People who are hungry for a little good news about what U.S. schools and students are achieving -- and that's most of us -- should take a look at The Concord Review. The Review publishes history essays written by pre-college students from all over the English-speaking world, but most are from the U.S. and fully half are by students attending public schools.
If you picked up a copy of the Review and started reading, you probably wouldn't realize that its lively and substantial articles come from students in high school -- or even junior high. An eighth-grader contributed the readable discussion about the future of Richard Nixon's reputation to the Winter 1989 issue. And in the same issue, the balanced treatment of 19th-century theories about African-Americans that contributed to the founding and development of a society to return former slaves to Africa came from a student in grade ten. The essays in The Concord Review suggest what students can do when they find a subject that engages them and they are encouraged to run with it.
Will Fitzhugh, a former high-school history teacher who used his own savings to found The Concord Review in 1988, sees the journal as a way of recognizing -- and fostering -- achievement. When a student writes an outstanding essay, the only reward a teacher can offer is a top grade. Like many good teachers, Fitzhugh felt that the grade was somehow not enough. So he designed the Review as an extra recognition -- a history student's equivalent to winning a varsity letter or getting a prize in a science fair. But of course it does much more.
Almost every school has its literacy magazine, and some publish good student essays on nonliterary topics. But the Review gives its writers a far wider audience than their parents and friends. And it offers a special kind of validity to its student authors by assuming that what they write will be interesting and valuable to this audience.
Writing is -- or should be -- an act of communication, a way of talking about something you know and care about to other people. But students usually begin by seeing it as an assignment. They write because the teacher tells them to. Their biggest questions are, "How long does it have to be?" and "Does spelling count?"
Unfortunately, standardized tests encourage this view by emphasizing the mechanics of writing by limiting what students write to paragraphs that are to be turned out in 20 minutes or so -- that is, when students are asked to write at all. Writing like this is unconnected with what kids know or feel enthusiastic about. And students who are prepared mainly with the idea of excelling on standardized tests may never see writing as anything more than an exercise.
The Concord Review assumes and encourages the view that writing is a way of communicating what students have learned and gotten excited about as they've studied history. In this, it's more like some of the performance-based assessments that are now being developed. These assessments ask students to turn out real products as tests of what they know and can do instead of tiny bits and pieces that can be machine-graded. For the students whose work appears in the Review, writing is no longer just an exercise and the teacher is no longer the primary consumer. They are producing real pieces of work in which they can talk about what they have discovered. Part of what makes The Concord Review impressive is that it honors -- and encourages -- this kind of achievement in pre-college students.
That's the good news. The bad news is that after two years and seven issues, The Concord Review's future continues to be doubtful. The Review now has subscribers in 13 countries, but it needs many more if it is to continue. Of course, school budgets are tight. But one school district Fitzhugh knows of has apparently set aside $100,000 to replace its football helmets, and Fitzhugh thinks that school district -- any many others -- could also afford $25 a year for a subscription to the magazine.
Fitzhugh is also eager for more students to submit essays. Eighty-five thousand kids take advanced placement history every year, he says, and all of them write essays. So there's a lot of good stuff out there.
The Concord Review deserves support -- and contributing a subscription to a local school library might be a good way of showing it. It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we've known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized. But when they were allowed to see the whole process -- or better yet become involved in it -- productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits -- history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned -- it's no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review's authors offers us a different model of learning. Maybe it's time for us to take it seriously.