NO SHORTCUTS

There Are No Shortcuts
Rafe Esquith
New York: Anchor Books, 2003, 20-21

…I realized then where the problem lay. My students, and so many of our young people today, want a good life. They love (even if they don’t always appreciate it) liberty. They all want to be happy. But I realized that day that my class was a microcosm of what is wrong with so many of our nation’s young people today.

What happened to pursuit? We aren’t handed happiness. We’re given an opportunity to pursue it. But how many children really pursue their dreams anymore? How can you go after things when you’re sitting in front of a television set or computer screen? Now that I’d identified the problem, I needed to find the answer.

And then one night we (class of sixth grade students) went to a concert to hear Lynn Harrell play Dvorak’s magnificent cello concerto at the Hollywood Bowl. After the concert, forty-five of my students were invited backstage to meet the world-renowned cellist. It was an amusing sight, as Harell is six feet five and dwarfed my little sixth-graders. The kids were intimidated by his height, his fame, and his extraordinary ability. One of them, a beginning cellist, asked Harell the question that would come to define part of my class mission. Peter looked up and said shyly, “Mr. Harell, how can you make music that sounds that beautiful?

Lynn had the answer I had been looking for. “Well,” he said as he squatted down to look Peter right in the eye, “there are no shortcuts.”

LITERACY KUDZU

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

[published in SchoolInfoSystem.org, Madison, Wisconsin; and EducationNews.org, Houston, Texas]

LITERACY KUDZU

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review [2010]

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

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

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

“Some educators feel that the ‘adolescent literacy crisis’ can be resolved simply by having adolescents read more books. This idea is based on the misconception that the source of the problem is ‘illiteracy.’ The truth is that adolescents—even those who have already ‘learned how to read’—need systematic support to learn how to ‘read to learn’ across a wide variety of contexts and content.”—So, no need for adolescents to read books, just give them lots of literacy kudzu classes in “rubrics, guidelines, parameters, checklists, techniques, and processes...”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VARUN SIKAND

From: Varun Sikand
Date: January 25, 2019 at 16:15:11 EST
To: "Fitzhugh@tcr.org"
Subject: Update

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I hope this email finds you in good health, and that all is well with your wonderful organization. Sorry for the delay in my reply. I had a successful first semester at Yale and have thoroughly enjoyed my extracurricular pursuits thus far. 

I am in the Directed Studies program, an intense interdisciplinary humanities program for select first-year students that combines 3 seminars in historical and political thought, philosophy, and literature. These discussion-based, peer-driven seminars are taught by top Yale faculty and are centered around fundamental texts in the western tradition. The program is writing heavy—every week I write a 5-page paper. It goes without saying that the skills I acquired writing for the Review have certainly made this extremely challenging program much more approachable. The ability to communicate your thoughts into a concise, effective argument is a trying—often frustrating—but rewarding task.

Your attempt to make known the dying art of writing among high school students is noble project, and I'd love to contribute a piece to your blog about how my experience in writing a paper for the Review has helped me succeed in the most demanding writing program in the entire world for first-year college students. It is no surprise that I have met other Review authors here at Yale, including my good friends Shaurya Salwan (Spring 2018) and Justin Weaver Lilley Jr. (Summer 2017), both of whom have either completed or are currently in the Directed Studies program that I am in. I would be honored to host a dinner here in New Haven with you and other Yale-TCR authors if you would like.

Carrying out the mission of The Concord Review, I inspired my brother, Rohan Sikand, who is a junior in high school and a computer science wizard, to take up an independent study in historical research. For the past year, my brother has embarked on his own journey to complete a historical manuscript with the hope of joining me as a published Concord Review author one day. He is in the final stages of editing his essay, and is preparing to submit the paper in just a few weeks.

To these ends, I have decided to donate my Emerson prize money in support of The Concord Review. Thank you for awarding me such an esteemed prize; it is my highest academic honor to date. By supporting TCR, I will continue to promote your mission of encouraging secondary students—like my brother—to write for your organization and realize the gift of historical inquiry.

Again, I am sorry for my late reply and I hope to keep in touch with you from Yale. All my best.

With Gratitude,

Varun Sikand
[Yale Class of 2022
Emerson Prize 2018]
[His 19,000+word paper on the Knights of Labor was published in the Summer of 2018 (28/4), and he included five papers published by his peers in The Concord Review in his endnotes and bibliography.]

RIGGS INTERVIEW

Education News
 
An Interview with Charles Emerson Riggs: 
Editorship of The Concord Review

December 18, 2018 by Michael F. Shaughnessy EducationViews Senior Columnist


1) Sir, I have just heard that you are about to take over the Editorship of The Concord Review. How did this come about?

Will Fitzhugh, TCR’s founder and longtime editor, had been in contact with a former professor of mine from Harvard, asking her whether she could recommend any Harvard history grads with editorial experience, an entrepreneurial bent, and an interest in being his “understudy.” She put us in touch initially. Will and I struck up a correspondence; when we met, about a year ago, we immediately hit it off, strategizing the future of the Review and its mission of encouraging and celebrating student academic achievement. I was still in the thick of graduate school, and so Will gave me a year to wrap up my dissertation before going to work for him.

2) For our readers, can you tell us a bit about your 
background and 
education and experience?
 
I’ve spent most of my life between North Carolina, where I grew up, and Massachusetts. I attended high school at Milton Academy in Milton, MA and then college at Harvard, where I majored in History and graduated in 2010 [summa cum laude]. I’m currently in the late stages of completing my PhD in American History at Rutgers University. My work experience has mostly been as an editor: for a small publishing house in North Carolina, for the budget travel guide company Let’s Go, and for a non-profit in Malden that commissioned me to coordinate and edit a book on American immigration history. My main focus for the past seven years, however, has been historical research and writing. My PhD dissertation is about liberal Christianity, psychoanalysis, and existentialism in mid-twentieth century American thought, with a focus on the German-American theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich. I’m hoping one of these days, if I can find the time amid my work for TCR, to turn my dissertation into a book on Tillich.

3) What lured you to take over the most prestigious journal 
in the world for high school writers?

When Will first told me about what The Concord Review was, I immediately saw the brilliance and logic of the idea: a journal by, and for, high school students that celebrates the best historical writing being done at the secondary level. I wish I had known about such a thing back when I was a History nerd in high school; I would have been keen on getting published myself. And so, I am very much in awe of what Will has built and honored to have the opportunity to carry on his legacy. I can hardly think of a more important, and more widely neglected, task than identifying and encouraging talented young people, fostering their historical consciousness, and giving them a platform to show their stuff.

4) In your mind how important are writing skills and 
doing research at 
the high school level?
 
They are absolutely essential. Both in the instrumental sense that without research and writing skills it will be difficult for students to make their way in the world; colleges—to say nothing of employers—care about these things. But also because their lives will be impoverished if they never expand their horizons by engaging the immense wealth contained in the world of books, especially History books.

5) How do you see critical thinking skills and critical writing 
skills
 as overlapping?


Good writing is an aid to—and a sign of—good thinking. But good writing is only possible when you have something to say and good thinking is only possible if that thought has actual content. Having something to say, in turn, is helped immeasurably by reading—widely and adventurously. And so TCR’s educational philosophy—which is nothing new—is simply to put good History books into the hands of smart kids, to let them read following their own curiosities and interests, and to provide a structure and incentive for them to write. Eventually, if they are enterprising, they will get to the point where their writing is a natural expression of what they have learned and of what they want to share with others, rather than an exercise being foisted upon them for the sake of “critical thinking” in the abstract.


6) What challenges do you see in front of you?

There are a lot of obstacles to TCR’s central mission of encouraging student reading and writing:

Institutionally, American secondary education is more interested in social engineering than in student academic achievement, notwithstanding the good work being done by many individual teachers. Within the classroom, teachers are so hard-pressed for time and crowded with curricular mandates that they increasingly don’t even assign the kind of substantive research papers that we publish and that we believe are the best outlets for student research. 

Politically, history education has become a battleground for rival ideologies. 

Economically, there is a perception—in my opinion both misguided and a little contemptible—that studying history is irrelevant to the main task of getting a good job, especially compared to “harder” fields like science, technology, or economics.
 
Technologically, the proliferation of smart phones and screens of all kinds has led to a general fracturing of the attention span that affects everyone (myself included), but that seems to be having an especially pernicious effect on many young people in their ability to read entire books and undertake serious research projects.

 All those are big-picture challenges. 

On a more practical level, TCR has to raise money to keep the organization alive and growing, to elevate the visibility of the Review, to encourage submissions, to get more subscribers, to make connections with history teachers and professional historians who are on board with what we’re doing, and to continue preaching the gospel of the substantive historical research paper to anyone who will listen.



7) What have I neglected to ask?

About my new ideas for TCR! In the next couple months I intend to launch a podcast where I will interview student-authors about their work, to commission a study on the state of academic summer programs in the humanities (TCR runs several such programs), and to begin work, under Will’s supervision, on a book about reading and writing in American secondary education.

PERSONALIZATION

That’s why Fitzhugh’s project has always been so alluring. Allowing passionate learners to pursue a historical topic that enthralls them and then have them pen an extended, extensively-researched, clearly-written essay on that topic is the best kind of personalization.

FORBES

December 21, 2018

We Can At Least Encourage The Crazy Ones

Frederick Hess Contributor
Education—I write about policy and practice in K-12 and higher education.

For the better part of two decades, school improvement has been focused on narrowing “achievement gaps” by raising the reading and math scores of low-performing students. While this charge has undeniable merit, it also carries some real costs. Among these are a lack of attention to students who are performing passably but are eager to pursue learning that stretches beyond the corners of state academic standards.

For those concerned about the failure to adequately challenge these students or push their intellectual horizons, this state of affairs has been disheartening. William Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, the world’s only quarterly journal for academic research papers by high school students, is one of them. Frustrated by decades of mostly-ineffectual efforts to persuade high schools to prioritize long-form, rigorous student work, he recently offered a suggestion that’s half tongue-in-cheek but wholly worth pursuing.

As Fitzhugh puts it:

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Hoosiers is when the coach first drives into the town early in the morning or late in the evening, and he passes the HS senior shooting hoops. This student is the one who defends the coach and puts up the winning shot in the state championship.

Could we provide more high school students with an incentive to spend part of their spare time on Independent Study History papers, with no teacher time required—as in the shooting hoops case? This should help with the problem everyone cites—that teachers have no time to guide students on serious term papers . . .

Fitzhugh’s notion seems especially well-suited as we enter 2019, a time when concern about the degree to which testing mania has fueled a lowest-common-denominator mindset, and when talk of “personalized learning” is inescapable.

Of course, the downside of “personalization” is that it can be an invitation to empty-calorie education, undermining rigor and leading to the problems of anything-goes instruction. That’s why Fitzhugh’s project has always been so alluring. Allowing passionate learners to pursue a historical topic that enthralls them and then have them pen an extended, extensively-researched, clearly-written essay on that topic is the best kind of personalization.

As Fitzhugh observed in a note which was accompanied by a remarkably accomplished student essay, “This 21,000-word paper was written as an independent study, and I have reason to believe the teacher didn’t even know about it. This kid is applying to Harvard—We could at least try to reach and encourage the crazy ones.”

This runs contrary to how many schools and school systems approach their work today. Even as the enthusiasm for test-based accountability recedes, discussions about success tend to focus on movement in reading and math proficiency for various student demographics. There is little reward or support for the time teachers spend encouraging the crazy ones.

This can be rectified. That may require retooling teacher evaluation to place more weight on teachers who provide extraordinary opportunities for students and who make it a point to nurture student learning that extends beyond state standards or isn’t captured on state tests. It may mean creating room in the schedules of high school students for things like Concord Review-style essays, and perhaps even providing coaching or giving some teachers a period to mentor and support such work. It may call for partnering with educators who have a track record of supporting extraordinary student efforts, as is the case in math instruction with the remarkable Art of Problem Solving.

Our schools have never been as good at encouraging the crazy ones as we might like, but it’s safe to say that things have gotten worse on this count over the past two decades.

Now, despite some overheated claims that No Child Left Behind-style accountability or test-based teacher evaluation were motivated by a villainous enthusiasm for “shaming and blaming” educators, the problem was not the intent of these efforts. The goal of ensuring that all children should, at a minimum, be proficient in reading and math was admirable, and it’s tough to quarrel with the insistence that teachers and schools should do their part. The problem, rather, was with the ill-conceived machinery and the lack of appreciation for how these policies would ultimately change teaching, learning, and the culture of schooling.

One costly consequence was that teachers felt far less free to devote time and energy to encouraging the crazy ones. Making it a point to reverse that state of affairs would be a healthy resolution for school improvement in 2019, and beyond.

Contributor
Frederick Hess 

I write about policy and practice in K-12 and higher education. I’m director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where I study K-12 and higher education. My books include "Spinning Wheels," Common Sense School Reform," "The Same Thing Over and Over," "Cage-Busting Leadership," "The Cage-Busting Teacher" and "Letters to a Young Education Reformer." My work has appeared in scholarly outlets such as Urban Affairs Review, Harvard Education Review and Social Science Quarterly, and popular outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, National Review and The Hill. I’ve edited academic volumes on topics including education philanthropy, educational entrepreneurship, college costs, educational research, the Common Core and the politically correct university. I’m a former high school social studies teacher and teach or have taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Georgetown, Rice, and the University of Virginia. I hold an M.Ed. in teaching and curriculum and a Ph.D. in government from Harvard University.
 
[The Concord Review; tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org]

ANA MUNDACA

Original research is a pillar of any well-rounded education, and it points to a huge flaw in our education system that humanities research and writing are not more emphasized in high school.

18 December 2018

Truth in American Education
 
Harvard Freshman Points Out Huge Flaw in K-12 Education System

December 18, 2018   By Shane Vander Hart

Will Fitzhugh with The Concord Review forwarded me an email he received from a Harvard freshman, Ana Mundaca, who contributed to his publication when she attended Sidwell Friends School. With her permission I wanted to share that email in part with our readers because she offers an excellent insight into a flaw with the K-12 education system:

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

I am just wrapping up my first semester at Harvard College, and I am really enjoying it so far. As I’m sure you remember from your time here, there is a mandatory college writing class all first year students take either in the Fall or the Spring. I was lucky enough to be enrolled early in the Fall class, and was struck by how easy the collegiate level writing in the class was for me. I don’t mean to say I didn’t have to apply myself or that I was any smarter than my peers, because that would not be true at all. However, I found the writing that I did in that class (and in all my humanities classes so far) has closely paralleled the writing structure of the paper I submitted for TCR a few years back. 



While I have since improved my writing, it was a huge relief to me to already have had experience writing high level academic papers as it allowed me to focus on the content of my essay rather than the flow or style of the paper. Consequently, I found the final research assignment enjoyable and enthralling, and will be working on expanding the paper and hopefully publishing it in a music journal in the coming months. I would not have been ready for this rich experience in writing had it not been for The Concord Review.

Original research is a pillar of any well-rounded education, and it points to a huge flaw in our education system that humanities research and writing are not more emphasized in high school. TCR provides an outlet for the type of academic work that we should be encouraging, and the publication is incredibly valuable. Publishing my first work in TCR only inspired me to pursue my writing further, and has led me to declare my major in Economics with a secondary in East Asian Studies in order to continue my research and publication. I will most likely be taking an in-depth course covering North Korea in Seoul this summer, and hope to expand upon the paper I submitted to you as part of my final project.

Ana Mundaca

[Sidwell Friends School, 2018

North Korean Theocracy, Fall 2017 Issue

Harvard Class of 2022]

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

This is not a new problem. It was not emphasized when I was in high school either, but the hyper-emphasis on STEM and the poor ELA standards most states have as a result of Common Core I don’t see a fix coming anytime soon. K-12 education needs a return to classical education. 

Anyway, The Concord Review should be commended for providing students with an opportunity many do not receive while they are in high school.

CHARLES EMERSON RIGGS

December 5, 2018 (Sudbury, Massachusetts) The Concord Review this week welcomed its new editor, Charles Emerson Riggs, to the organization. Mr. Riggs succeeds TCR editor William Hughes Fitzhugh, who will remain Head of the parent organization he founded, The Concord Review, Inc.

Mr. Riggs, who is currently finishing his doctorate in American History at Rutgers University, is a graduate of Harvard College, summa cum laude, in History. He has more than a decade of experience as an editor, researcher, historian, and educator, having worked for Morgan Reynolds Publishing, Let's Go Publications, The Immigrant Learning Center, and Rutgers University. In the summer of 2018, he acted as dean of The Concord Review's summer programs in San Francisco, Boston, and Seoul, a role he will continue to occupy in 2019 and beyond.

A native of North Carolina and a descendent of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mr. Riggs is a scholar of American intellectual history. His Ph.D. dissertation, which he recently completed and will be defending this spring, is about the confluence of religion, existentialism, and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century American thought, with a focus on the German-born theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich.

His first task at TCR will be editing the Review's 120th issue, to appear in the Spring of 2019. Under Mr. Fitzhugh, The Concord Review has published 1,307 student academic research papers in History from more than 40 countries on a quarterly basis since 1987. Incidentally, that is also the year of Mr. Riggs's birth.

Mr. Fitzhugh expressed his congratulations on the arrival of the new editor. "I am very glad that Charles Emerson Riggs has a deep commitment to both History and to academic expository writing, and he understands and believes in the mission of The Concord Review to encourage and celebrate the achievements of secondary students around the world in both areas."