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GIVING YOUNG SCHOLARS A VOICE TEENAGERS ANALYZE HISTORY IN CONCORD REVIEW

Author(s): Nina McCain, Globe Correspondent Date: June 13, 1999 Page: C5 Section: Learning

William Fitzhugh would like to do for academic achievement what Olga Korbut did for gymnastics.

"Kids rise to a challenge," Fitzhugh says. "When Olga Korbut got on a balance beam at the 1972 Olympics, 10,000 little girls all over the country got on balance beams. . . . If you provide a way, motivation is released. My goal is to provide a way to tap that motivation and reward it. Fitzhugh is talking about superior performance in history, not gymnastics. Instead of a balance beam, he uses the Concord Review, a quarterly journal he founded that publishes the essays of high school history students from throughout the United States and around the world.

But he says the dynamics are the same. You recognize and reward young people for writing cogent, well-researched essays, on everything from Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964 to the impact of Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore on 20th-century literature. Then you say to other students, "You can do that too."

"We want both to recognize good work and to inspire other kids to try," Fitzhugh says. "We also want to encourage teachers. It's hard to maintain high standards."

Fitzhugh, a former Concord-Carlisle High School history teacher, founded the review in 1987. Since then, he has published 407 essays from students in 37 states and 24 foreign countries. He says it is the only quartlerly journal in the world devoted to the work of high school students.

"I feel the ability to write good essays is widely distributed," Fitzhugh says. "Many times kids are not being asked to try."

The Review has won praise from such influential people as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, education-reform advocate Theodore Sizer, and the late Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers. College admissions officials, such as William Fitzsimmons of Harvard University, think highly of it.

What the Review does not have is money. Fitzhugh has put all of his time and energy and about $100,000 of his own money into the journal, which is published out of his home in Sudbury. D espite applications to 130 foundations, none of the big money donors have signed on.

The Review relies on revenue from about 850 subscribers at $35 a head and on contributions of about $120,000 from two small foundations and two individuals. Most of the money comes from John E. Abele, founder and chairman of a medical instruments company and chairman of the Review's board.

To put the Review on a more secure financial footing, Abele hired a consultant to do a business plan. Using an idea of Fitzhugh's for an external assessment of students' academic work that would be useful for college admissions offices, they came up with a proposal for the National Writing Board.

The plan calls for "senior history and literature instructors" to read student papers in history and literature and grade them "against an international standard of performance" on a scale of 1 to 6. The scores would be sent to the colleges to which the student is applying. The fee for each paper would be $60 and the proceeds would go to support both the board and the Review.

Abele has pledged a challenge grant of $50,000 to be matched two-for-one up to $100,000.

Fitzhugh says the proposal has been welcomed by college admission offices, and Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard, serves on the advisory council. If all goes well, history-paper evaluations will begin in June next year and literature will be added the following year.

Meanwhile, young people continue to send in essays to the Review. Fitzhugh gets from 500 to 600 a year and publishes about 18 percent of the total. About half come from private school students and half from public schools.

One, about Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign, was written by Gilman Barndollar of Portsmouth, N.H., who is a junior at Phillips Academy in Andover.

Barndollar, who describes himself as "kind of conservative," said he saw Goldwater as the "founder of the conservative movement in America" and wanted to find out why he lost so overwhelmingly to Lyndon Johnson.

"When I began, I saw it as a result of negative advertising," Barndollar says. `But as I did the research, I saw that basically all the factors were stacked against him. . . . The campaign was basically doomed from the start."

Barndollar says he wrote the paper for an Advanced Placement history class in his sophomore year and submitted it for a school prize. His history teacher, James M. Rogers Jr., suggested that he send it to the Review. When he learned that it would be published, Barndollar says he was "happy for the recognition."

Another Review article, on the effects of school desegregation in Kent County, Md., was written by Ann Collier, who grew up in the county and is a senior at the Groton School.

Collier began the article by acknowledging that she attended an all-white private school, had no black friends, and "Not once, in all those years, did I think about race." But she thought about it a great deal as she did a prodigious amount of research for the article, poring through back copies of the local newspaper and interviweing black and white community leaders, teachers, and students.

Her history teacher, John Lyons, says Collier is an "exceptionally talented young woman" who "did a terrific job of exploiting the primary sources." She will be attending the University of North Carolina in the fall where she will be a Moorehead scholar with all of her educational expenses paid.

Lyons, who has been teaching history for 16 years, is a big fan of the Concord Review.

"I walk in with a copy in mid-winter when we begin to write the big research paper," he says. "I say, `This is what is possible.' It's a source of inspiration. It sets a standard.

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