By Will Fitzhugh 

Education Week
American Education's Newspaper of Record
January 16, 2002

It seems likely that the history research paper at the high school level
is now an endangered species. A focus on creative writing, fear of
plagiarism, fascination with PowerPoint presentations, and lack of time
to meet with students to plan papers (and to read them carefully when
they are turned in) are factors in its decline. They have been augmented
by a notable absence of concern for term papers in virtually all the
work on state standards. And the combination has produced a situation in
which far too many high school students never get the chance to do the
reading or the writing that a serious history paper requires. As a
result, students enter college with no experience in writing papers, to
the continual frustration of their professors. And the employers who
hire them after college-the Ford Motor Co., for example-have had to
institute writing classes to ensure that they can produce readable
reports, memos, and the like.

A few years ago, a study of state English and social studies standards
prepared by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation showed that term papers
were included in none of the standards. The Pew Charitable Trusts'
Standards for Success program, which is working on high school/college
articulation of standards and expectations, also includes no term
papers. And the American Diploma Project in Washington, now working to
define academic expectations of high schools, colleges, and employers,
has yet to find a place in its deliberations for history research
papers.

One problem, of course, is that serious term papers cannot be assessed
in a one-hour objective test. Yet their impact on students-and the
consequences of never having done one-may be incalculable.

In the early 1980s, when I was teaching American history to high school
sophomores in Concord, Mass., each of my students had to write a
biographical paper on one of the U.S. presidents. One student managed to
get John F. Kennedy, and I lent him a copy of Arthur M. Schlesinger
Jr.'s A Thousand Days. The boy took a look at that rather large book and
told me, "I can't read this." I said, "Yes, you can," and he did it.
Five or six years later, I got an unexpected call from that boy. He was
then a junior at Yale and wanted to thank me, he said, for "making him"
read that book. It had been the first serious work of nonfiction he had
ever read, and being able to get through it had done something for his
confidence. Of course, he'd made himself read the book, but the anecdote
points up one of the great advantages of the history term paper: Such an
assignment often will be the first time a high school student finds out
that he or she is capable of reading a history book on something
important.

When I was an alumni interviewer for Harvard College, I once was asked
to talk to a boy at a local suburban high school. I asked him, among
other things, what he thought he might major in. History, he said. The
boy knew nothing about me other than that I was an alum, I had said
nothing about my own interest in history. But when he said this, I
naturally asked what was his favorite history book. It soon became clear
that while he had good grades, Advanced Placement scores, and other
markers of success, this student had read nothing in history beyond his
textbooks and no one had handed him a history book and encouraged him to
read it. Neither had he ever been forced to do a serious history paper,
no doubt, for if he had, he might have read at least a book or two in
the field.

As Victor W. Henningsen, the head of the history department at Phillips
Academy at Andover, said in these pages last year: "There's no
substitute for the thrill that comes from choosing a topic of your own
and wrestling with a mass of evidence to answer a question that you've
posed, to craft your own narrative and your own analysis. We've been
teaching kids to write research papers [at Andover] for a long time.
Kids don't remember the Advanced Placement exam, but they do remember
the papers that they've written, and so do I." ("Respected Journal Rates
Student History Papers," March 14, 2001.)

Since 1987, I have been the editor of The Concord Review, a quarterly
journal of history research papers written by high school students. We
have published 528 papers (an average of 5,000 words, with endnotes and
bibliography) by students from 42 states and 33 other countries. Out of
some 22,000 public and private high schools in the United States, we are
sent about 600 essays a year, from which we publish 11 in each of four
quarterly issues. If you do the calculation, that means that perhaps
21,000 high schools or more across the country do not send even one
history essay for consideration in a given year. This doesn't prove that
good, long history essays are not being written at those schools (many
may not know of The Concord Review's existence), but to me it's not an
encouraging sign.

As to what teachers are expecting in their high school history classes
in lieu of research papers, I have only anecdotal evidence. For example,
I once asked the head of a history department at a public high school in
New Jersey-a man very active in the National Council for History
Education-why he never sent papers from his best students to The Concord
Review. His reply was that he didn't have his students do history
research papers anymore; he had them do PowerPoint presentations and
write historical fiction instead. When I asked the now-retired head of
history at Scarsdale High School in New York why he had three
subscriptions to The Concord Review, yet never sent any of his student
papers to be considered, he too said he no longer assigned research
papers. After the AP history exam, he said, he held what he called "the
trial of James Buchanan for his part in the coming of the U.S. Civil
War." He had his students write their responses to that instead.

The class valedictorian at a high school on Long Island wrote me, after
publication of her essay on the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in
the Review, to say that she'd always felt weak in expository writing.
She offered some possible reasons for that. Here are her words: "I
attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop
their talents in this field (it is assumed students will learn how to
write in college)."

I feel quite confident in saying that, on the college side, there is the
expectation that students will learn at least the rudiments of a
research paper while they are still in high school, and that college
humanities professors are routinely surprised (slow learners) when they
find that this has not happened for their students.

Creative writing rules at the high school level (and even earlier) in
many cases. The director of the Expository Writing Program at Harvard
College has said she thinks in fact that high school students don't get
enough chances to write about their feelings, relationships, anxieties,
hopes, and dreams, and that they really shouldn't be pushed to work on
history research papers until college. The National Writing Project in
Berkeley, California, a program that reaches hundreds of teachers and
thousands of students each year, teaches a postmodern approach to what
it calls "literatures" (quotes are absolutely necessary) and never comes
within a mile of considering that students could use some work on their
research skills or their nonfiction expository writing.

I have actually seen what high school students can do, and it is more
like the following excerpt from an essay published a few years back in
the Review (more examples are at http://www.tcr.org). This passage
concluded an essay by a high school junior who went on to major in civil
engineering at Princeton, get a Ph.D. in earthquake engineering at
Stanford, and is now an assistant professor of engineering at Cornell:

"As is usually the case in extended, deeply-held disagreements, no one
person or group was the cause of the split in the woman suffrage
movement. On both sides, a stubborn eagerness to enfranchise women
hindered the effort to do so. Abolitionists and Republicans refused to
unite equally with woman suffragists. Stanton and Anthony, blinded for a
while by their desperation to succeed, turned to racism, pitting blacks
and women against each other at a time when each needed the other's
support most. The one thing that remains clear is that, while in some
ways it helped women discover their own power, the division of forces
weakened the overall strength of the movement. As a result of the
disagreements within the woman-suffrage movement, the 1860s turned out
to be a missed opportunity for woman suffragists, just as Stanton had
predicted. After the passage of the 15th Amendment, they were forced to
wait another 50 years for the fulfillment of their dream."

As this excerpt suggests, high school students are fully capable of
writing long, serious history papers. They also will get a lot out of
doing it-not only will they read more nonfiction, but they'll also learn
how to write it themselves. These days, too many of our students are not
being given that chance.

Colleges will no doubt continue to do what they can to help them master
the rudiments of expository writing after high school. But much of what
these students have missed cannot be made up in remedial courses.

Will Fitzhugh is the president of the National Writing Board and the
founder and editor of The Concord Review, in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

On the Web: View the most recent-as well as past issues-of The Concord
Review, "the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic
work of secondary students." Read about The Concord Review's history
along with a summary of the role of the National Writing Board.
http://www.tcr.org

© 2001 Editorial Projects in Education Vol. 21, number 18, page 35, 37

Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
National Writing Board
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, MA 01776 USA
(800) 331-5007
http://www.tcr.org
fitzhugh@tcr.org