HS HISTORY SCHOLAR

Schoolinfosystem.org
Madison, Wisconsin

History Scholar

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review

College scholarships for specific abilities and achievements are not news. There are football scholarships and volleyball scholarships and music scholarships and cheerleading scholarships, and so on—there is a long list of sources of money to attract and reward high school students who have talent and accomplishments if those are not academic.

Consider an example: there was a high school student in Georgia, in an IB program, who spent a year and a half working on an independent study of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s. This paper, a bit more than 15,000 words, with endnotes and bibliography, was published in the Fall 2008 issue of The Concord Review, the only journal in the world for the academic history research papers of secondary students, and it earned the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. (He went to Christ Church College, Oxford.) If he were an outstanding baseball player, a number of college baseball coaches would have heard about him, and would have done what they could to persuade him to accept an athletic (baseball) scholarship to their colleges.

But suppose he were not a HS athlete, but only a HS history student of extraordinary academic promise at the high school level. Would college professors of history have known about and taken an interest in his work? No. Would there have been college history scholarships competing for him? No. Would his teacher, who worked with him on his independent study, have attracted attention from his teaching peers (professors) at the college and university level? No.

I hope I am wrong, but based on what I have found out so far, there are no college scholarships available specifically for outstanding secondary students of history. There is abundant moaning and gnashing of teeth by EduPundits and professors about the widespread ignorance of history among our young people, but when someone shows unusually strong knowledge of history at the Lower Education Level, no one pays any attention at the Higher Education Level.

In 26 years of working to publish 1,077 history research papers by secondary students of history from 46 states and 38 other countries in The Concord Review, I have not learned of a single instance of an author being offered a college scholarship based on their exemplary academic work in history.

When we lament that our adolescents seem more interested in sports than in academics, we might consider how differently we celebrate and reward those activities. High school coaches who are well known to and almost treated as peers by their college counterparts, receive no attention at all for their work as teachers, no matter how unusually productive that work may happen to be. Higher Education simply does not care about the academic work being done by teachers and students at the Lower Education level.

Behavioral psychology argues that by ignoring some behavior you will tend to get less of it, and by paying attention to and rewarding other behavior you are likely to find that there is more of it.

I know that students are being recruited for college scholarships in cheerleading, and I would dearly love to hear from anyone who can tell me of students being recruited for their specific academic work in a high school subject, like history, literature, physics, Chinese, chemistry and so on.

I realize there are scholarships for disadvantaged students, for students of high general intellectual ability, and the like, but where are the scholarships for specific HS academic achievement? After all, athletic and dance scholarships are not awarded on the basis of general tests of physical fitness, but because of achievement in the actual performance of particular athletic or artistic activities.

It is said that you get what you pay for, and it seems likely that you get more of what you value and reward in academics as well. If we continue to overlook and ignore the academic achievement of our secondary-level scholars of history and other subjects, that does not mean that some students will no longer work hard in their areas of academic interest. There may be fewer of them, and fewer teachers who see the point of putting in the extra coaching time with exceptionally diligent students, but if we continue down this road, at least folks in Higher Education ought to be aware that they are working just as hard to discourage good academic work at the secondary level as anyone, and they should stop complaining about the attitudes toward scholarship of the students in their classrooms, which, after all, are in part a result of their own neglect of and indifference to, exemplary academic work at the secondary (aka “pre-college”) level.


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

ANDOVER HISTORY

Phillips Academy
ANDOVER
180 Main Street, Andover, Massachusetts 01810-4161

                                                 January 19, 1998

Mr. William Fitzhugh
Editor & Publisher
The Concord Review
Concord, Massachusetts 01742

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

    Congratulations on your Kidger Award from the New England History Teachers Association. The Concord Review has made an extraordinary contribution to secondary school students and teachers and to the craft of historical writing. The Review not only recognizes the outstanding historical research and writing of 15-18-year-olds, but it is truly a monument to one man’s imagination and tenacity. You have brought great professional skill and judgment as the publisher and editor. The layout of the journal is as good as any professional journal.

    I use it as the lead-in to our spring term U.S. History research papers here at Phillips Academy. We begin the process on February 1 and the students hand in their papers in mid-May, with the best going to outside judges for prizes. First, the students read articles from The Concord Review to understand what they are capable of doing. Then we go through the multiple steps, with due dates along the way: select topics, acquire the preliminary bibliographies, pass in note cards, develop a thesis and an outline, hand in a “final bibliography,” then a rough draft, and, finally, the submission of the final paper.

    When Mike Gottesman found that his paper on the 1952 Republican Presidential primary contest between Senator Robert Taft and General Dwight Eisenhower was to be published in this winter’s Review, Mike’s world was complete. Our weekly newspaper, The Phillipian, did a front-page story on his accomplishment and recognition.

    Thank you for your dedication and unrelenting effort to keep The Concord Review going.


                            Sincerely yours,
                            [signed]
                            Thomas T. Lyons
                            Instructor in History



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

                       

MAJOR PLAYERS

EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
The Report Card

MAJOR PLAYERS

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
30 August 2013


Who are the Most Important Players in U.S. education debates, and in our schools? Well, let’s see—there are EduPundits, legislators, governors, consultants, professional developers, publishers, the Department of Education, foundations, journalists, state commissioners of education, superintendents, principals, teachers, and who else? Oh, students!...do you think education has something to do with them? No one else does. And if students do have a part to play in their own education and they are not doing it, and this has perhaps some sort of impact on their academic achievement, what can be done about it? They can’t be fired, except by charter schools, and neither can their parents. So let’s not think about them, or their work.

In addition, most students have been allowed to believe, and the EdWorld agrees with them, that education is something teachers are responsible for delivering to them, whether they do any actual academic work or not. As to the academic work they actually are currently doing, Indiana University has found that 42% of high school students now do less than one hour of written homework in a week.

Because student responsibility for academic work is not part of our ideas about education, students can feel free to, as the Kaiser Foundation reports they now do, spend at least 53 hours each week with electronic entertainment media. (That would be 53 times as many hours as lots of our high school students now spend on homework each week.)

Of course all the current Major Players have something to say and something to do about education, and about students’ academic achievement, but as long as, for whatever complex of reasons, we continue to ignore student participation in and responsibility for their own educational achievement, we are colluding in some very large, very tragic, and very sad, joke.

Try to imagine stories and commentaries on Major League Baseball which completely ignored the activities of the players, and you can see what a monstrous mistake it is for so many influential people in the education debates to pay no attention to whether: A) we are asking our students to do any serious academic work, and B) they are actually doing any.

Banishing students from our discussions about the Major Players in education may satisfy some set of needs for our EduPundits and others, but it is a sad and quite clearly doomed misdirection of all efforts to understand ways to improve student academic achievement in this country.

HS ACADEMIC WRITING COURSE 2014

[This course was cancelled by CTY in August 2013....]


The Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University plans to offer a three-week residential course in academic expository writing for high school students in the Summer of 2014. The instructor will be Will Fitzhugh, founder and editor of The Concord Review. 

Mr. Fitzhugh has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard and has been reading history for more than thirty years. In addition, he has read thousands of history research papers by high school students while choosing the 1,077 he has published in 98 issues of his unique quarterly journal, The Concord Review. So far, more than thirty percent of authors published in the journal have gone to Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.

Papers written during the prospective course may be on any historical topic, including the history of science, medicine, technology, business, warfare, economics, engineering, politics, discovery, and any other topic of interest to the high school authors who take the course. Interested students should send inquiries to Eileen Hansen, Executive Director, Center for Talented Youth. 

A decision whether to offer this course will be made in September 2013, so be sure to express your interest next month.


Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
www.tcr.org
fitzhugh@tcr.org

ROUTINE

ROUTINE:
 
Coach Fitzhugh? Hi, this is Coach O'Toole at Boston College. We have spoken before, but I understand this year you have a very good strong safety on your team. How many tackles did he make last year? That's impressive. And how many interceptions? Outstanding. Listen, I wonder if I could come over to school there one day soon and meet with you and him? Great. See you then.


INCONCEIVABLE:

Mr. Fitzhugh? Hi, this is Professor O'Toole from the history department at Boston College. We have spoken before, but I understand you have an outstanding student in history this year. He wrote a 15,000-word paper on the Soviet-Afghan War? That
sounds impressive. It was published in The Concord Review? And it received an Emerson Prize? Outstanding. Listen, I wonder if I could come over to school there one day soon and meet with you and him? Great, see you then.



---------------------
“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

CC CAN TEST "SKILLS" BUT NOT KNOWLEDGE

The Report Card

Fitzhugh: The Common Core Promotes Skills, Not Knowledge

Posted on 24 July 2013

Tags: curriculum reform, educational standards, failure of common core standard, The Concord Review, Will Fitzhugh

by Will Fitzhugh www.thereportcard.org  www.tcr.org

(Editor—William Korach: The Common Core Standard (CCSS) has had increasing opposition in recent month across America, but Will Fitzhugh has the best reason to oppose it. He says it does not teach knowledge-just skills or learning how to learn. Will Fitzhugh publishes a quarterly of the best high school papers in America (and 38 other countries),. Mr. Fitzhugh is concerned that CCSS has “no standards about what students should know.”)
 
The Common Core is not a curriculum—that is plainly stated, again and again. That means that they do not tell teachers what books to teach, for example in history and literature classes. They say that a few United States founding documents would be nice to offer students and that someone should teach some other nonfiction.

The Founding Documents they suggest could be read by a good ‘B’ high school student in one afternoon, so presumably they would want more history than that, although they do not specify any (Common Core is not a curriculum, they keep saying).

Because they offer no curriculum in history and literature, teachers across the country will vary in the poems, plays, novels, nonfiction articles and the history books (if any) which they assign students to read and study. Common Core follows Kipling’s notion that “There are 97 ways to compose tribal lays, and every single one of them is right.”

This is very progressive, of course, but it makes for an insuperable problem for the National Testing Consortia which are preparing to examine students prepared to meet the Common Core Standards.

Because students will have read and even, perhaps, written about and/or discussed many different examples of history and literature, the Common Core Assessments can not ask them about what they have learned, because they will have learned (or not) many different things from the sources they have been offered.

As a result, the Common Core National Assessment Consortia can only test students for their critical thinking, deeper reading, and other analytic “skills” which do not require that them to show that they actually know anything about anything.

So, even though supporters of the Common Core often make the mistake of saying it raises standards for what students “know” and can do, it really says nothing about what they should know.

The application of the Common Core to American students is thus directed at enabling students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant critical analysis of selected test passages, but they will not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace. And, if E.D. Hirsch is right (and he is), they won’t be able to understand what they read much either (because they don't know anything).

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

HARVARD—BOOKS AND PAPERS

HARVARD COLLEGE
Office of Admissions and Financial Aid

September 15, 2010

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


Dear Will,

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

        The Concord Review, founded in 1987, remains the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students, and we in the Admissions Office here are always glad to see reprints of papers which students have had published in the Review and which they send to us as part of their application materials. Over the years, more than 10% (117) of these authors have come to college at Harvard.

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

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

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

WRF:oap

Administrative Office: 86 Brattle Street • Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

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

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