Will Fitzhugh: Hoping to raise money to finance initiatives to help high school students learn history
1) First of all, what is the Consortium for Varsity Academics?
The Consortium for Varsity Academics was founded this year to support the work of The Concord Review, the National Writing Board, the TCR Institute and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes, and some new initiatives, for decades into the future. We are looking for 100 Partners and Member Schools willing to commit $5,000 a year to these efforts.
2) Why do you think this is needed?
The main need is for stable funding for the efforts above, which try to honor and distribute exemplary academic expository writing by high school students, to provide an independent assessment service for their papers, to do research on the actual academic work of high school students in the United States and to provide Prizes and other incentives for their work. Foundations and the government have not supported this work.
3) Tell us about The Walden Review.
The Walden Review, if it is funded, would do for high school academic literary research papers what The Concord Review has done for high school academic history research papers since 1987. The Concord Review has published 770 papers
by high school students of history from 44 states and 34 other countries. While many English departments in our schools spend students’ time on fiction and personal writing, there are, I believe, a good number of teachers who still have their students do serious academic papers for literature classes, and The Walden Review could bring some much needed attention to their diligent work at last.
4) Why do you think that no one outside of schools is paying attention to the actual academic work of secondary students?
School Reform pundits have many things on their minds, including school management, teacher training, budgets, charter schools, the achievement gap on standardized tests, vouchers, No Child Left Behind, etc., etc. No one much
seems to want to look, for instance, at whether our high school students are actually learning to write academic papers or read nonfiction books before they graduate.
5) What is the research work of The TCR Institute?
The TCR Institute has commissioned one study, of the assignment of history research papers in U.S. high schools, which found that the majority of teachers (61%) never assign a 12-page paper even to Seniors. Most teachers say that while they think research papers are very important (95%), they do not have time to require this vital preparation.
When funding is found, the TCR Institute will commission a study to discover how many of our public high school students are assigned one complete nonfiction book before they graduate. It seems probable that many of our students now go off to college never having read one nonfiction book.
6) What do you mean by a “Brain Trust” for the Consortium? Who can apply ?
Secondary educators are the ones who really care about the academic work of secondary students, and the Consortium will give them a chance to support studies of the kind I have mentioned and to discuss among themselves the academic standards they are setting for their students as they prepare them for college and for life as citizens and workers in our society.
Any secondary school willing to pledge $5,000 a year to the Consortium is eligible for membership, and other organizations, such as the Boston University School of Education, the American Council of Trustees and Alumnni, and The
History Channel, have decided to become our Partners by pledging $5,000 a year as well.
7) How would this project help both reading AND writing?
The Consortium will bring more attention to the state of academic (nonfiction and serious literature) reading and to academic expository writing (research papers) both among their members and among the general high school population to the extent possible. We are sending too many students on to higher education unprepared. A Chronicle of Higher Education survey of college professors recently found that 90% thought that the students that come to them are not well-prepared in reading, doing research or in academic writing. We can do better than that.
8) What is your link to the National Writing Board?
I founded the National Writing Board in 1998 to provide an independent assessment service for the academic papers of high school students. We have two Readers for each paper who know nothing about the author, and we have provided our three-page reports on papers by students from 31 states to Deans of Admission at 75 colleges, at the author’s request. Our service is now endorsed by Amherst, Boston University, Bowdoin, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, Connecticut College, Cooper Union, Dartmouth, Duke, Eckerd, Emory, George Mason, Georgetown, Hamilton, Harvard, Haverford, Illinois Wesleyan, Lafayette, Lehigh, Michigan, Middlebury, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Pitzer,Princeton, Reed, Richmond, Sarah Lawrence, Shimer, Smith, Spelman, Stanford, Trinity (CT), Tufts, the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, Williams, and Yale.
9) Do you have an e-mail address where people can get more information?
My email address is: fitzhugh@tcr.org, and our website is: www.tcr.org <http://www.tcr.org>;
Varsity Academics® is a registered trademark of The Concord Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) Massachusetts corporation.