For more than a decade, Achieve, Inc has been compiling standards and assessments for grades K-12 in an effort to raise the bar for high school graduation.  Achieve refers to this goal as “College and Career Readiness,” and increasingly attempts to marry the goals of college and career to avoid the appearance of a first- and second-class curriculum.

In 2004, ADP published Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma that Counts, the result of two years of research. The report includes English and mathematics benchmarks that describe the specific content and skills that graduates must have mastered by the time they leave high school if they expect to succeed in postsecondary education or in high-growth careers.

Most conspicuous by its absence from the language of the ten writing goals is the term “genre.”  Instead the goals include:  “C8. Present written material . . .” / “C9. Write an academic essay . . .”/ or “C10. Produce work-related texts . . .”  Given the variety of writing included here, the mystery of the missing “genre”  thickens.”  Why would Achieve exclude this language? And should there be a goal that requires writers to see connections among “written material,” “the academic essay,” and “work-related texts”?

Among the writing benchmarks, the centerpiece is the “academic essay,” which is not only ill-defined (essays for what purposes?),  but assuming the form of what we now call “strategies” rather than genres.

Write an academic essay (for example, a summary, an explanation, a description, a literary analysis essay) that:

* develops a thesis;

* creates an organizing structure appropriate to purpose, audience and context;includes relevant information and excludes extraneous information;
* makes valid inferences;
* supports judgments with relevant and substantial evidence and well-chosen details; and
* provides a coherent conclusion.

When we read words like “summary,” “description,” or “explanation,” we imagine strategies writers employ in an academic essay, but not types of essays.  Essays include these strategies, but they do not constitute genres by themselves. A literary essay is nothing like a case study or the results of an experiment. Which of these is not an academic essay?  The benchmarks conflate what they want writers to do with the actual genres they might employ.  This is the first clue that the “academic essay” is more a hypothetical goal than an actual genre with an audience and purpose.
Nor would we expect a summary or a description to “develop a thesis” or “make valid inferences.”  This is because summaries and descriptions are not authentic genres, but strategies employed for specific purposes by different genres.  The problem with this curriculum is not merely the forgivable confusion between genres and strategies, but the less-innocent fabrication of a wished-for genre,  the “academic essay,” to cover a multitude of writing genres.

Of course this is the familiar Five-paragraph essay in academic clothing.  There is no attempt to distinguish a “literary analysis essay” from a “biography” or from “the presentation of empirical research.”  It is assumed that all “college-ready” writing stems from the root of one plant, the “academic essay.” This is a view of writing Chris Anson calls a “closed system.”  The system, as Anson describes it, “is one in which the activities admit little variation, are habituated over long periods of time and are learned through repeated practice.” Insofar as an essay is defined as one construct, regardless of whether it is written for biology or economics, it can be “habituated” across the disciplines.
Ultimately, Achieve had to admit that the academic essay was not the most authentic genre for the workplace, so they added the following to their exit goals for high school:

C10. Produce work-related texts (for example, memos, e-mails, correspondence, project plans, work orders, proposals, bios) that:
* address audience needs, stated purpose and context;
* translate technical language into non-technical English;
* include relevant information and exclude extraneous information;
* use appropriate strategies, such as providing facts and details, describing or analyzing the subject, explaining benefits or limitations, comparing or contrasting, and providing a scenario to illustrate;
* anticipate potential problems, mistakes and misunderstandings that might arise for the reader;
* create predictable structures through the use of headings, white space and graphics, as appropriate; and
* adopt a customary format, including proper salutation, closing and signature, when appropriate.

With the addition of these workplace genres and many goals for composing that overlap the academic essay (especially under “use appropriate strategies”), you might think this created a “open system” of writing, where one genre becomes the basis for thinking about related genres of writing.  The premise of  the open system is that “ . . . continued writing development involves acquiring, through exposure and experience, the ways of thinking and communicating that define these different communities, students are obviously better prepared to do so when they have had similar experiences earlier in their education” (Anson 2008). Yet none of the goals for this curriculum include reflecting on the differences and similarities among genres. In fact the word “reflection” does not appear in the writing curriculum at all. In the numerous references to writing, the Achieve jargon confines itself to “essay,” “materials,” and “texts.”  These terms share one characteristic: none refer to “the ways of thinking and communicating that define these different communities.”
Without getting too picky about the jargon of composition, I have to believe that the omission of the word “genre” must be intentional, since most university writing curricula are saturated with that term. And it is the navigation among different genres that constitutes an open system of learning.  It refers to a significant writing activity we often describe as “meta-cognition.”  And nowhere in this curriculum can we find language that suggests meta-cognition, reflection or synthesis.  Since the research literature on composition is rife with references to meta-cognition and reflection, this omission must also be intentional.
What intentions are at play in this proposed curriculum for writing for high school graduates? The intention to assess every goal with reliable, objective, and measurable criteria.  Reflection can be assessed, but certainly not with the precision that five-paragraph essay can.  Reflection has the same elusive qualities as art and poetry, and will not succumb to unambiguous assessments.

So the key language of open systems,”genre,” “reflection” and “meta-cognition” are excluded from the domain of Achieve. Without such mental activity you can not navigate among genres within an open system. The very existence of discrete genres is left in question, and whether a writer can move consciously among them appears to be irrelevant.  If there are any genres, their differences are minimized. They are treated as one genre, one closed system. Sorry, the genre is closed today.