EDUCATION LITE

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas

EDUCATION LITE

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
28 May 2012


When I read about education in Finland, where they accept only one of every ten applicants for teacher training, require those to earn a master’s degree in a (content) subject area, and then support them and trust them to do professional work, I have to agree with Diane Ravitch that our practices—of accepting anyone into teacher training, putting them through several years of edubabble on pedagogicalisticalism, and then treat them like untrustworthy assembly line workers whose jobs hang on each year’s student scores on bad tests—are mistaken.

We do mistrust and mistreat the teachers we have, and we have lost sight, in the race to the bottom of “objective” tests, of some very simple facts, such as that classes usually differ in their performance from year to year, even with the same teacher, and that students bear the main responsibility for their own learning.

Our teachers have responded to this dismal situation, on many occasions, by saying that the current punch-card, standardized regimens for curriculum and “assessment” (if you want to dignify it with that label) are limiting the time and opportunity for them to exercise their creativity in teaching.

Now, who, other than Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted...,” could be against creativity in teaching?

The question for me, however, is how do so many seem to want to apply that creativity? Too often, in my view, it is in the service of FUN, and “hands-on” (and brains-off?) activities to entertain students in an age-appropriate and “relevant” way, to make everyone feel good about themselves, no matter how little they know and how little academic competence they have achieved.

The Chief Academic Officer of a major educational publisher recently spoke in an interview about all the Summer reading activities that could help students lose less knowledge and skill in that gap. But the emphasis, along with using a stopwatch to keep track of “reading minutes” (shades of industrial management practice), was on digital games to provide FUN.

Education.com has a regular feature of suggested activities for high school students, and for some reason, they never suggest that students read a complete nonfiction book or work on a long serious history research paper, as some of their more diligent peers are doing. Instead, they recommend group games which they hope will provide, above all, relevance to teen lives, and, of course, FUN.

For comparison, think about the approach taken by high school coaches with their athletes. It is true that sometimes they urge their athletes to “have fun out there,” but it is always after hundreds of hours of grueling and un-fun training and practices. They may want their players to be “loose” and upbeat, but they mostly want them to know what they are doing and to be as competent as possible at doing it. One local sports shop where I live sells sweatshirts for high school athletes, which say “Work all Summer, Win all Fall!” And it means training work-outs, not summer employment.

I am not sure where our educators’ obsession with FUN comes from. Where went the old view that “hard work never hurt anyone”? Is it the result of laying aside the time-honored authority and role of “The Old Battleaxe,” who represented to students the goals and hopes of the community, and whose academic expectations and standards were not only high, but remembered for years after graduation, usually with profound gratitude? Perhaps too many now seek to be a good friend to students instead? They should try to remember that friends don’t let friends drive drunk, and they don’t put FUN before a teacher’s job to take academic work seriously practically all the time.

The sad thing is that usually Education Lite, with its digital games, etc. turns out not to be much FUN, and, in the end, students really do want to grow up and gain a good deal of knowledge and competence, in academics as well as in sports.

If educators labor to keep it Lite, they will rightfully earn, not the friendship of their students, but their contempt, for laying down their responsibilities, and they lose the respect of the community, as well. In Finland, a Lower Education teacher is held in high regard by the society, just a bit behind that for doctors. In the United States, it is otherwise. Where I taught, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was quite clear that while parents and others in the town thought “the world” of their teachers, they would definitely not want their son or daughter to be one, or to marry one.

Keep in mind the Disney version of Pinocchio, where he is led off to a place where he could have nothing but FUN, and was turned into a jackass. It would be nice if our teachers used their creativity on serious academic work with students, and let somebody else do the “friendly and FUN” work of turning our students into jackasses.

TYRANNY OF THE PRESENT

“Bertrand Russell, after his first disastrous experiment in organizing a school, 
observed that the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination.”


 
Kieran Egan
“Social Studies and the Erosion of Education”
Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Children’s Minds, Talking Rabbits & Clockwork Oranges
Teachers College Press, 1999, pp. 131-146

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

 
“Cicero remarked that the purpose of education is to free the student from the tyranny of the present.”

 

Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death
New York: Penguin, 1985, p. 146

 

SPEED KILLS

SchoolInfoSystem.org; Madison, Wisconsin

SPEED KILLS
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
16 May 2012


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 begin 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 exemplary history research paper that The Concord Review has published by more than 1,000 diligent 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 to 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.

QUICK AND DIRTY ROBOSCORING

An Interview with Will Fitzhugh: Robot Graders Behaving Badly?

Posted by Michael Shaughnessy EducationViews Senior Columnist

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas, on May 1, 2012

Robo-Graders

Michael F. Shaughnessy



1) Will, I understand that some of these testing corporations are using robots to grade real live human writing. Can you briefly tell us what this is all about?

Mike Winerip reports in the New York Times that “The automated reader developed by the Educational Testing Service, e-Rater, can grade 16,000 essays in 20 seconds, according to David Williamson, a research director for E.T.S.” In Concord, Massachusetts, there was a print shop that had a sign: Good, Fast, Cheap: CHOOSE TWO, the point being you could not have all three.

It seems clear to me that the Deeper Learning Project of the Hewlett Foundation is looking for writing assessment that is fast and cheap. It is hard to beat 16,000 “scores” in 20 seconds. The National Writing Board, which provides a unique assessment for high school student history research papers, takes three hours on each paper to provide a four-page report. I doubt if we could do even one of those assessments in 20 seconds, no matter how much foundation funding we were offered.


2) I guess the first thing that comes to mind is creativity—are these R2D2 graders going to be able to recognize a real creative writing sample?

As you know, my primary interest is in academic expository writing, but when it comes to creative writing, these programs don’t care if you are writing an “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or an Ode to an iPhone. 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.


3) Let’s move on to grammar—or better grandma. Here are two sentences: Let’s eat, Grandma. Lets eat grandma. In the first sentence, we have an apparently hungry kid ready to gobble some apple pie. In the second sentence, it sounds like the kid is a cannibal, plotting to have a tasty repast. What is the computer going to think?

Or in the old example, “It’s not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” Again, the computer is not “interested” in the meaning of anything it is scoring. At the New York World’s Fair years ago they showed a computer translator that took English and turned it into Russian and then back into English. One example was “The Spirit is Willing but the Flesh is Weak.” After going into Russian, it came back into English as “The Ghost is Ready, but the Meat is Bad.”


4) I know a bit about how these testing services work. Here is an example of a question: Discuss three books that you have recently read and how they impacted you. Now, how will the computer differentiate between one response listing Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, and another response listing Great Expectations, The Three Musketeers and Don Quixote?

By the way, I just read Great Expectations for the second time a month ago, and I was surprised to find how much wonderful stuff there is about friendship in it. I had not noticed that the first time around. Again, the computer doesn’t care whether you are talking about Peter the Great or Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater, By removing any interest in knowledge or meaning, they can really speed up the scoring process to a very remarkable level—and save a lot of money, too. That is, after they finish paying out all the $100,000 grants and paying for all the new consultants, professional developers, computers, software, etc.


5) There are these two words, that seem to have been forgotten—quality and quantity. Certainly, the robo-evaluator can count the number of words. However, how can they ascertain the veridicality of the robust statements in the student’s rhetoric?

Back in the day, many courses in college taught us that it was important to try to find truth, to separate appearance from reality, to avoid being misled by the surface of things, but to go deeper to find lasting meaning and value. All of this is of no interest to the computer, or perhaps to those who fund these robo-scoring studies either. Otherwise they could not be satisfied with and even proud of so much speed at so little cost, with so much absence of quality or meaning.


6) Will, you have published, QUALITY high school papers for years. I put QUALITY in capital letters, but I am not sure if the robo-graders would understand the concept. Can you tell us a little about The Concord Review, and the consistent quality that you have recognized?

In the last 25 years, I have found nearly one thousand high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries who were willing to write exemplary–average 6,000-word––history research papers on a huge variety of topics that computers have no interest in. The longest paper was 22,000 words on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but I have published a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War, a 13,000-word paper on the Needham Question by a student from Hong Kong, and so on. I have found that many HS students, presented with the challenge of the exemplary work of their peers, will rise to the challenge and write longer and more serious papers than I thought possible when I started The Concord Review in 1987. I am happy to send examples to anyone who sends me an email at fitzhugh@tcr.org, and there are a number of them on our website at www.tcr.org.


7) Will, you and I used to use typewriters, and probably white out when we made a mistake, and often re-typed our high school and college papers. Nowadays, they have these word processors that automatically correct and identify grammar and spelling errors. Yet, high school kids seem to write less and less. What’s going on?

Most teachers in high schools now either do not have, or are unwilling to take, the time to read serious academic papers by students in the high school, so they do not assign them, and with the exception of the few students who seek out the opportunity of The Concord Review, and the ones who must write an Extended Essay for the IB Diploma, students do not do much academic expository writing. Even some elite private schools are cutting back the academic expository writing they ask students to do.

Most writing competitions ask for very short personal stories, or very short pieces on set topics, or what is called “creative nonfiction” which is a form of self-centered diary writing. If nobody is asking students to do writing that requires reading of nonfiction books, or knowledge of history, or which is the length of an IB Extended Essay, then they won’t do it. So they don’t write. Everyone complains about their writing, and students still aren’t asked to write much in high school.


 8) Sadly, the Spell check machine, like the robo graders, probably does not recognize the difference between to, two, and too as well as there and their. Or can they?

I am not sure. It is possible that computers can be programmed to look for the probable correct position of various parts of speech, but again, they have been designed to have no interest in, or understanding of, what the student is writing about. Writing for a computer may yield a “score”of some sort, but as far as meaning goes, the student might as well be talking into a dead phone. After all, coming to understand the meaning of what someone is saying takes time, and that would mess up the path to polishing off 16,000 writing “samples” in 20 seconds, right?

Marc Bousquet of The Chronicle of Higher Education makes the excellent point that: “It’s reasonable to say that the forms of writing successfully scored by machines are already—mechanized forms—writing designed to be mechanically produced by students…”


9) What have I neglected to ask?

It is a great enduring puzzle to me why we when we know that nearly 90% of college professors say their new students are not very well prepared in reading, doing research or academic writing, and yet we continue to give our high school students mostly fiction to read and ask them to do only personal writing, the five-paragraph essay and/or the 500-word “college essay.” In general I feel sure we don’t hate our students and we are not determined to have them fail, but when 47% of Freshmen in the California State College System need to enroll in remedial Reading courses, it is hard to see how we could serve them much worse if we did hate them.



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

“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

HISTORY BOOKS?

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

History Books
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
23 April 2012

I majored in English literature at Harvard, and had such wonderful professors as B.J. Whiting for Chaucer, Alfred Harbage for Shakespeare, Douglas Bush for Milton, Walter Jackson Bate for Samuel Johnson, and Herschel Baker for Tudor/Stuart Drama. In my one year at Cambridge after graduation, I had the benefit of lectures by Clive Staples Lewis, F.R. Leavis, Joan Bennett, and R.T.H. Redpath.

But in high school and in college I didn’t read any history books and I didn’t think twice about it. Many years later, when I was asked to teach United States History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, I panicked. I read Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People to get started and I have been reading history books ever since (thirty years), but I never knew enough history to be as good a history teacher as my students deserved.

Since 1987, (I left teaching in 1988) I have been the editor of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we have now published 1,022 history research papers by high school students from 46 states and 38 other countries. This has only increased my understanding that high school students should be not only encouraged to read complete history books (as I never was in school) but assigned them as well. It is now my view that unless students in our high schools get used to reading at least one complete history book each year, they will not be as well prepared for the books on college nonfiction reading lists as they should be.

In addition, as adherents to the ideas of E.D. Hirsch know well, understanding what one reads depends on the prior knowledge of the reader, and by reading history books our high schools students will learn more history and be more competent to read difficult nonfiction material, including more history books, in college.

When I discuss these thoughts, even with my good friends in the education world, I find a strange sort of automatic reversion to the default. When I want to talk about reading nonfiction books, suddenly the conversation is about novels. Any discussion of reading nonfiction in the high schools always, in my experience, defaults to talk of literature. It seems virtually impossible to anyone discussing reading to relax the clutches of the English Departments long enough even to consider that a history book might make good reading material for our students, too. Try it sometime and see what I mean.

I realize that most Social Studies and History Departments have simply given up on having students read a history book, even in those few cases where they may have tried in the past. They are almost universally content, it seems, to leave the assignment of books (and too much of the writing as well) entirely in the hands of their English Department colleagues.

One outcome of this, in my view, is that even when the Common Core people talk about the need for more nonfiction, it is more than they can manage to dare to suggest a list of complete history books for kids to read. So we find them suggesting little nonfiction excerpts and short speeches to assign, along with menus, brochures, and bus schedules for the middle schoolers. Embarrassing.

Nevertheless, if asked, what history books would I suggest? Everyone is afraid to mention possible history books if they are not about current events, or civics, or some underserved population, for fear of a backlash against the whole idea of history books.

But I will offer these: Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough for Freshmen, Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer for Sophomores, Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson for Juniors, and The Path Between the Seas by David McCullough for Seniors in high school.

Obviously there are thousands of other good history books, and students should be free to read any of these as they work on their Extended History Essays or the very new Capstone Essays the College Board is now beginning to start the process of thinking about. And of course I do realize that some history took place before 1620 and even in countries other than our own, but these books are good ones, and if students read them they will actually learn some history, but perhaps more important, they will learn that reading a real live nonfiction history book is not beyond their reach. I dearly wish I had learned that when I was in high school.

WE DON'T WANT TO KNOW YOU

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

WE DON’T WANT TO KNOW YOU

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
15 April 2012


Three times a year, The Boston Globe (in the Athens of America) has a 14-16-page Special Supplement celebrating local "scholar-athletes" with pictures and brief write-ups. These are high school students who have taken part in soccer, tennis, golf, football, swimming, baseball, basketball, softball, wrestling, and what-have-you, and done well by various measures. Their coaches, too, get their pictures in the paper and sometimes a paragraph of praise. In addition to these supplements, hardly a day goes by during the school year when some high school athlete, team, coach or event doesn't get "covered" by The Boston Globe. A local philanthropic group has recently raised several million dollars to promote sports in our public high schools.

As we all know, sports involve students, parents, boosters and the like, and they build teamwork, discipline, character, equality (of a sort), ambition, competition, and attendance. Parents do not need to be dragged to games the way they do to school meetings or Parents' Night to talk to teachers. In many cases, they pay fees to allow their youngsters to participate in sports, and some even raise money as boosters for trips to games, tournaments, etc. Community involvement is fairly easy to get in sports, and there are very few edupundits who find work advising schools and communities on how to get parents and other community members involved when it comes to school sports. I know of no new initiatives or workshops to teach parents how to get involved in their children’s sports programs. Athletes also enjoy rallies, cheerleaders, and coverage in their high school newspaper as well.

Recently a young student basketball player in Massachusetts, 6'10" and very good at his sport, "reclassified" himself (changed from a Junior to a Senior?), so that he could choose among the many colleges whose coaches want him to come play at their institutions. His picture not only appeared several times in his local school newspaper, but also showed up several times with stories in The Boston Globe (the Sports Section is one of only four main sections in the paper each day). Apparently we want to know who our good high school athletes are, and what they are achieving, and what they look like, etc.

There is another group in our high schools, which might be called not "scholar-athletes," but perhaps "scholar scholars," as their achievements are in the academic work for which, some believe, we build our schools with our taxes in the first place. But we tell those "scholar scholars" that we really don't want to know them. Their work does not appear in The Boston Globe. Their pictures and stories do not appear in the three-a-year Special Supplements or in the daily paper (there is no "academics" section in the paper of course), or even in their local high school newspaper.

Whenever the subject of students who do exemplary academic work in our schools comes up, our cliché response tends to be that "they can take care of themselves." But if we don't seem to feel that good high school athletes should have to get along in anonymity, why do we think that anonymity for our best high school students will serve them (and us) well enough, in our education system, and in the country, which is in a serious fight to stay up with other countries who take their best students and their academic achievement very seriously indeed.

Sometimes when I mention that it might serve us well if we gave some recognition to our best high school "scholar scholars" people say that I must be "against sports." I am not. I am just critical of the huge imbalance between our attention to athletes and what we give to scholars at the high school level. 100 to zero doesn't make the best balance we can achieve in recognizing them, in my view.

Of course, I am biased, because for 25 years I have been publishing exemplary history research papers by high school students (so far 1,022 papers from 46 states and 38 other countries) in a unique quarterly journal, and none of them ever gets mentioned for their history scholarship in The Boston Globe. Folks tell me this practice is not limited to the Athens of America, of course.

If we are worried about the performance of our student athletes, then the relentless coverage of their efforts might seem justified. I know we are worried about the academic achievements of our public high schools, yet when scholar scholars in the high schools get published in The Concord Review (and then go on to Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton (as about 30% of our authors do), or get to be Rhodes Scholars (as several have), they don't get mentioned in The Boston Globe. Actually one author, Jessica Leight, from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, did get her picture in the paper when she got her Rhodes Scholarship, after being named Junior Eight Phi Beta Kappa and graduating summa cum laude at Yale, but no mention was made of her Emerson Prize-winning paper on Anne Hutchinson, which was published in that unique international journal when she was still in a local public high school.

So let's do continue to praise our local high school athletes and their coaches. But isn't it time at long last now to think about the message such publicity sends to our diligent and successful scholar scholars and their coaches (I mean their teachers—who are also ignored) about what we value as a society? Why has it been so important all these years to send them, when they are doing not only what we ask them to do in school, but well above and beyond what we have expected, the message that, sorry, but "We Don't Want to Know About You"?



----------------------------
“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

CONTENTLESS WRITING

Schoolinfosystem.org
Madison, Wisconsin

October 5, 2008

Contentless Writing
Will Fitzhugh


Mr. Fitzhugh [fitzhugh@tcr.org] is Editor and Publisher of The Concord Review and Founder of the National Writing Board and the TCR Institute [www.tcr.org].


Abraham Lincoln's address at Gettysburg was short. Indeed, the President had spoken and taken his seat before many in that large crowd gathered outdoors even realized that he had spoken. Fortunately, an alert reporter took down his words. Short as the speech was, it began with a date and a fact—the sort of factual content that is being drained away from student writing today.

The very idea of writing without content takes some getting used to. I was taken aback not long ago to read the comments of a young woman who had been asked how she felt about having a computer grade the essays that she wrote on the Graduate Management Admission Test (Mathews, 2004). She replied that she didn't mind, noting that the test givers were more interested in her "ability to communicate" than in what she actually said.

Although style, fluency, tone, and correct grammar are certainly important in writing, folks like me think that content has value as well. The guidelines for scoring the new writing section on the SAT seem to say otherwise, however. Readers evaluating the essays are told not to take points off for factual mistakes, and they must score the essays "holistically"—at the rate of 30 an hour (Winerip, 2005).

Earlier this year, Linda Shaw of the Seattle Times (2006), reported that the the rules for the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) do not allow dictionaries, but "when it comes to the writing section, there's one rule they can break: They can make things up. Statistics. Experts. Quotes. Whatever helps them make their point." According to Shaw, the state's education office announced that "making up facts is acceptable when writing nonfiction, persuasive essays on the WASL."

Lest you conclude that writing without content, or writing nonfiction with fictional content—think James Frey's A Million Little Pieces—is limited to the Left Coast, think again. Across the United States, even the most prestigious writing workshops for teachers generally bypass the what to focus on the how.

All writing has to have some content, of course. So what are students encouraged to put down on the page? In its 2003 report, The Neglected 'R', The National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, gave us a clue. According to the report, the following passage by a high school student about the September 11 terrorist attacks shows "how powerfully children can express their emotions."

The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us.

Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored "Basic" or "Below Basic," NAEP scored the following student response "Excellent." The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse's Demian, in which the main character grows up and awakens to himself, the student wrote,

High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life. (p. 22)

As these two excerpts show, both the National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges and the NAEP seem to favor emotional and personal writing, at least at the high school level. If personal memoir and "fictional nonfiction" were the sorts of writing that college courses required—not to mention in business, government and other lines of work--then perhaps it wouldn't matter. After all, top executives at ENRON wrote quite a bit of fiction before their arrests, not to mention some well-known journalists who substituted fiction for fact in their reporting.

The problem is that students must know facts, dates, and the viewpoints of various experts and authors to write their college term papers. The Boston Globe has reported some frightening statistics about students' knowledge gaps. Sixty-three percent of students graduating from Massachusetts high schools and attending community colleges are in remedial courses, as are 34 percent of those attending four-year colleges. (Sacchetti, 2004)

A survey of leading U.S. companies revealed that organizations are spending more than $3 billion each year in remedial writing courses for both hourly and salaried employees (National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges, 2004).

Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

As it happens, some teachers and students in U.S. high schools know that writing serious, factual history research papers is good and necessary preparation for future writing tasks, and that it's a superb way to learn history and practice scholarship. One student, whose history essay appeared in The Concord Review (see "Raising the Bar for Expository Writing," p. 46) was so interested in the trial and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson in the early 1600s that she spent several months during her Junior year doing independent study at a public high school in Massachusetts. Her 13,000-word research paper won The Concord Review's Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. [She has since graduated summa from Yale, finished her Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at MIT.]

The student found Anne Hutchinson's independence inspiring. In the following extract from her paper, the student discusses the accusations made against Hutchinson during the trial in which this courageous woman was excommunicated for questioning in private the authority of the ministers as the sole source of God's wisdom:

...This bitter speech, made by a man who had seen his entire career threatened by the woman now standing before him, opened a trial marked by extraordinary vindictiveness on the part of the men presiding. Why? Because their regulatory power had been, up to this point, thwarted. Hutchinson had done nothing in public, nothing that could be clearly seen and defined, nothing that could be clearly punished. The principal accusation leveled against her was failure to show proper respect to the ministers, but again, she had made no public speeches or declarations, and the court would soon find that producing evidence of her insolence was very difficult.

The assembly did not immediately strike to the heart of the matter: Hutchinson's disparagement of the ministers of the colony as under a covenant of works. Instead, the presiding ministers first accused her of disobeying the commandment to obey one's father and one's mother by not submitting to the 'fathers of the commonwealth,' as [Governor] Winthrop termed it. Next, Hutchinson's meetings were condemned, despite her citation of a rule in Titus exhorting the elder women to teach the younger.

This is factual writing about a historical event—a trial—in which the facts of the case were of the greatest importance. Fiction was not the focus here. The author's emotions, and her "experiences in high school," were distinctly of secondary—if any—importance in her account of these events in American religious and legal history.

Some readers may mistakenly assume that writing with content is common in schools. In 2002, the Roper Organization conducted a study for The Concord Review and found that in U.S. public high schools, 81% of teachers never assign a 5,000-word research paper--that's 8,000 words shorter than the previously cited award-winning essay--and 62% never assign a 3,000-word nonfiction paper. (The Concord Review 2002). Although 95% of teachers surveyed believed that research papers were "important" or "very important," most reported that they did not have time to assign and grade them.

When Support Trumps Rigor

In her report for the Fordham Foundation on state social studies standards in the United States, researcher Sandra Stotsky (1999), cited a newspaper article about a Hispanic high school student named Carol who was unprepared for college work. Described as a top student, the girl was stunned by the level of writing that her Boston college demanded of her. Although the students said that she had received encouragement and support from her high school teachers, she wished that her teachers had given her more challenging work. According to the reporter, the student discovered that "moral support is different from academic rigor." Stotsky noted that teachers often substitute self-esteem-building assignments for rigorous work. The same newspaper article described a high school teacher,

“who had had her students "write a short story about their lives" because, in the teacher's words, it allowed them to show "a high level of writing ability" and to realize that "their own experience is valid and useful." This teacher is also quoted as believing that this assignment reflected her "high expectations" for her students. It apparently did not occur to the reporter that this kind of writing assignment today, especially for high school students from minority groups, is more likely to reflect a concern for their self-esteem rather than a desire to challenge them intellectually. A regular flow of such writing assignments may be part of the reason that Hispanic students like Carol are not prepared for college-level writing.” (pp. 269-270)

Students like Carol who belatedly discover their lack of preparedness for college work are far more numerous than one might think. Through a survey of recent high school graduates (Achieve, Inc., 2005), the National Governors Association learned that a large majority of students surveyed wished that their teachers had given them more challenging work. Moreover, the High School Survey of Student Engagement (Indiana University, 2004) found that 55% of the 80,000 students surveyed said they did fewer than three hours of homework each week, and most received As and Bs anyway.

Anything But Knowledge

Writing about oneself can be the work of genius, as Marcel Proust demonstrated so well in his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time. But limiting students to thinking and writing almost entirely about themselves in school is, well, limiting. The Boston Globe, which annually celebrates essays on Courage, asks students to submit short essays—not about someone else's courage, but about their own. Of course, famous people like Anne Hutchinson, Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, Jr., don't have a monopoly on courage. But it would be refreshing for students to look outside themselves from time to time to reflect on such qualities in others. Unfortunately, solipsism seems to have become the order of the day; the lack of a sustained focus on objectivity and rigor in writing is showing up in poor literacy rates, greater numbers of remedial classes in college, and higher college dropout rates.

In 2005, comedian Stephen Colbert introduced the idea of "truthiness" into the English language. The term characterizes speech or writing that appears to be accurate and serious, but is, in fact, false or comical. In college, I learned that one of the tasks of thought is to help us distinguish appearance from reality. The goal of "truthiness" is to blur that distinction. On satirical news programs, like The Daily Show this dubious practice brings the relief of laughter, but on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning--in which students are told that it's OK to make things up and to invent experts and "quote" them--it just brings confusion, even to the task of writing of "nonfiction." Postmodernists and deconstructionists at the university level have long been claiming that there is no such thing as truth, but here we have high school students being told, on a state assessment, that when writing nonfiction, it is OK just to make things up, for instance to invent an expert, and then "quote" him in support of an argument they are making.

The danger is that practices like these can lead high school students to believe that they don't need to seek information about anything outside of their own feelings and experiences. However, college students are still expected to read nonfiction books, which obviously deal with topics other than their personal lives. Students also have to write research papers in which they must organize their thinking and present material coherently. Too many students are not prepared to do this, and many end up dropping out of college. What a terrible waste of hopes and opportunity!


References

Achieve (2005). "Rising to the challenge: Are high school graduates prepared for college and work?" PowerPoint presentation prepared by the Peter D. Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies. Available: www.achieve.org/files/poll.ppt http://www.achieve.org/files/poll.ppt

The Concord Review, (2002). History research paper study (conducted by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis). Available: www.tcr.org/tcr/institute/historytcr.pdf http://www.tcr.org/tcr/institute/historytcr.pdf

Indiana University. (2004) High School Survey of Student Engagement. Bloomington, Indiana: [Martha McCarthy]

Mathews, J. (2004, August 1). "Computers weighing in on the elements of essay; Programs critique structure not ideas." The Washington Post

National Center for Education Statistics. (2002). The Nation's Report Card: Writing Highlights 2002. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pubs/main/2002/2003531.asp

National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. (2003). The neglected 'R'; The need for a writing revolution. New York: College Board. www.writingcommission.org http://www.writingcommission.org

National Commission on Writing in America's Schools and Colleges. (2004). Writing: A ticket to work...or a ticket out: A survey of business leaders. www.writingcommission.org http://www.writingcommission.org

Sacchetti, M. (2005, June 26) Colleges question MCAS success; many in state schools still need remedial help. The Boston Globe.

Shaw, L. (2006, March 17). "WASL writing: Make it up as they go along." The Seattle Times, p. B1.

Stotsky, S (1999). Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason. New York: The Free Press, pp. 269-271

Winerip, M. (2005, May 4). "SAT Essay rewards length and ignores errors." The New York Times. www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~rgibson/satessay.html

This article was first published by Educational Leadership in October 2006, and is reprinted with permission of the author.


===============
"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®