We Interrupt this Writing Process . . .

Pay attention, educators.  Here are some verbs from our drafted National Standards that describe what writers should do to be “college- and career-ready:”

make an argument, inform, explain, represent, synthesize, convey, make claims, link claims and evidence, and produce high-quality text the first time.

We have trafficked in literacy standards long enough to know what these verbs foreshadow.  They foreshadow a highly-structured, rigidly-sequenced curriculum that features the kinds of writing privileged by college admissions tests for the past half-century.  They foreshadow the demise of personal and reflective writing. They foreshadow the repossession of genres, media, and styles that do not match the legal and corporate purposes of writing.  They foreshadow the revocation of ownership, passion, and reflection that inspires authors to do their best work.

Now here are some nouns which apparently do not apply to writing for  “college-and career-readiness” and which you will not find in the draft of “Standards for Reading, Writing and Communication:”

genre, voice, irony, code-switching, reflection, process, transfer, meta-cognition,  self-evaluation, and portfolio.

Mind you, this is only a draft of the Standards, so we accept that it is not an example of “producing high quality text the first time under a tight deadline.” According to this document, writers “frequently” engage in this kind of “writing on- demand.”  This draft of National Standards represents one of those rare occasions when writers “have the opportunity to take a piece of writing through multiple drafts, receiving feedback along the way, successfully polishing and refining the text.”  Moreover, someone has interrupted the writing process of these Standards, and we now are allowed to evaluate their unfinished work.  Probably the writers of the Standards would have gladly avoided the hassle of  “receiving feedback along the way,” but they also might have wished for more time to consider this freighted language about how all graduates of high schools in the United States should write. Their work has been published before they were finished. There might be poetic justice in this.

In this document, narrative writing actually has its own sidebar. Rather than an honorable distinction, it appears to be a disclaimer about the diminished importance of narrative.  While giving it credit for “faithfully describing the steps in a scientific process,” the sidebar also characterizes narrative as a “principal steppingstone to writing forms directly relevant to college and career readiness.”   The role of “steppingstone” lacks the dignity that we might accord to some forms of narrative, such as eyewitness testimony, college admissions essays, and the narrative background for proposing national standards. Narrative deserves better than a sidebar.

Why are these nouns, from “genre” to “portfolio,” absent from national standards, when they overpopulate the curricula of first-year writing programs in our nation’s colleges?  Why are words synonymous with “thinking” excluded from literacy standards? Their omission is no oversight or exclusion for lack of space. These words represent the leisure of pre-writing, the power to select (topics, genres and formality of language), the luxury of process and self-evaluation, and the dignity of explaining what you have written.  Once the domain of writing is allowed to expand beyond the “on-demand” kind, our testing instruments become expensive and time-consuming.  No one will say this openly, but Standards may only represent what we can conveniently and economically test.
If you follow the work of Achieve, Inc. for the last twelve years, you will find their fingerprints all over this document.  Through the auspices of the National Governors’ Association they have become the arbiters of state requirements, until 46 states have subscribed to their college- and career-ready standards.  When they examine each state’s standards they claim to have benchmarks created by academic and corporate experts, but the ultimate criteria are whether their standards are testable. The critical question they ask of all state standards is “How clear, specific, and measurable?”

When standards are created to be measurable, they become reductive.  Not that standards should not be measured, but measurement entails efficiency and efficiency implies reduction. Hence the jettisoning of the writing process. Hence the neglect of genre study.  Hence the absence of reflection, meta-cognition, and self-evaluation.  Hence the  demotion of  narrative writing, a mode of expression with messy boundaries.

If we have intruded on the writing process for these Standards, then it is not a moment too soon.  They are not mere standards, but blueprints for national testing.  They are an emerging national curriculum, a criterion for funding, a pretext for punishment, and the subversion of effective teaching of literacy. On the pretense of raising the bar, the designers are erecting a guillotine. No one should doubt from the content and structure of these Standards that they are for execution, not for a benign “race to the top.”

This writing process for National Standards badly needs the feedback and revision it would deny to high school writers in the “on-demand” environment. For those who designed the draft we are seeing now, it would be a process well-learned.