MEDIA BLACKOUT

In the United States, our media are not allowed to report on or discuss exemplary student academic achievement at the high school level, so they don't do it. For example, in the “Athens of America,” The Boston Globe has more than 150 full pages each year on the accomplishments of high school athletes, but only one page a year on academics—a full page with the photographs of valedictorians at the public high schools in the city, giving their name, their school, their country of origin (often 40% foreign-born) and the college they will be going to.

The reasons for this media blackout on good academic work by students at the secondary level are not clear, apart from tradition, but while high school athletes who “sign with” a particular college are celebrated in the local paper, and even on televised national high school games, the names of Intel Science Talent Search winners, of authors published in The Concord Review, and of other accomplished high school scholars may not appear in the paper or on television.

Publicity offers encouragement for the sorts of efforts we would like our high school students to make. We naturally publicize high school athletic achievements and this helps to motivate athletes to engage in sports. By contrast, when it comes to good academic work, we don't mention it, so perhaps we want less of it? 

One senior high school history teacher has written that “We actually hide academic excellence from the public eye because that will single out some students and make others ‘feel bad.’”

Does revealing excellence by high school athletes make some other athletes or scholar-athletes or high school scholars feel bad? How can we tolerate that? I know there are some Progressive secondary schools which have eliminated academic prizes and honors, to spare the feelings of the students who don’t get them, but I don’t see that they have stopped keeping score in school games, no matter how the losers in those contests may feel.

SAMPLE MEDIA COVERAGE OF HS ATHLETES

Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Signing Day Central—By Michael Carvell
11:02 am Wednesday, February 5th, 2014

“Welcome to the AJC’s Signing day Day Central. This is the place to be to catch up with all the recruiting information with UGA, Georgia Tech and recruits from the state of Georgia. We will update the news as it happens, and interact on the message board below.

University of Georgia’s TOP TARGETS FOR WEDNESDAY…AND RESULTS

Lorenzo Carter, DE, 6-5, 240, Norcross: UGA reeled in the big fish, landing the state’s No.1 overall prospect for the first time since 2011 (Josh Harvey-Clemons).   Isaiah McKenzie, WR, 5-8, 175, Ft. Lauderdale (Fla.) American Heritage: This was one of two big surprises for UGA to kick off signing day. McKenzie got a last-minute offer from UGA and picked the Bulldogs because of his best buddy and high school teammate, 5-star Sony Michel (signed with UGA).   Hunter Atkinson, TE, 6-6, 250, West Hall: The Cincinnati commit got a last-minute call from Mark Richt and flipped to UGA. I’m not going to say we saw it coming, but … Atkinson had grayshirt offers from Alabama, Auburn and UCF.   Tavon Ross, S, 6-1, 200, Bleckley County: The Missouri commit took an official visit to UGA but decided to stick with Missouri. He’s signed.   Andrew Williams, DE, 6-4, 247, ECLA: He signed with Auburn over Clemson and Auburn. He joked with Auburn’s Gus Malzahn when he called with the news, saying “I’m sorry to inform you….. That I will be attending your school,” according to 247sports.com’s Kipp Adams.   Tyre McCants, WR-DB, 5-11, 200, Niceville, Fla.: Turned down late interest from UGA to sign with USF.”

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, of course, in the coverage of high school athletes that goes on during the year. I hope readers will email me any comparable examples of the celebration of exemplary high school academic work that they can find in the media in their community, or in the nation generally.

PAGE PER YEAR PLAN©

SchoolInfoSystem.org
EducationViews.org

Page Per Year Plan©

By Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

“Reading maketh a Full Man, Conference a Ready Man, and Writing an Exact Man.”      Francis Bacon, Of Studies, 1625

Diane Ravitch recently pointed out that, “the campaign against homework goes on. Its success will guarantee a steady decline in the very activities that matter most in education: independent reading; thoughtful writing; research projects.”

It is clearer and clearer that most high school students, when they do read a book, read fiction. The College Board’s old Reading List of 101 Books for the College-Bound Student included only four works of nonfiction: Walden, Emerson’s Essays, Night, and The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass. Nothing by David McCullough, David Hackett Fischer, or any other great contemporary (or past) historian was suggested for the “College-Bound Student.”

The SAT, ACT, and NAEP writing assessments, and most state writing standards, require no prior knowledge and challenge students to write their opinions and personal stories in 25 minutes. Unless college history professors start assigning term papers by saying: “‘History repeats itself.’ See what you can write about that in 25 minutes and turn it in six weeks from now,” our high school graduates will continue to find that they have been sadly misled about the demands for academic writing they will face.

A unique national study done for The Concord Review in 2002, of the assignment of high school history term papers, found that 81% of public high school history teachers never assign a 20-page paper, and 62% never assign a 12-page paper any more, even to high school seniors. The Boston Latin School, a famous exam school, no longer assigned the “traditional history term paper.”

One reason for this, I believe, is that teachers find that by the time their students are Juniors and Seniors in high school, they have done so little academic expository writing that they simply could not manage a serious history research paper, if they were asked to do one.

For twelve years, I have suggested, to those who doubt the ability of U.S. high school seniors to write academic history research papers, that schools should start on our Page Per Year Plan©, which would work as follows:

Each first grader would be required to write a one-page paper on a subject other than herself or himself, with at least one source.

A page would be added each year to the required academic writing, such that, for example, fifth graders would have to write a five-page paper (five sources), ninth graders would have to write a nine-page research paper, with nine sources, and so on, until each and every senior could be asked to prepare a 12-page academic research paper (twelve sources), with endnotes and bibliography, on some historical topic, which the student could choose each year.

This would gradually prepare students for future academic writing tasks, and each senior could graduate from high school knowing more about some important topic than anyone else in the class, and he/she might also have read at least one nonfiction (history) book before college. This could reduce the need for remedial instruction in writing (and perhaps in remedial reading as well) at the college level.

At each grade level, teachers would need more time to help students plan their papers and to evaluate and comment on them when the papers came in, but with our Page Per Year Plan©, all students would be likely to graduate from U.S. high schools with better academic expository writing skills and better reading skills.

In our public schools, the power over reading and writing belongs to the English Department, and many social studies and history teachers, perhaps especially those who are preparing students for AP exams, do not believe their students have the time to read a history book or write a history research paper.

While this is the rule, there are exceptions, and I have been glad to publish history papers written by AP history students and others from 40 countries in the last 27 years of The Concord Review. But all too often, those exemplary papers were written by students putting in the extra time and effort to do an independent study, of the sort that Diane Ravitch believes is now in steady decline in our schools.

Of course it is rewarding for me to receive letters, like one from Shounan Ho when she was at Notre Dame Academy in Los Angeles, which included a comment that: “I wrote this paper independently, during my own time out of school. My motives for doing so were both academic and personal. Although history has always been my favorite subject, I had never written a paper with this extensive research before. After reading the high quality of essays in The Concord Review, I was very inspired to try to write one myself. I thought it was a significant opportunity to challenge myself and expand my academic horizons. Thus during the summer before my Senior year, I began doing the research for my own paper.” She was then a John Jay Scholar at Columbia University, and it seems likely she found that she had prepared herself well for college work.

But what about those students who depend on educators to set academic standards which will prepare them for the reading and writing tasks ahead? For those students, I recommend that teachers consider the Page Per Year Plan© to help their students get ready. Again, this plan would also make it somewhat more likely that our high school graduates would have been asked to read perhaps one complete history book before they leave for college or for work.


“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh (founder)
The Concord Review  (1987)
National Writing Board  (1998)
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
(800) 331-5007; (978) 443-0022
fitzhugh@tcr.org; www.tcr.org
Varsity Academics®

WHISTLING DIXIE

“First, we stopped demanding that students read anything very challenging in school, and then we stopped holding our teachers or students accountable for the quality of student writing.”

On Writing
National Center on Education and the Economy

By Marc Tucker on January 17, 2014 10:21 AM

I read a news story the other day that made my heart sink.  It was written by a professor in a business school at a public university.  He told a tale in which his colleagues agreed that the writing skills of their students were miserable, but none would take responsibility for dealing with it.  They were not, they said, writing teachers, and could not be expected to spend time doing what those miserable souls in the understaffed writing labs were expected to do.  This was just as true of the professors in the English department as it was of all their other colleagues.  The author of the article was pretty astute about the causes of that refusal.  Teaching someone to write well takes a lot of time and individual attention, he pointed out.  Professors in university departments are not compensated for that time.  Teaching students to write will take time away from what they need to do to advance in their profession.  And it is not likely to earn them the esteem of their colleagues.  So it was no surprise that his colleagues suggested that the students would be going into a business environment in which presentations were usually done with power points, so maybe the students did not have to learn how to write anyway.  Yes, they said that!

A year ago, my own organization reported on a study we had done of what is required of freshman in their first-year credit bearing courses in a typical community college.  We reported that the texts they are assigned are generally written at an 11th or 12th grade level and the students cannot read them, so their instructors are now used to summarizing the gist of the texts in power points they prepare for their students.  In these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that they assign little or no writing to their students.  They have evidently anticipated the suggestion of the business school faculty I was just quoting that they solve the problem by assuming that their students would not have to write.

But surely, you might be saying, it cannot really be that bad. Oh, but it can.  The attitudes of the college faculty I just reported on are not new.  The departmental faculty might have been prepared in the past to help their students with the technical aspects of writing in their particular field, but they never expected to have to teach basic competence in writing.  They assumed that would be done in our schools.  So what happened?

Two things happened.  First, we stopped demanding that students read anything very challenging in school, and then we stopped holding our teachers or students accountable for the quality of student writing.

I did not learn how to write from a writing manual.  I mostly learned to write by reading good writing, a lot it, some of it fiction, much of it non-fiction. And I had instructors in high school and college who were themselves good writers and took the time to coach me.  My friend William Fitzhugh tells us that very few students are ever asked to read a single non-fiction book from end to end in their entire school career, much less many such books.  More to the point, they are rarely asked to write very much and the expectations for what they do write are, on the whole, absurdly low.

And why is that?  Because we do not hold our teachers accountable for the quality of student writing.  Under prevailing federal law, we hold our teachers accountable for student performance in English, mathematics and, to a minor degree, science.  But the tests we use to hold them accountable for student performance in English typically do not require them to write anything, and, when they do, it is rarely more than a paragraph.  And why is that?  There is only one way to find out if a student can write a well-crafted 15-page essay and that is to ask them to write one.  And, if they are required to write one, someone has to read it.  To make sure that the scores given on the essay are reliable, it may be necessary to have more than one person read it.  That is time-consuming and expensive.  So we talk about English tests, but they do not really test speaking, listening or writing skills. They test reading skills.  The teachers know this, so they don't waste their time teaching writing, probably the single most important skill we can teach.

It is unclear whether they could if they wanted to.  They could certainly ask students to write more, but most teachers of English do not have the time to do more than skim student written work and give it a global grade and maybe a comment or two.  But that is not going to help a developing writer very much.  Extended coaching is needed, at the hands of a good writer and editor.  And, by the way, we have no idea whether our teachers are themselves good writers, never mind good editors.  Many come from the lower ranks of high school graduates, and those are the same young people whose low writing skills I described at the beginning of this essay.

I have a cognitive dissonance problem.  There is a lot of talk about implementing the Common Core State Standards.  The Common Core calls for much deeper understanding of the core subjects in the curriculum, the ability to reason well, and to make a logical, compelling argument based on good evidence, which in turn requires the student to be able to marshal that evidence in an effective way.  Sounds like good writing to me.

But we talk about implementation of the Common Core as if it can be accomplished by giving teachers a workshop lasting several days and handing them a manual.  I don't think so.  I would argue that there is no single skill more important to our students than the ability to write well.  Is there anyone who believes that students whose college instructors have discovered that they cannot write will somehow now emerge from high school as accomplished writers because their teacher got a manual and attended a three-day workshop on the Common Core State Standards?  That would qualify as a miracle.

If my analysis is anywhere near right, making sure our students have the single most important skill they will ever need requires us to 1) make sure that our teachers read extensively, write well and have the skills needed to coach others to be good writers; 2) organize our schools so that teachers have the time to teach writing, give students extended writing assignments, read carefully what the students have written and provide extensive and helpful feedback on it (all of which would required major adjustments in teacher load and school master schedules); and 3) change the incentives facing teachers, so that those incentives are based to a significant degree on the ability of students to write high quality extended essays.  If we don't do that, we are just whistling Dixie.


--------------------------
“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

PEACH BASKETS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
16 December 2013


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 weeks, months, and years of practice.
Make sure your feet are behind the three-point line.
Take the shot.

WHEELBARROW

“Wheelbarrow”


        There is an old story about a worker, at one of the South African diamond mines, who would leave work once a week or so pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. The guard would stop him and search the sand thoroughly, looking for any smuggled diamonds. When he found none, he would wave the worker through. This happened month after month, and finally the guard said, “Look, I know you are smuggling something, and I know it isn’t diamonds. If you tell me what it is, I won’t say anything, but I really want to know.” The worker smiled, and said, “wheelbarrows.”


        I think of this story when teachers find excuses for not letting their students see the exemplary history essays written by their high school peers for The Concord Review. Often they feel they cannot give their students copies unless they can “teach” the contents. Or they already teach the topic of one of the essays they see in the issue. Or they don’t know anything about one of the topics. Or they know more about the topic than the HS author does. Or they don’t have time to teach one of the topics they see, or they don’t think students have time to read one or more of the essays, or they worry about plagiarism, or something else. There are many reasons to keep this unique journal away from secondary students.


        They are, to my mind, “searching the sand.” The most important reason to show their high school students the journal is to let them see the wheelbarrow itself, that is, to show them that there exists in the world a professional journal that takes the history research papers of high school students seriously enough to have published them [from 39 countries] on a quarterly basis for the last 26 years. Whether the students read all the essays, or one of them, or none of them, they will see that for some of their peers academic work is treated with respect. And that is a message worth letting through the guard post, whatever anyone may think about, or want to do something with, the diamonds inside.


Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review



...And of course there are a few teachers who are eager to show their students the exemplary work of their peers....may their tribe increase!!


The Concord Review—Varsity Academics®

"BEYOND ENGLISH"

                                The Extended Essay: 

      A Life-Changing Project at “Beyond English” in China

                    by David Scott Lewis, Qingdao, China

I'm delighted that Will Fitzhugh has given me this opportunity to write a guest post, to talk a bit about “Beyond English,” our after-school enrichment program for high school students in China, and about the extended essays written by my students.  Our program focuses primarily (but not exclusively) on philosophy, law and history, more specifically on ethics and moral philosophy, public international law and conflict studies, and classical antiquity and the American republic through the Civil War. 

Our students take courses which range in difficultly from “101” courses to a graduate-level course taught at the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “Central Challenges of American National Security, Strategy, and the Press,” HKS211x (two of my high school students, Kun Pang in Singapore and Xinhe Zhang in Qingdao, were among the 500 competitively selected for this Harvard course among 50,000 applicants).  The courses serve to expose high school students to subjects they've never encountered. 

My approach:  Hybrid learning combined with the Harkness Method, with a greater emphasis on blended learning as “Beyond English” expands beyond Qingdao, China into Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Enter the extended essay.  It's usually after taking a course that my students choose their substantial writing topic (as it's called in law school).  But that's just the first step.  Imagine the difficultly in writing a 10,000-plus word essay (in your second language) on a topic in which you have absolutely no background, not even cultural background.  Not to belabor this point, but how much do you really think Chinese students know about democracy (as one example)?

We help our students with other activities as well.  I like to think of us as the best of Phillips Academy and Roxbury Latin “after school” enrichment programs, but with Chinese characteristics.

Two of my top students, Yueyi Li and Meicen Meng, chose their majors based upon the work they did for their extended essay.  This shouldn't be understated.  Yueyi Li wrote a 14,000 word essay on Rawlsian distributive justice.  Some of the comments she received from her National Writing Board [www.tcr.org] evaluation:  “Well-researched!  A very good and thorough job, indeed!  It reminds one of the work of an advanced graduate student.”  “You have an exceedingly bright academic future ahead of you.”  Meicen Meng wrote a 23,000 word (“23,000” is not a typo) extended essay on the intellectual history of Just War Theory.  Some of the comments she received:  “Yours is a mature and demanding subject.  Your work is both convincing and authoritative, and your research is first class.”  “There are flashes of genuine distinction in all you do.  Congratulations.”  The personal impact on Yueyi Li is that she wants to study pre-law/justice and Meicen Meng wants to study philosophy; both want to go to law school for their graduate studies.  And another student, Wenbin Gao, who wrote a paper on Chinese liberalism, received some absolutely phenomenal comments:  “Your work is mature, persuasive and truly inspirational. It was a privilege to read and critique your paper.  Many, many congratulations.  Be sure to thank your parents for their support and for a wonderful gene pool.  As you think on that, please extend the most vocal kudos to your sponsoring teacher.”

It's important to consider that my students do not attend an international school or a school offering an IB Diploma; they attend a public high school, Number 2 Middle/High School (in Qingdao, China), a school where only the English class is taught in English!

We've had ten essays submitted to the National Writing Board. Frankly, not all were excellent or even good essays.  But every student improved their critical reading skills, honed their writing skills, both in a way simply not possible in SAT preparation courses. So even if their efforts didn't result in a “4” or “5” (equivalent to AP scoring), they still learned a lot in the process of writing their essays. This is an important point, because it's not just about the score, it's about a learning process.  And determination.  And perseverance.

Essay topics for evaluation in 2014:  History of democracy (Zheng Xu), the international human rights movement (Ling Yi), an analysis of the conflict between China and Japan in the East China Sea (using English-, Chinese-, and Japanese-language sources (Bowen Li)…and a biography of Shakespeare (Jiahao Bian).  Should be a fascinating year.

SINGAPORE AMERICAN SCHOOL

“The Concord Review offers young people a unique incentive to think and write carefully and well…The Concord Review inspires and honors historical literacy. It should be in every high school in the land.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Historian

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

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:     Feedback
Date:         Wed, 20 Sep 2006 12:40:57 +0800
From:         Bill Rives
To:             William Fitzhugh
CC:            Rick Bisset

Hi, Will:

I think you will enjoy getting this quick piece of feedback on our new set of journals, which have just arrived. Thanks.

Rick Bisset, a veteran teacher with lots of previous international experience, including Korea and Malaysia, sent this note to the U.S. History colleagues here. He also updated later to say his class was still going strong with The Review well into the class period, at which point he had to pull them away.

Best Regards,

Bill
[Bill Rives,
History Department Chair,
Singapore American School]

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

From:     Rick Bisset
Sent:     20 September, 2006 10:13 AM
To:         Bill Rives
Subject: The Concord Review
 
So, I passed out The Concord Review at the beginning of class. I didn’t say anything except “Take a look at this.”

Here it is 10 minutes later, as I type this, and everyone is reading it and not saying a word.  Amazing!  What a powerful tool.  Great idea, Bill.

Regards, Rick

Rick Bisset
Singapore American School
History Department
SINGAPORE 


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


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

Albert Shanker, New York Times, June 3, 1990