[Dr. Shaughnessy is currently Professor in Educational Studies at Eastern New Mexico University and is a Consulting Editor for Gifted Education International and Educational Psychology Review. In addition, he writes for www.EdNews.org <http://www.EdNews.org>; and the International Journal of Theory and Research in Education. He has taught students with mental retardation, learning disabilities and gifted. He is on the Governor's Traumatic Brain Injury Advisory Council and the Gifted Education Advisory Board in New Mexico. He is also a school psychologist and conducts in-services and workshops on various topics. ]

Will Fitzhugh is the Founder/Editor of The Concord Review, a quarterly review of essays by students of history. Since 1987 The Concord Review has published 748 history research papers by high school students on a wide variety of historical topics. This quarterly is the only one in the world for the academic work of secondary students. In this interview, he responds to questions about the need for writing, and some of his current endeavors.


1) I understand that you have just finished a stint on the ACT/NAGB Steering Committee for the 2011 NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) Writing Assessment. What was that like? (And what does NAGB stand for?)

WF: NAGB is the National Assessment Governing Board, which runs the NAEP, "America's Report Card," as they say. I was glad that Diane Ravitch recommended me for the Steering Committee for the new national writing assessment scheduled for 2011. I was very impressed with the intelligence and competence of Mary Crovo, representing NAEP, and Rosanne Cook, who is running the project for American College Testing. Many people on the Committee were from the National Council of Teachers of English and the College Composition world, which have little interest in having students read history books or write history research papers. In fact that world favors, or has favored in the past, personal and creative writing and the five-paragraph essay, which do a terrible job of preparing high school students for the nonfiction books and the academic term papers most will be asked to cope with in college.


2) Given the paucity of writing that goes on in the high schools of America, is it really fair to ask high school students to engage in a robust writing assessment?

WF: It would not be fair to ask high school students to play in a football game if they hadn't had an opportunity for lots of practice, and it is very hard to ask high school students to do the sort of academic expository writing they should be doing if they have never done it in all their years in school. But we need to start somewhere. Every high school student does not need to be able to play football, but they all need to be able to read nonfiction books and write serious term papers.


3) On the other hand, since so much of the college experience is writing, are high school teachers doing students a disservice by NOT requiring more writing?

WF: High school teachers would make terrible football coaches and their teams would lose most if not all of their games, if the teacher/coaches did not have time to practice their teams. We take football seriously, and we take band seriously, so ample time and money are made available to produce the best teams and the best bands the high school can manage. We allow really no time for a public high school teacher to work with students on heavy-duty term papers. We don't make time for them, because we don't think they are that important. Not as important as drama practice, yearbook, chorus, debate or a host of other activities. As a result our high school students are, once again, ill-prepared for college reading and writing. AP courses in history do not require, in most cases, that students read a complete nonfiction book, and most of the AP teachers say they don't have time to ask the student to write a research paper, because they "have to get students ready for the AP Exam."


4) Most English teachers would cry “already overworked “or “dealing with under-prepared students” if we asked them to do more writing instruction. Is the answer smaller class sizes? Or fewer mainstreamed kids?

WF: I have suggested the "Page Per Year Plan," which would ask first-graders to write a one-page paper about something other than themselves, and so on, with 8th graders writing an 8-page paper, 11th graders writing an 11-page paper, etc. This would provide English and History teachers with more students who were ready to do serious term papers, and the students would not all have to be started from scratch, like someone going out for football for the first time in their senior year in high school. In addition, if we are serious about term papers and book reports, English and History teachers should be given five class days each semester to supervise such work, and to assess it when it is handed in. We don't do that now, so most teachers feel they are really too busy to assign these vital projects to their students.


5) I have often seen ”The American public wants more attention paid to writing” phrase. In spite of public outcry, educators or politicians don’t seem to respond. Are there just a lot of lone voices crying in the wilderness?

WF: When there is a response, as from the National Commission on Writing in the Schools, the writing sought is almost inconceivably superficial, formulaic, sentimental, and bland. It is hard for anyone concerned about writing to understand how these and other groups concerned about "Adolescent Literacy" keep their standards so very low. Young Adult sections in bookstores and libraries are full of fiction which panders to teen interests. None of the great history books can find a place there, as teens are assumed to be interested in only little fictional stories which are basically about them and their friends. Dumbing Down doesn't get much plainer than that.


6) Doing a national assessment of writing must involve a lot of different opinions about writing. What were some of the fundamental issues discussed at this meeting?

WF: The assessment planned was hobbled by the need to do the evaluation on two 25-minute samples which require no background knowledge, and could be written by students who had never spent a day in school. Nothing learned in school is required and the prompts are accordingly necessarily superficial. In addition, the claim is that "writing on demand" is somehow the standard to be met. Some claim that they are asked at work to produce something written in a short time (not 25 minutes I suppose), but even that writing is based on all the knowledge they have from their job and their schooling. For the most part, any decent writing, whether at college or in the workplace, depends on time to gather knowledge, to write, to reflect, and to re-write at least at a basic level. Writing for a prompt in 25 minutes tells us basically nothing about students' ability to acquire and understand knowledge or to organize their thoughts in a paper. A lot of work was done on this assessment, but I believe the constraints imposed requiring no knowledge and no time for thought or re-writing, make this assessment sadly uninformative about the real academic reading and writing skills of our students.


7) You recently published “Math and Reading: A Lament for High School History and Writing “ in The Historical Society’s Historically Speaking, November/December 2006, pp 36-37. What were the main point that you were trying to make in that article?

WF: My basic concern is that if Edupundits don't care about serious reading and writing, and Educators limit their students to fiction and to writing very short personal stories and the like, we cripple out children's ability to read and write at the necessary level. There seems to be no awareness or desire for awareness of the absence of nonfiction books in our high schools and our (The Concord Review) study from 2002 found that the majority of high school teachers are no longer assigning 12-page term papers. Many of our high school graduates find that they need remedial writing courses when they get to college, and many also find the nonfiction books on their reading lists overwhelming, which is not surprising. If they had not played football in high school, they would not last long on a college football team. When it comes to reading and writing, we seem content to deprive our students of the practice they would need to manage college work when they get there. Many drop out as a result of this, in my view.


8) Good writing, like good piano or violin playing, probably takes time, effort, and energy. But what are the payoffs to good writing for high school students?

WF: Reading is the path to knowledge in the liberal arts, not to slight the value of science labs and the like, and writing is the path to making knowledge one's own. If students have not practiced academic reading and academic writing they will literally be "out of mental shape" as they approach more difficult academic material. Some will adjust, but many too many will not, and we will lose them, at least for a while, from the opportunity for a higher education.


9) What question have I neglected to ask ?

WF: Why have history, which might have helped us as we considered our plans in Iraq, and academic writing, which allows thinking to develop, been so neglected in our schools? There is a tremendous interest in the Arts, which are thought to be good for the soul, and for science, which is thought to be the key to economic success, but as one of the major foundations told me, "We are interested in Math, Minorities, and Science" so they can't support history, writing, and the like. But Minorities also need to read and write, and so will all our future legislators, mayors, judges, lawyers, and all citizens of our democracy, no matter what their path in life. We need science and math, of course, but we also need, desperately, I believe, to do a better job of teaching academic reading and writing to a higher standard than we have allowed to prevail in our schools.

Medical scholar Harriet Washington joins [Amy Goodman] to talk about her new book, “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present.” The book reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and the roots of the African American health deficit. It also examines less well-known abuses and looks at unethical practices and mistreatment of blacks that are still taking place in the medical establishment today. ...

On the south side of Jamestown Island stands an imposing bronze statue of Capt. John Smith, put up in 1907 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the colony he helped to found. For most of the past century, a loose archaeological consensus held that the statue looked out over the site of the original settlement, a stretch of low-lying ground long ago eaten away by the swiftly flowing currents of the James River.
The loss of that land, and the stories that its subterranean contents might have told, became a kind of coda to the standard historical interpretation of the colony itself: that Jamestown had been a largely unsuccessful venture, carried out by genteel adventurers and military men ill-suited to the task of wresting a livelihood from a rugged wilderness. That they had failed to build their palisaded encampment on higher ground was further proof of their ineptitude. No wonder Jamestown took a back seat to Plymouth Rock in American history textbooks.

Lingering doubts. But one man who had doubts about the established consensus has been almost single-handedly responsible for overturning it-and with it, much of the older thinking about the first years of the Virginia Company's colony. Since 1993, as chief archaeologist of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, William Kelso has been directing the Jamestown Rediscovery Project, pursuing a hunch born exactly 30 years before. A graduate student at the nearby College of William and Mary when he first visited the island, he was unconvinced by the park ranger's spiel. Why, Kelso wondered, would those first settlers not have put their base on higher ground where later, during the Civil War, Confederate soldiers had thrown up an artillery earthwork? Kelso knew that desultory digs in and around the Civil War mound in the 1950s had failed to find traces of the original James Fort. Yet his suspicions were reinforced by a book, Here Lies Virginia, that he read a few months after his visit to the island. The author, Ivor Noel Hume, a British archaeologist at Colonial Williamsburg, had argued that burial grounds discovered near the earthwork suggested that the original fortress stood nearby.

But don’t commit hara-kiri just yet, because your friends at the AHA are trying to make it easier for you to get your research published. How? By creating an online database that provides helpful links to English-language journals that publish in various fields of history. We call it the “Publish Your Paper!” website. Once it’s up and running, you’ll be able to click on a category (African-American history, for example) and the submission information for several journals related to that specialty will pop right up. No more time-consuming searches on the Internet!

Of course, no one’s perfect. With so many different specialties to deal with, we’ll likely leave out a few things. That’s why we welcome your ongoing comments/suggestions on how we can continually improve this service. If you ever see something that needs to be changed, simply drop us a line at publishyourpaper@historians.org and we’ll do our best to accommodate your wishes. You’ve expended enough energy researching and writing your paper; let us help you find a place to publish it.

“Publish Your Paper!” will be available through the AHA website in March 2007.

President Bush, in a primetime speech Wednesday, admitted that he erred in having failed to send more troops to Iraq.

As part of a new war plan, Bush will be sending 21,500 additional troops to Iraq to stomp out the sectarian violence that has been ravaging the nation and threatening to send it into civil war.

However, a recent AP poll suggests that most Americans oppose such a move.

Such overwhelming opposition reflects increasing doubt that the U.S. was correct in having gone to war in the first place and that establishment of a secure democratic government is possible.

According to the poll, only 35 percent of the public believe it was right for the U.S. to go war-a complete reversal from two years ago when two-thirds of Americans thought it was the right decision.

Pat Robertson recently interviewed the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick W. Kagan, who helped develop the President's new plan. Watch the interview right here on CBNNews.com.

[Click on the SOURCE link above to watch the interview.]

Last week, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a “Portrait of Generation Next,” a wide-ranging collection of survey data from Americans aged 18-25. The report collapsed a generation into a few crisp adjectives. Generation Nexters, it turns out, are tolerant, tech-savvy, idealistic, and liberal-leaning. And alongside all of their catalogued assumptions, one goes unsaid: None of them will find it strange that they and 42 million peers have been distilled into a press release.

As Sarah Igo points out in her new book The Averaged American (Harvard University Press), people haven’t always been so welcoming of large-scale attempts to lump them together. Surveyors, argues Igo, popularized the concept of a mass public as they defined its boundaries. As they framed a snapshot of the nation’s collective psyche, early pollsters were giving often-resistant Americans a new—and often distorted—way of thinking about themselves. In her engaging history of the surveyors and the surveyed, Igo, an assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that surveys and polls have helped generate the very idea of the archetypical American.

Reason: What does it mean to be part of a mass public?

Sarah Igo: The way people have talked about that in the past was very wrapped up with being a consumer. That people were listening to the same radio shows of watching the same television programs, buying the same kinds of products, and to me that was always kind of unsatisfying. I didn’t think products necessarily made one feel part of anything larger. What I discovered was that statistical information, bastardized and popularized, was a deeper way for people to understand that they belonged to something larger than a family or a particular community. It gave people a way to look at the nation in a very new way. I think that kind of statistical information, where people could find themselves in the numbers, or sometimes not find themselves, was a very powerful technology for understanding this whole, or this mass.

The word mass has an interesting history, but it's often been portrayed very negatively. I think there is something more interesting going on in people's recognition of themselves, or sometimes misrecognition of themselves, in the numbers that surveyors provided.

Reason: How did surveys become a way to define the average rather than the marginal?

Igo: Surveys go centuries back, but in the modern period, in the 19th century, they were really used as a tool of social control, of policing almost—of poor people, marginal people, black migrants, immigrants—by social reformers. And it's really not until the 20th century that you get surveys attempting to query "normal, ordinary" Americans—white, middle class folks. I think there is an expected conflation in the 20s 30s 40s 50s of that character—the normal American—with white middle class subjects. And then there is a movement in the 60s and 70s, both in survey research itself and in the wider social cultural political world, to pay greater attention to people who had been neglected in earlier surveys. It happens in medical studies, in epidemiology, women's health activists for example, where women who had not been medical subjects suddenly asked why there hadn’t been any attention paid to breast cancer....

The following report identifies several academic departments at Pennsylvania State University which openly and regularly violate the academic freedom provisions of the university. These provisions were only recently made applicable to students at Penn State by a resolution of the faculty senate (20.00) in May. The new policy was a response to the Pennsylvania academic freedom hearings and the campaign for academic freedom waged by Students for Academic Freedom and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The report examines official class syllabi, departmental web pages, and course descriptions and singles out the Penn State Women’s Studies Department for failing to meet academic standards and being a program designed to indoctrinate students in a sectarian ideology, which is expressly forbidden by Penn State's academic freedom policy HR 64....

Introduction to American Studies (University Park Campus)
American Studies 100. Instructor, Melinda P.Wilkins

The course is taught by several instructors, among them M.P. Wilkins, a Senior Lecturer in English at the University Park campus. Wilkins’ syllabus depicts American culture as the expression of a history of uninterrupted brutality and oppression, in which minority groups suffer while their white oppressors write the official story as a narrative of unfolding freedom. This is not atypical of the curricula offered in other American Studies 100 sections. Wilkins is not formally trained in history and only holds an M.A. in English Literature from Virginia Tech, which she received in 1982.

The sole historical text assigned for this course is Jame’s Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me. This book is not a scholarly work, but -- as the title suggests -- a sectarian polemic against the traditional teaching of American history and against what the author views as the black record of the American past. Among other harangues to be found in his text, Loewen laments “[h]ow textbooks misrepresent the U.S. government and omit its participation in state-sponsored terrorism.”

According to Loewen, the lies teachers told him result from facts being “manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written.” This answers the course’s instruction to students to determine who is telling the story and who benefits. But it is an extreme and sectarian answer, and is not tempered by a required text with opposing views. Hence it violates Penn State’s academic freedom policy which defines an appropriate academic instruction as training students “to think for themselves” and providing them with “access to those materials which they need if they are to think intelligently.”

A typical chapter in Loewen’s required text is called “1493: The True Importance of Christopher Columbus.” Loewen summarizes the achievement of Columbus in these words: “Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous peoples, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.”

As an extreme view, Loewen’s amateur text might be a useful subject of analysis and discussion. It is certainly not an accurate view of the historical record, since the taking of land, wealth and labor from indigenous people, leading to their near extermination, was a well-known practice of the Romans, long before Columbus arrived in the Americas. Moreover, the intercontinental slave trade (though not the translatlantic one) long pre-dated Columbus making his role hardly revolutionary as Loewen claims.

But Lowen’s tendentious text is not offered as a text to be examined critically and objectively as a reflection of extreme, uninformed, polemical views. Lies My Teachers Told Me is required as an official classroom guide for students. It is the only assigned historical text for Wilkins’ Introduction to American Studies course and its chapters are assigned in lessons throughout the semester to provide historical background to students as they study cultural artifacts throughout American history. In other words, it is the text designed by the instructor course to introduce students to the facts of American history which are said to underlie its culture. ...

... A few weeks ago, I saw an odd comment on Paul Halsall's English Eclectic:"I moved, and have been trying out as a mortgag[e] broker." If you don't know who Paul Halsall is or why that struck me as so unusual, you should. He is the creator of the remarkable Internet History Sourcebooks Project. It includes primary source documents in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern History, as well as African, East Asian, Global, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, and Women's History, texts in the history of science and a guide to gay, lesbian, and transgender history.

After completing his doctorate at Fordham in 1999, Halsall took a tenure track position as Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Florida. There, he was out as a gay activist and, in May 2005, complained on local television about a police raid on local gay bars. Within an hour of his public complaint, Halsall was arrested by the police for selling cocaine to an undercover agent. He was first suspended and, then, his resignation demanded by University officials. In court, Halsall pled nolo contendere, but the damage was done. For more information, see David Meadows's Rogue Classicism; the comments, including Halsall's own, at N. S. Gill's Ancient/Classical History and Scott Carson's An Examined Life; and this site for Halsall's defense.

The two historians who lost their plagiarism case against the British publishers of the best seller “The Da Vinci Code” by Dan Brown turned to the Court of Appeal in Britain yesterday in an effort to reverse their loss in a case that also saddles them with a legal bill of more than $2 million, The Associated Press reported. Lawyers for the historians, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, argued that the “vast amount of skill and labor” they expended in writing their book “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,” first published in 1982, is “protectable.” They contend that Mr. Brown stole significant parts of it for his novel. Both books are based on the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married and had a child, and that the bloodline continues to this day. In April, Justice Peter Smith ruled that Random House had not breached the copyright of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail,” and Mr. Baigent and Mr. Leigh were ordered to pay 85 percent of Random House’s legal bill, estimated at $2.6 million. In a statement, Random House expressed regret “that more time and money is being spent trying to establish a case that was so comprehensively defeated in the High Court.”

Dear colleagues,

Among the more than 250 college professors who have been killed since 30 April 2003 in Iraq are the following historians:

**Khalid M. al-Janabi, PhD. in Islamic history, faculty member at the College of Art, Babylon University. Date of assassination unknown.

**Essam Sharif Mohammed (also spelled Hissam Sharif), Ph.D in History, assistant professor at the College of Art, Baghdad University. Date of assassination: 25 October 2003.

**Mahfoudh al-Qazzaz, PhD. in Islamic history; faculty member at the College of Art, Mosul University. Killed by a death squad in front of his family at his home in Mosul on 20 December 2004.

**Jamhour Karim Kammas Al Zargani, PhD. in History; department head at the College of Education at Al- Basrah University. Abducted for two days, tortured, and killed. His family found the dead body with broken arms and legs in a nearby street in Basra on 19 August 2005.

**Kemal Nassir, professor of history, lecturer in Mustansiriya and Kufa. Date of assassination: 1 October 2006.

**In addition, Abd-Asalam Ali Hussein, PhD. in Islamic History, was arrested on 22 May 2005.

The Council for Assisting Refugee Academics (CARA), London, is one of several human-rights organizations launching a petition campaign for these scholars. To sign, please visit CARA's homepage at http://www.academic-refugees.org. Thank you.

With best wishes,

Antoon De Baets (Network of Concerned Historians)

P.S.: For other news about Iraqi history and archives, see the NCH Annual Reports of 1998, and 2000 up to 2006, all soon available on http://www.concernedhistorians.org.