literacy–to step-by-step solutions. Achieving true literacy–reading, writing, listening and speaking with skill and insight–is, as Confucius said, a journey of a thousand miles; we must begin with a single step. Let’s begin at the end and work our way backwards.
How might we do that? Little noted and not long remembered is the high end of the literacy scale, high flyers, youngsters who distinguish themselves by the quality of their work. By way of illustration, young math and science high flyers have the Intel Talent Search to reward them with great fanfare, newspaper headlines and hard cash (the first place winner gets a $100,000 scholarship) and runners-up get scholarships worth more than $500,000 in total.
That’s as it should be; the modern era is defined by science, technology and engineering, and it is appropriate to highlight achievement in these fields, both as a reward for success and an incentive to others.
But so too should ELA receive public fanfare, attention and rewards. In particular, exemplary writing skills should be encouraged, rewarded and showcased.
It was the Council for Basic Education’s great insight that ELA and math are the generative subjects from which all other knowledge flows. Without a command of these two “languages” we are mute. Neither math nor English is more important than the other; they are equally important.
Indeed, there is a duality in literacy and math which is noteworthy–each subject is pursued for its own sake and at the same time each one is instrumental. Literacy serves its own purpose as the fount of the examined life while it serves larger social and economic purposes as a medium of communication. No wonder it’s greatest expression is honored with the Nobel Prize.
What is called for is a Junior Nobel, for younger writers, something like the Intel Talent Search for literary excellence. In the mean time we are lucky enough to have The Concord Review. Lucky because its editor and founder, Will Fitzhugh, labors mightily as a one-man show without surcease (and without financial support). We are all in his debt.
Before considering ways to discharge our obligation, what, you might wonder, is The Concord Review?
I quote from their web site: “The Concord Review, Inc., was founded in March 1987 to recognize and to publish exemplary history essays by high school students in the English-speaking world. With the 81st issue (Spring 2010), 890 research papers (average 5,500 words, with endnotes and bibliography) have been published from authors in forty-four states and thirty-seven other countries. The Concord Review remains the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students.” (see www.tcr.org)
Lest anyone doubt the importance of this undertaking, permit me to offer a few unsolicited testimonials. The first is from former Boston University President John Silber, “I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously.”
The other is from former AFT President Al Shanker: “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.”
Can an enterprise which numbers among its friends and admirers people as diverse as John Silber and Al Shanker deserve anything less than the best?
What is called for is an Intel-like response from the business and philanthropic community to put TCR on a level footing with a reasonable time horizon. Will Fitzhugh has been doing this on his own for 22 years (he’s now 73) and TCR deserves a more secure home (and future) of its own.

“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

Reading Period

When I was a student at Cambridge University, I was told that term time was for attending lectures and socializing, at Oxford and Cambridge, and vacation time was for reading lots of books (a reading period). When I was an undergraduate at Harvard, (this is my 50th reunion year), we were given a formal Reading Period before exams, to help us catch up on semester reading assignments and prepare for finals.
If we would like to expect high school teachers of English and History to work with their students on the sort of serious research paper from which they will learn a lot on their own, and which will prepare them for college term papers, we have to give teachers a Reading Period, too, but we don’t, so many don’t assign such papers, and the majority of our public high school students now go on to college unprepared for college writing and panicked when their first assignments come down.
Laura Arandes, when she was a Freshman at Harvard, was shocked at the newacademic writing expectations, because at her public high school in Southern California she had never been asked to write more than a five-paragraph essay. She wrote me that:

I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they’re right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.
It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them. So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn’t easily quantified and demonstrable.

A survey of college professors done a couple of years ago by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them thought the students they were seeing were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, and writing.
The Diploma to Nowhere report from 2008 found that more than one million of our high school graduates, with diploma and college acceptances in hand, are put into remedial courses when they arrive at college. The California State College people reported at a conference in Philadelphia last fall that 47% of their Freshman were in remedial writing courses. I asked the Director of Composition at Stanford if they had any remedial writing courses, and she told me that, no, all Freshman had to take a composition course.
So, what is the matter with all those public high school English and History teachers, that they are not preparing our graduates for college writing tasks? Many public high school teachers have five classes of thirty students each. With 150 students, if the teacher assigns a 20-page paper, she/he will have 3,000 pages of student research and writing to read, consider and correct when they come in. If she/he takes an hour on each paper, that would require 150 hours, or 30 days at five hours a day.
Even teachers who do a lot of their preparation and correcting after regular school hours, at night and on the weekends, do not have 150 hours to go over research papers. As a result, they do not assign them, students do not learn how to do the reading and writing required, and colleges (and students) complain when students arrive unprepared.
A sensible solution, it seems to me, would be to provide a Reading Period of perhaps eight school days for History and English teachers to do the necessary work to prepare their students for serious academic papers. This will seem excessive and unmanageable to administrators, but not, perhaps, if they consider the extra time already allotted in our public high schools for other things, like band practice, layup drills for basketball, yearbook, concerts, football and baseball practice, and on and on and on, when it comes to non-academic purposes.
If we do give the necessary time for teachers of English and History to work with their students on research papers, and to evaluate their work, I believe our students will learn how to read complete nonfiction books and to write serious term papers, but if we continue to expect the impossible of our teachers, they will continue to ask less academically of their students than they can do, and students will continue to suffer the consequences.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

What Students Do

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.
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. 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 does not seem to be 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 come suggestions that involve 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 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.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

DENIGRATION

Many educators greatly admire the wide range of human achievements over the millennia and want their students to know about them. However, there are those, like the Dean of the Education School at a major east coast university, who told me that: “The myth of individual greatness is a myth.” Translated, I suppose that might be rendered: “Individual greatness is a myth (squared).”
Why is it that so many of our teachers and others in education are, as it were, in the “clay feet” business, anxious to have our students know that human beings who accomplished wonderful things also had flaws, like the rest of us? As they emphasize the flaws, trying to encourage students to believe that they are just fine the way they are now, with their self-esteem and perhaps a couple of the multiple intelligences, they seem to teach that there is no need for them to seek out challenges or to emulate the great men and women who have gone before.
One of the first major problems with this, apart from its essential mendacity, is that it deprives students of the knowledge and understanding of what these people have accomplished in spite of their human failings. So that helps students remain ignorant as well as with less ambition.
It is undeniable, of course, that Washington had false teeth, sometimes lost his temper, and wanted to be a leader (sin of ambition). Jefferson, in addition to his accomplishments, including the Declaration of Independence, the University of Virginia, the Louisiana Purchase and some other things, may or may not have been too close to his wife’s half-sister after his wife died. Hamilton, while he may have helped get the nation on its feet, loved a woman or women to whom he was not married, and it is rumored that nice old world-class scientist Benjamin Franklin was also fond of women (shocking!).
The volume of information about the large and small failings is great, almost enough to allow educators so inclined to spend enough time on them almost to exclude an equal quantity of magnificent individual achievements. Perhaps for an educator who was in the bottom of his graduating class, it may be some comfort to focus on the faults of great individuals, so that his own modest accomplishments may grow in comparison?
In any case, even the new national standards for reading include only short “informational texts” which pretty much guarantees for the students of educators who follow them that they will have very little understanding of the difficulties overcome and the greatness achieved by so many of their fellow human beings over time.
Alfred North Whitehead wrote that: “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.” What Education School did he go to, I wonder?
Peter Gibbon, author of a book on heroes, regularly visits our high schools in an effort to counter this mania for the denigration of wonderful human beings, past and present.
Surely it would be worth our while to look again at the advantages of teaching our students of history about the many many people worthy of their admiration, however small their instructor may appear by comparison.
Malvolio was seriously misled in his take on the meaning of the message he was given, that: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them,” but his author, the greatest playwright in the English language, surely deserves, as do thousands of others, the attention of our students, even if he did leave the second-best bed to his wife in his will.
Let us give some thought to the motivation and competence of those among our educators who, whether they are leftovers of the American Red Guards of the 1960s or not, wish to advise our students of history especially, not to “trust anyone over thirty.”
After all, in order to serve our students well, even educators should consider growing up after a while, shouldn’t they?
==============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

“Anything But Knowledge”: “Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach”

from The Burden of Bad Ideas Heather Mac Donald, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000, pp. 82ff.
America’s nearly last-place finish in the Third International Mathematics and Sciences Study of student achievement caused widespread consternation this February, except in the one place it should have mattered most: the nation’s teacher education schools. Those schools have far more important things to do than worrying about test scores–things like stamping out racism in aspiring teachers. “Let’s be honest,” darkly commanded Professor Valerie Henning-Piedmont to a lecture hall of education students at Columbia University’s Teachers College last February. “What labels do you place on young people based on your biases?” It would be difficult to imagine a less likely group of bigots than these idealistic young people, happily toting around their handbooks of multicultural education and their exposés of sexism in the classroom. But Teachers College knows better. It knows that most of its students, by virtue of being white, are complicitous in an unjust power structure.
The crusade against racism is just the latest irrelevancy to seize the nation’s teacher education schools. For over eighty years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)–self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity–but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh, sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in “constructing one’s own knowledge,” or “contextualized knowledge.” Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
The education profession currently stands ready to tighten its already viselike grip on teacher credentialing, persuading both the federal government and the states to “professionalize” teaching further. In New York, as elsewhere, that means closing off routes to the classroom that do not pass through an education school. But before caving in to the educrats’ pressure, we had better take a hard look at what education schools teach.
The course in “Curriculum and Teaching in Elementary Education” that Professor Anne Nelson (a pseudonym) teaches at the City College of New York is a good place to start. Dressed in a tailored brown suit, and with close-cropped hair, Nelson is a charismatic teacher, with a commanding repertoire of voices and personae. And yet, for all her obvious experience and common sense, her course is a remarkable exercise in vacuousness.
As with most education classes, the title of Professor Nelson’s course doesn’t give a clear sense of what it is about. Unfortunately, Professor Nelson doesn’t either. The semester began, she said in a pre-class interview, by “building a community, rich of talk, in which students look at what they themselves are doing by in-class writing.” On this, the third meeting of the semester, Professor Nelson said that she would be “getting the students to develop the subtext of what they’re doing.” I would soon discover why Professor Nelson was so vague.
“Developing the subtext” turns out to involve a chain reaction of solipsistic moments. After taking attendance and–most admirably–quickly checking the students’ weekly handwriting practice, Professor Nelson begins the main work of the day: generating feather-light “texts,” both written and oral, for immediate group analysis. She asks the students to write for seven minutes on each of three questions; “What excites me about teaching?” “What concerns me about teaching?” and then, the moment that brands this class as hopelessly steeped in the Anything But Knowledge credo: “What was it like to do this writing?”

Meaningful Academic Work

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
22 March 2010
In Outliers [2008], Malcolm Gladwell writes [p. 149-159] that: “…three things–autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying…Work that fulfills these three criteria is meaningful.” (emphasis in the original)
One of the perennial complaints of students in our schools is that they will never make use of what they are learning, and as for the work they are asked to do, they often say: “Why do we have to learn/do/put up with this?” In short, they often see the homework/schoolwork they are given to do as not very fulfilling or meaningful.
In this article I will argue that reading good history books and writing serious history research papers provide the sort of work which students do find meaningful, worth doing, and not as hard to imagine as having some future use.
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.”

His point has value twenty years later. Even the current CCSSO National Standards recommend merely snippets of readings, called “informational texts,” and “literacy skills” for our students, which, if that is all they get, will likely bore them and disengage them for the reasons that Mr. Shanker pointed out.
Students who read “little bits” of history books have nothing like the engagement and interest that comes from reading the whole book, just as students who “find the main idea” and write little “personal essays,” or five-paragraph essays, or short “college” essays, will have nothing comparable to the satisfaction that comes from working on and completing a serious history research paper.
Barbara McClay, a homescholar from Tennessee, while she was in high school, wrote a paper on the “Winter War” between Finland and the Soviet Union. In an interview she was asked why she chose that topic:

“I’ve been interested in Finland for four years or so, and I had read a book (William Trotter’s A Frozen Hell) that interested me greatly on the Winter War; after reading the book, I often asked people if they had ever heard of the Winter War. To my surprise, not only had few of them heard about it, but their whole impression of Finnish-Soviet relations was almost completely different from the one I had received from the book. So there was a sense of indignation alongside my interest in Finland in general and the Winter War in particular: here was this truly magnificent story, and no one cared about it. Or knew about it, at least.
“And it is a magnificent story, whether anyone cares about it or not; it’s the stuff legends are made of, really, even down to the fact that Finland lost. And a sad one, too, both for Finland and for the Soviet soldiers destroyed by Soviet incompetence. And there’s so much my paper couldn’t even begin to go into; the whole political angle, for instance, which is very interesting, but not really what I wanted to write about. But the story as a whole, with all of its heroes and villains and absurdities–it’s amazing. Even if it were as famous as Thermopylae, and not as relatively obscure an event as it is, it would still be worth writing about.
“So what interested me, really, was the drama, the pathos, the heroism, all from this little ignored country in Northern Europe. What keeps a country fighting against an enemy it has no hope of defeating? What makes us instantly feel a connection with it?”

Perhaps this will give a feeling for the degree of engagement a young student can find in reading a good nonfiction history book and writing a serious [8,500-word, plus endnotes and bibliography] history research paper. [The Concord Review, 17/3 Spring 2007]
Now, before I get a lot of messages informing me that our American public high school students, even Seniors, are incapable of reading nonfiction books and writing 8,500 words on any topic, allow me to suggest that, if true, it may be because we need to put in place our “Page Per Year Plan,” which would give students practice, every year in school, in writing about something other than themselves. Thus, a first grader could assemble a one-page paper with one source, a fifth grader a five-page paper with five sources, a ninth grade student a nine-page with nine sources, and so on, and in that way, each and every Senior in our high schools could write a twelve-page paper [or better] with twelve sources [or better] about some historical topic.
By the time that Senior finished that paper, she/he would probably know more about that topic than anyone else in the building, and that would indeed be a source of engagement and satisfaction, in addition to providing great “readiness” for college and career writing tasks.
As one of our authors wrote:

…Yet of all my assignments in high school, none has been so academically and intellectually rewarding as my research papers for history. As young mathematicians and scientists, we cannot hope to comprehend any material that approaches the cutting edge. As young literary scholars, we know that our interpretations will almost never be original. But as young historians, we see a scope of inquiry so vast that somewhere, we must be able to find an idea all our own.
In writing this paper, I read almanacs until my head hurt. I read journal articles and books. I thought and debated and analyzed my notes. And finally, I had a synthesis that I could call my own. That experience–extracting a polished, original work from a heap of history–is one without which no student should leave high school.”

This paper [5,500 words with endnotes and bibliography; Daniel Winik, The Concord Review, 12/4 Summer 2002] seems to have allowed this student to take a break from the boredom and disengagement which comes to so many whose school work is broken up into little bits and pieces and “informational texts” rather than actual books and term papers.
If I were made the U.S. Reading and Writing Czar at the Department of Education, I would ask students to read one complete history book [i.e. “cover-to-cover” as it was called back in the day] each year, too. When Jay Mathews of The Washington Post recently called for nonfiction book ideas for high school students, I suggested David McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback, for Freshmen, David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing for Sophomores, James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom for Juniors, and David McCullough’s The Path Between the Seas for all Seniors. Naturally there could be big fights over titles even if we decided to have our high schools students read nonfiction books, but it would be tragic if the result was that they continue to read none of them. Remember the high school English teacher in New York state who insisted that her students read a nonfiction book chosen from the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list, and a big group of her female students chose The Autobiography of Paris Hilton…
When I was teaching United States History to Sophomores at the public high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I used to assign a 5-7-page paper (at the time I did not know what high schools students could actually accomplish, if they were allowed to work hard) on the Presidents. My reasoning was that every President has just about every problem of the day arrive on his desk, and a paper on a President would be a way of learning about the history of that day. Students drew names, and one boy was lucky enough to draw John F. Kennedy, a real coup. He was quite bright, so, on a whim, I gave him my copy of Arthur Schleshinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days. He looked at it, and said, “I can’t read this.” But, he took it with him and wrote a very good paper and gave the book back to me. Several years later, when he was a Junior at Yale, he wrote to thank me. He said he was very glad I had made him read that first complete history book, because it helped his confidence, etc. Now, I didn’t make him read it, he made himself read it. I would never have known if he read it or not. I didn’t ask him.
But it made me think about the possibility of assigning complete history books to our high school students.
After I began The Concord Review in 1987, I had occasion to write an article now and then, for Education Week and others, in which I argued for the value of having high school students read complete nonfiction books and write real history research papers, both for the intrinsic value of such efforts and for their contribution to the student’s preparation for “college and career.”
Then, in 2004, The National Endowment for the Arts spent $300,000 on a survey of the reading of fiction by Americans, including young Americans. They concluded that it was declining, but it made me wonder if anyone would fund a much smaller study of the reading of nonfiction by students in our high schools, and I wrote a Commentary in Education Week [“Bibliophobia” October 4, 2006] asking about that.
No funding was forthcoming and still no one seems to know (or care much) whether our students typically leave with their high school diploma in hand but never having read a single complete history book. We don’t know how many of our students have never had the chance to make themselves read such a book, so that when they get to college they can be glad they had that preparation, like my old student.
As E.D. Hirsch and Daniel Willingham have pointed out so often, it takes knowledge to enrich understanding and the less knowledge a student has the more difficult it is for her/him to understand what she/he is reading in school. Complete history books are a great source of knowledge, of course, and they naturally provide more background to help our students understand more and more difficult reading material as they are asked to become “college and career ready.”
Reading a complete history book is a challenge for a student who has never read one before, just as writing a history research paper is a challenge to a student who has never been asked to do one, but we might consider why we put off such challenges until students find themselves (more than one million a year now, according to the Diploma to Nowhere report) pushed into remedial courses when they arrive at college.
It may be argued that not every student will respond to such an academic challenge, and of course no student will if never given the challenge, but I have found several thousand high school students, from 44 states and 36 other countries, who did:

“Before, I had never been much of a history student, and I did not have much more than a passing interest for the subject. However, as I began writing the paper, the myriad of facts, the entanglement of human relations, and the general excitement of the subject fired my imagination and my mind. Knowing that to submit to The Concord Review, I would have to work towards an extremely high standard, I tried to channel my newly found interest into the paper. I deliberately chose a more fiery, contentious, and generally more engaging style of writing than I was normally used to, so that my paper would better suit my thesis. The draft, however, lacked proper flow and consistency, and so when I wrote the final copy, I restructured the entire paper, reordering the points, writing an entirely new introduction, refining the conclusion, and doing more research to cover areas of the paper that seemed lacking. I replaced almost half of the content with new writing, and managed to focus the thesis into a more sustained, more forceful argument. You received that final result, which was far better than the draft had been.
In the end, working on that history paper, [“Political Machines,” Erich Suh, The Concord Review, 12/4, Summer 2002, 5,800 words] inspired by the high standard set by The Concord Review, reinvigorated my interest not only in history, but also in writing, reading and the rest of the humanities. I am now more confident in my writing ability, and I do not shy from difficult academic challenges. My academic and intellectual life was truly altered by my experience with that paper, and the Review played no small role! Without the Review, I would not have put so much work into the paper. I would not have had the heart to revise so thoroughly; instead I would have altered my paper only slightly, enough to make the final paper a low ‘A’, but nothing very great. Your Concord Review set forth a goal towards which I toiled, and it was a very fulfilling, life-changing experience.”

If this is such a great idea, and does so much good for students’ engagement and academic preparation, why don’t we do it? When I was teaching–again, back in the day 26 years ago–I noticed in one classroom a set of Profiles in Courage, and I asked my colleagues about them. They said they had bought the set and handed them out, but the students never read them, so they stopped handing them out.
This is a reminder of the death of the book report. If we do not require our students to read real books and write about them (with consequences for a failure to do so), they will not do that reading and writing, and, as a result, their learning will be diminished, their historical knowledge will be a topic for jokes, and they will not be able to write well enough either to handle college work or hold down a demanding new job.
As teachers and edupundits surrender on those requirements, students suffer. There is a saying outside the training facility for United States Marine Corps drill instructors, which says, in effect, “I will train my recruits with such diligence that if they are killed in combat, it will not be because I failed to prepare them.”
I do realize that college and good jobs are not combat (of course there are now many combat jobs too) but they do provide challenges for which too many of our high school graduates are clearly not ready.
Some teachers complain, with good reason, that they don’t have the time to monitor students as they read books, write book reports and work on serious history research papers, and that is why they can’t ask students to do those essential (and meaningful) tasks. Even after they realize that the great bulk of the time spent on complete nonfiction books and good long term papers is the student’s time, they still have a point about the demands on their time.
Many (with five classes) now do not have the time to guide such work and to assess it carefully for all their students, but I would ask them (and their administrators) to look at the time put aside each week at their high school for tackling and blocking practice in football or layup drills in basketball or for band rehearsal, etc., etc., and I suggest that perhaps reading books and writing serious term papers are worth some extra time as well, and that the administrators of the system, if they have an interest in the competence of our students in reading and writing, should consider making teacher time available during the school day, week, and year, for work on these tasks, which have to be almost as essential as blocking and tackling for our students’ futures.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

Digital Dilettantism

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
26 February 2010
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 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.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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

Writing Instruction in Massachusetts: Commonwealth’s Students Making Gains, Still Need Improvement

BOSTON – Writing Instruction in Massachusetts [1.3MB PDF], published today by Pioneer Institute, underscores the fact that despite 17 years of education reform and first-in-the-nation performance on standardized tests, many Massachusetts middle school students are still not on the trajectory to be prepared for writing in a work or post-secondary education environment.
The study is authored by Alison L. Fraser, president of Practical Policy, with a foreword by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review, who, since 1987, has published over 800 history research papers by high school students from around the world.
Writing Instruction finds that Massachusetts’ students have improved, with 45 percent of eighth graders writing at or above the ‘Proficient’ level on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. In comparison, only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above ‘Proficient’ in 1998. The paper ascribes Massachusetts’ success in improving writing skills to adherence to MCAS standards and the state’s nation-leading state curriculum frameworks. It also suggests that strengthening the standards will help the state address the 55 percent of eighth graders who still score in the “needs improvement” or below categories.
According to a report on a 2004 survey of 120 major American businesses affiliated with the Business Roundtable, remedying writing deficiencies on the job costs corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually. Writing, according to the National Writing Commission’s report Writing: A Ticket to Work…Or a Ticket Out, is a “threshold skill” in the modern world. Being able to write effectively and coherently is a pathway to both hiring and promotion in today’s job market.
“While we should be pleased that trends show Massachusetts students have improved their writing skills, the data shows that we need renewed focus to complete the task of readying them for this important skill,” says Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. “Before we even think about altering academic standards, whether through state or federal efforts, we need to recommit to such basics.”
The study notes that if the failure to learn to write well is pervasive in Massachusetts, one should look first to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) designed to measure mastery of those frameworks. Analysis completed in December 2009 by a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that nearly all of the skills that the 21st Century Skills Task Force identified as important, such as effective written communication, are already embedded in the state’s academic standards guiding principles.

A Little Fiction

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
February 3, 2010
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, “I’ve got some real problems.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don’t know how to block or tackle, then can’t read the playbook and they can’t follow their assignments.”
“That does sound bad. What is your record this season?”
“The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties.”
“Also,” he told me, “During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !”
“Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?”
“No, I don’t know them.”
“Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?”
“No, I really don’t have time for that sort of thing.”
“Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?”
“No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!”
“That is a start, I guess, but I don’t think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame.”
“Well,” I said, “what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?”
“I could do that, I guess, but I don’t know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort.”
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don’t know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don’t really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see…]
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®

Tackling the Term Paper

Kristy (Christiane) Henrich, Marblehead High School Class of 2010
“Civil War Medicine” paper published in the Winter 2009 Issue of The Concord Review

Before crafting my research paper on U.S. Civil War Medicine, I had never composed a piece of non-fiction literature beyond six or seven pages. Twenty pages seemed to be an unconquerable length. I remember the dread that filled me as my A.P. United States History teacher, Mrs. Melissa Humphrey, handed out the assignment for the twenty-page research paper. She also passed around copies of The Concord Review as examples of research papers done well. For us, the first deadline was only a few weeks away. We had to have a thesis. It was then that I truly realized the depth of this academic adventure. My job was not to simply report on some topic in U.S. history; I had to prove something. I had to create an arguable thesis and defend it. I was overwhelmed.
I put the assignment in the back of my mind for about a week. Then, I began to think seriously about what I could possibly want to write about. I brainstormed a list of all times in U.S. history that fascinate me, ranging from World War II to the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, I settled on Civil War medicine because of my plans to pursue a career in medicine. I figured this would be a great opportunity to gather more knowledge on my potential future profession.
Simply choosing a topic was not enough, though. I needed a thesis. So I began to search through books and online databases for any information about Civil War medicine. I gathered so much information that my head was spinning. I realized I had to narrow down my topic, and that this would be done by creating a specific, arguable thesis. Sifting through all the data and historical articles, I noticed that Civil War medicine was not as atrocious as I had always believed it to be. I had my thesis. I wanted to defend Civil War medicine by placing it in its own historical context, something many fail to do when evaluating it with a modern eye.
A few weeks later, approved thesis in hand, I stepped into the Tufts University library, the alma mater of my mother. The battle plan: gather enough materials, particularly primary sources, to prove my thesis. The enemy: the massive amounts of possibly valuable literature. I had never previously encountered the problem of finding books so specialized that they didn’t end up being helpful for my thesis nor had I ever been presented with so many options that I had to narrow down from thirty to a mere fifteen books. Actually, I had never left a library before with so many books.
For the next few months, the books populated the floor of my room. Every weekend, I methodically tackled the volumes, plastering them with Post-it notes. The deadline for the detailed outline and annotated bibliography loomed. I continued reading and researching, fascinated by all I was learning. In fact, I was so fascinated that I felt justified using it as my excuse to delay synthesizing all of my information into an outline. With thousands of pages of reading under my belt, I finally tackled the seven-page map for my twenty-page journey. That was easily the hardest part of the entire process. Once the course was charted, all I had to do was follow it. Of course, it was under construction the entire way, and detours were taken, but the course of the trip turned out much like the map.
I thought printing out the twenty-page academic undertaking, binding it, and handing it in was the greatest feeling I had ever experienced from a scholastic endeavor. I remember being overjoyed that day. I remember sleeping so soundly. I remember the day as sunny. I’m not sure if it actually was…
Clearly, I was thinking small. I had no idea what my grade would be. At that point, I did not even care. I had finished the paper. I considered that a tremendous accomplishment. Eventually, the graded research papers were handed back. What had previously been my greatest academic feeling was surpassed. The grade on my paper was a 99%. I was overjoyed and thrilled that I had not only completed such a tremendous task but had completed it pretty darn well. I thought that was the greatest feeling.
I still needed to think bigger. I submitted my paper to The Concord Review on a whim this summer. I remember Mrs. Humphrey showing us the journals and praising their quality. She is a tough teacher, and I thought since she had liked my paper so much I should give The Concord Review a go. I was not counting on being published. I knew my chances were slim, and I knew I was competing with students from around the world.

This November, I received a letter in the mail from Will Fitzhugh, the founder of The Concord Review. My paper was selected to be published in the Winter 2009 issue. That was the greatest feeling. I am a seventeen-year-old public high school student. I am also a seventeen-year-old published author. People work their whole lives to make it to this point. I feel so honored to have this recognition at my age. My hard work paid off far beyond where I thought it would. Thank you, Mr. Fitzhugh, for recognizing the true value of academic achievement and for reminding me why I love to learn.

Evaluating the Legacy of Civil War Medicine; Amputations, Anesthesia, and Administration

Exit Interviews

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
14 January 2010
In the early 1960s, I was fortunate enough to work for a while at the Space and Information Systems Division of North American Aviation in Downey, California, which was building the command modules for the Apollo Program. I was quite impressed by the fact that, although I was basically a glorified clerk, when I left the company to work for Pan American World Airways, they invited me in for an exit interview.
The interviewer asked me about the details of my job–what I liked and didn’t like about it. He asked me if the pay and benefits were satisfactory, and whether my immediate boss had done a good job in supervising me or not (he was an Annapolis graduate and had done a first-rate job). The general goal of the interview seemed to be to find out why I was leaving and if there was anything they could do to keep an employee like me in the future. This took place in the middle of a very high-pressure and a multi-billion dollar effort to get to the moon before the end of the decade. North American Aviation also had the contract for the Saturn 5 rocket at their Rocketdyne division. But they made the time to talk to me when I left.
Tony Wagner of Harvard, in his book, The Global Achievement Gap (2008), reports on a focus group he held for recent graduates “of one of the most highly-regarded public high schools,” to ask them about their recollections of their experience of the school. This was a kind of exit interview two or three years later. When he asked them what they wished they had received, but didn’t, in school, they said:

“More time on writing!” came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! “Research skills,” another student offered and went on to explain: “In high school, I mostly did ‘cut and paste’ for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material.”

This was of particular interest to me, because of my conviction that the majority of U.S. public high school students now graduate without ever having read a complete nonfiction book or written a serious research paper. When I asked Mr. Wagner if he knew of other high schools which conducted focus groups or interviews with recent graduates, he said he only knew of three.
I would suggest that this is a practice which could be of great benefit to all our public high schools. Without too much extra time and effort, they could both interview each Senior, after she/he had finished all their exams, and ask what they thought of their academic experience, their teachers, and so forth. In addition, schools could hold at least one focus group each year with perhaps a dozen recent graduates who could compare their college demands with the preparation they had received in their high schools.
Lack of curiosity inevitably leads to lack of knowledge, and it is to be lamented that our high schools seem, in practice, not to wonder what their graduates actually think of the education they have provided, and to what extent and in what ways their high school academic work prepared or did not prepare them for their work in college. Mr. Wagner points out that:

Forty percent of all students who enter college must take remedial courses…and perhaps one of every two students who start college never complete any kind of postsecondary degree.

The Great Schools Project, in its report Diploma to Nowhere in the Summer of 2008, said that more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial classes each year when they get to college, and the California State Colleges reported in November of 2009 that 47% of their freshmen are now in remedial English classes.
As national concern slowly grows beyond high school dropouts to include college “flameouts” as well, it might be time to consider the benefits of the ample knowledge available from students if they are allowed to participate in exit interviews and focus groups at the high school which was responsible for getting them ready to succeed academically in college and at work.
==============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®

“A Throwback” Review keeps light shining on high school scholars

Adam Sell:

The Concord Review is a one-man outfit run from a cluttered office on Route 20 in Sudbury.
Back issues of the academic journal featuring research by high school history students sit in stacks, and editor Will Fitzhugh keeps his computer in the corner so he can leave even more room for books.
Fitzhugh, 73, has been running the quarterly publication for 22 years in an effort to keep old-fashioned term papers alive and well. He thinks scholarly research at the high school level has declined, and students are arriving at college unprepared.
“I think we’re doing the majority of public high school students a disservice,” said Fitzhugh. “They get to college and are assigned these nonfiction books and term papers, and they flame out. The equivalent is sending kids to college math classes with only fractions and decimals.”
Yet Fitzhugh, who started the journal while on sabbatical from his teaching job in Concord (hence the name), can’t find anybody to take over when he retires. He took no salary from the journal for 14 years, and even now averages only $10,000 a year.
“It’s going to be really hard, there’s no job security. But most people don’t want to work for nothing, and they don’t want to leave the classroom,” Fitzhugh said. “I don’t know how long I can keep going.”
Despite a perpetual lack of funding for his project–Fitzhugh said he’s been turned down by 154 foundations–The Concord Review has persevered.

Academic Writing

“More time on writing!” came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! “Research skills,” another student offered and went on to explain: “In high school, I mostly did ‘cut and paste’ for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material.”
Tony Wagner
The Global Achievement Gap
New York: Basic Books 2008, p. 101-102
College Ready?

A few years ago, I was asked by the leaders of one of the most highly regarded public high schools in New England to help them with a project. They wanted to start a program to combine the teaching of English and history because they thought that such a program would give their graduates an edge in college–and more than 90 percent of their students went on to college. They thought that teaching the two subjects together would help students gain a deeper understanding of both the history and literature of an era. Yet when I asked them how they knew that this would be the most important improvement they might make in their academic program, they were stumped. They’d just assumed that this innovation would be helpful to students.
Personally, I think interdisciplinary studies make a great deal of sense, but I also know that schools have very limited time and resources for change and so must choose their school and curriculum improvement priorities with great care. I proposed that we conduct a focus group with students who’d graduated from the high school three to five years prior, in which I would ask alums what might have helped them be better prepared for college–a question rarely asked by either private or public high schools. The group readily agreed, though, and worked to identify and invite a representative sample population of former students who would be willing to meet for a couple of hours when they were back at home during their winter break.
The group included students who attended state colleges and elite universities. My first question to them was this: “Looking back, what about your high school experience did you find most engaging or helpful to you?” (I would ask the question differently today: “In what ways were you most well prepared by high school?”) At any rate, they found
the topic quite engaging and talked enthusiastically and at length about their high school experiences.
Extracurricular activities such as clubs, school yearbooks, and so on topped the list of what they had found most engaging in high school. Next came friends–there were no cliques in this small school, they claimed, and so everyone got along well. Sports were high on the list as well: Because the school was small, nearly everyone got a good deal of playing time.
“What about academics?” I asked.
“Most of our teachers were usually available after school to help us when we needed it,” one young man replied. Several nodded in agreement, and the the room fell silent.
“But what about classes?” I pressed.
“You have to understand, ” a student who was in his last year at an elite university explained to me somewhat impatiently. “Except for math, you start over in all your courses in college–we didn’t need any of the stuff we’d studied in high school.”
There was a buzz of agreement around the table. Then another students said, with a smile: “Which is a good thing because you’d forgotten all the stuff you’d memorized for the test a week later anyway!” The room erupted in laughter.
I was dumbfounded, not sure what to say next. Finally, I asked: “So, how might your class time have been better spent–what would have better prepared you for college?”
“More time on writing!” came an immediate reply. I asked how many agreed with this, and all twelve hands shot up into the air. And this was a high school nationally known for its excellent writing program! “Research skills,” another student offered and went on to explain: “In high school, I mostly did ‘cut and paste’ for my research projects. When I got to college, I had no idea how to formulate a good research question and then really go through a lot of material.”
============
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®

High school research papers: a dying breed

Jay Matthews:

Doris Burton taught U.S. history in Prince George’s County for 27 years. She had her students write 3,000-word term papers. She guided them step by step: first an outline, then note cards, a bibliography, a draft and then the final paper. They were graded at each stage.
A typical paper was often little more than what Burton describes as “a regurgitated version of the encyclopedia.” She stopped requiring them for her regular history students and assigned them just to seniors heading for college. The social studies and English departments tried to organize coordinated term paper assignments for all, but state and district course requirements left no room. “As time went by,” Burton said, “even the better seniors’ writing skills deteriorated, and the assignment was frustrating for them to write and torture for me to read.” Before her retirement in 1998, she said, “I dropped the long-paper assignment and went to shorter and shorter and, eventually, no paper at all.”
Rigorous research and writing instruction have never reached most high-schoolers. I thought I had terrific English and history teachers in the 1960s, but I just realized, counting up their writing assignments, that they, too, avoided anything very challenging. Only a few students, in public and private schools, ever get a chance to go deep and write long on a subject that intrigues them.
We are beginning to see, in the howls of exasperation from college introductory course professors and their students, how high a price we are paying for this. It isn’t just college students who are hurt. Studies show research skills are vital for high school graduates looking for good jobs or trade school slots.

An Alabama High School Makes Literacy a Schoolwide Job
An Alabama school that is seen as a national model shows how to teach reading and writing in every subject.

[and the wordless picture books have been a big hit, too!!…Will Fitzhugh]
“The staff cobbled together an approach that incorporates methods and materials used with younger children, such as art projects and wordless picture books, into high-school-level instruction. The idea is to use engaging activities and easy-to-access materials as door-openers to more complex subject matter.
The result is a high school that ‘looks more like an elementary school,’ Mr. Ledbetter said, because teachers find that letting students sketch, cut out, or fold their ideas seems to work well.”
Catherine Gewertz:

The sheep’s-brain dissections are going rather well. Scalpels in hand, high school students are slicing away at the preserved organs and buzzing about what they find. It’s obvious that this lesson has riveted their interest. What’s not so obvious is that it has been as much about literacy as about science.
In preparing for her class in human anatomy and physiology to perform the dissections, Karen Stewart had the students read articles on the brain’s structure and use computer-presentation software to share what they learned. She used “guided notetaking” strategies, explicitly teaching the teenagers how to read the materials and take notes on key scientific concepts. She reinforced those ideas with more articles chosen to grab their interest, such as one on how chocolate affects the brain.
The class also watched and discussed a recent episode of the hit television show “Grey’s Anatomy,” about a patient with an injury to one side of the brain. The students’ work is graded not just on their grasp of the science, but also on the quality of their research and writing about it.
Ms. Stewart isn’t the only teacher who weaves literacy instruction into classes here at Buckhorn High School. It pops up on every corridor. A teacher of Spanish shows his students a self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and asks what cues it conveys about her culture. A physical education teacher brings his class to the school library to study body mass. And a mathematics teacher burrows into the Latin roots of that discipline’s vocabulary to help students see their related meanings, and uses “concept maps”–visual depictions of ideas–to help them grasp an idea’s steps or parts.
Literacy is shot through everything at this 1,350-student Alabama school in a former cotton field 10 miles south of the Tennessee state line. It’s been an obsession for a decade, ever since school leaders tested their students and found that one-third of the entering freshmen were reading at or below the 7th grade level, many at the 4th or 5th grade level.
“Those numbers completely changed my professional life,” said Sarah Fanning, who oversees curriculum and instruction at Buckhorn High. “I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Each of those numbers had a face, and that face went to bed with me at night.”
‘Relentless From the Beginning’
The Buckhorn staff immersed itself in figuring out how to improve student learning by boosting literacy skills in all subjects, something few high schools do now, and even fewer were doing then. That work has made the school a national model. Hosting visitors and making presentations–including at a White House conference in 2006–have become routine parts of its staff members’ schedules.
Adolescent-literacy work such as that at Buckhorn High is taking on a rising profile nationally, as educators search for ways to improve student achievement. Increasingly, scholars urge teachers to abandon the “inoculation” model of literacy, which holds that K-3 students “learn to read,” and older students “read to learn.” Older students are in dire need of sophisticated reading and writing instruction tailored to each discipline, those scholars say, and without it, they risk being unable to access more-complex material. The Carnegie Corporation of New York recently released a report urging that adolescent literacy become a national priority. (“Literacy Woes Put in Focus,” Sept. 23, 2009.)
Selected literacy resources at Buckhorn High School:
Professional Reading
Reading Reminders, Jim Burke
Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher
Content Area Reading, Richard R. Vacca and Jo Anne L. Vacca
I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, Cris Tovani
Do I Really Have to Teach Reading? Cris Tovani
Wordless Picture Books
Anno’s Journey, Mitsumasa Anno
Free Fall, David Wiesner
Tuesday, David Wiesner
Freight Train, Donald Crews
Zoom, Istvan Banyai
Content-Area Picture Books and Graphic Novels
Chester Comix series, Bentley Boyd
Just Plain Fancy, Patricia Polacco
Harlem, Walter Dean Myers
The Greedy Triangle, Marilyn Burns
High-Interest, Easy-to-Understand Books for Adolescents
A Child Called “It,” Dave Pelzer
Hole in My Life, Jack Gantos
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Burned, Ellen Hopkins
The “Twilight Saga” collection, Stephenie Meyer
The “Soundings” and “Currents” series, Orca Publishing
The Bluford High series, Townsend Press
Source: Buckhorn High School

INTRODUCTION by Theodor Sizer

Volume One, Number One
The Concord Review, Fall 1988
Theodore Sizer: Professor of Education, Brown University Author, Horace’s Compromise, Horace’s School Chairman, Coalition of Essential Schools

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.

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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®

Cross Purposes

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
A recent survey of college professors by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that nearly 90% thought that the students they teach were not very well prepared in reading, doing research and academic writing by their high schools.
At the same time, many college admissions officers ask students for 500-word “personal statements,” which have become known as “college essays,” and many high school English department spend a lot of their writing instruction on this sort of effort.
History departments and English departments are assigning fewer and fewer term papers, so it is not surprising that lots of students are arriving in college not knowing how to do research or write academic papers.
Why is it that college admissions officers and college professors seem to be working at cross purposes when it comes to student writing? College professors want students to be able to write serious research papers when they are assigned in their history, economics, political science, etc., classes, but that is not the message that is going out to high school applicants from the college admissions offices.
Most of the attention, if not all, in the college counseling offices at the secondary level is on what it will take to gain students admission to colleges, not on whether, for example, they have the academic knowledge and skills to graduate from college. That is someone else’s concern. Recently the Gates Foundation has taken up the challenge of trying to find out why students drop out of community colleges in such large numbers.

Read the Whole Book

The Concord Review
22 September 2009
For the last seven or eight years, I have been trying to get funding for a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction (i.e. history) books in U.S. public high schools. No one seems to be interested in such a study, but I have come to believe, from anecdotes and interviews, that the majority of our public high school students now graduate without ever having read a single complete nonfiction book, which would seem to be a handicap for them as they encounter college reading lists in subjects other than literature.
I am told that students in history classes do read excerpts, but those are a pale shadow of the complete work, and they do not discover, unless they read on their own, the difference between an excerpt and the sweep of an entire book.
For example, if high school students hear anything about Harry Truman, they are usually asked to decide whether his decision to drop the atomic bomb was right or wrong.
They miss anything about what he did when he was their age or younger. David McCullough worked on his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Truman for ten years, and here is an excerpt about HST when he was ten:
“For his tenth birthday, in the spring of 1894, his mother presented him with a set of large illustrated volumes grandly titled in gold leaf Great Men and Famous Women. He would later count the moment as one of life’s turning points.” p. 43
and in high school: “He grew dutifully, conspicuously studious, spending long afternoons in the town library, watched over by a white plaster bust of Ben Franklin. Housed in two rooms adjacent to the high school, the library contained perhaps two thousand volumes. Harry and Charlie Ross vowed to read all of them, encyclopedias included, and both later claimed to have succeeded…History became a passion, as he worked his way through a shelf of standard works on ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome…’Reading history, to me, was far more than a romantic adventure. It was solid instruction and wise teaching which I somehow felt I wanted and needed.’ He decided, he said, that men make history, otherwise there would be no history. History did not make the man, he was quite certain.” p. 58
Most of our high school students would have no idea that Harry Truman worked on the small family farm from 1906 to 1914:
“Harry learned to drive an Emerson gang plow, two plows on a three-wheeled frame pulled by four horses. The trick was to see that each horse pulled his part of the load. With an early start, he found, he could do five acres in a ten-hour day”….”Every day was work, never-ending work, and Harry did ‘everything there was to do’–hoeing corn and potatoes in the burning heat of summer, haying, doctoring horses, repairing equipment, sharpening hoes and scythes, mending fences…Harry’s ‘real love’ was the hogs, which he gave such names as ‘Mud,’ ‘Rats,’ and ‘Carrie Nation.’ Harry also kept the books….” pp. 74, 75
Perhaps this time on the farm toughed him for his job as commander of artillery Battery ‘D’ in World War I: “Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. ‘I didn’t come here to get along with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get along with me. And if there of you who can’t, speak up right now, and I’ll bust you right back now.’ There was no mistaking his tone. No one doubted he meant exactly what he said. After that, as Harry remembered, ‘We got along.’ But a private named Floyd Ricketts also remembered the food improving noticeably and that Captain Truman took a personal interest in the men and would talk to them in a way most officers wouldn’t.” pp. 117-118
And in the United States Senate, investigating waste, fraud and abuse: “Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee…’Looks like I’ll get something done,’ Harry wrote to Bess.”…”His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk–since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President–but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task.” p. 259
All of these quotes are from David McCullough’s Truman, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. The book is 992 pages long and there are some other great ‘excerpts’ in it, of course. My point is to show a bit of how much our high school students might miss in trying to understand the man who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb if they don’t read the whole book. Some will say 992 pages is too much for high school students, who have work and sports and extracurricular activities as well as 5-6 hours a day of electronic entertainment already. I would just argue that if students now can take calculus and chemistry, and in some cases, even Chinese, they ought to be able to spend as much time on a complete nonfiction book as they do at football or basketball practice, even if their reading of a complete book is spread out over several weeks. Reading a complete nonfiction (history) book will not only help to prepare them for college (nonfiction) reading lists, it will also give them a more complete glimpse into one of our Presidents, and after reading, for example, Truman, they should have a better understanding of why someone like David McCullough thought writing it was worth ten years of his life, and why the Pulitzer committee thought it should receive their prize.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®