Month: July 2010

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Everybody Can Write (Amen)

It’s time to quiet the ranting demon and  invoke the affirming spirit of educational reform: the democratization of writing.  We will invoke the spirit with the creed “Everybody can write.”   If there is a church where this creed is reliably practiced it is The National Writing Project, a professional development network of teachers of writing that holds summer tent-meetings (actually “summer institutes” in  air-conditioned settings) for its followers, called “teacher consultants.” Since launching itself from the imagination of James Gray in 1974, the NWP has begun its Summer Invitational Institutes with the invocation: “teachers of writing should be writers.” And that mantra has persistently inspired the faithful for thirty-six years of devotion to the profession of teaching writing (http://nwp.org).

The vertical axis of educational reform is the better-known and better-funded “Standards Reform,” led by think tanks like Achieve, Inc., foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and political coalitions like the National Governors’ Associations and the Council of Chief State School Officers. You can follow their work in the current edition of the “Common Core State Standards,” which claims to be “evidence-based,”  “aligned with college and work expectations,” “rigorous,” and “internationally benchmarked.”  You can also read a cogent and critical analysis of the work of the vertical axis over the last twenty years in Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books, 2010). I leave that in Dr. Ravitch’s very capable hands.

But the  gospel of the horizontal axis of educational reform should be proclaimed. It is an under-funded and under-publicized axis that has just begun to get traction. It begins with the origin tale of the National Writing Project (Teachers at the Center, James Gray, National Writing Project, 2000); continues in the eloquent preaching of Peter Elbow, his sermons compiled in the incomparable Everybody Can Write (Oxford University Press, 2000); it collects the epistles of its followers in the National Conversation on Writing (http://ncow.org/site/), and currently celebrates their contributions in the National Day on Writing ( http://www.ncte.org/dayonwriting), the second annual on October 20, 2010.  All of these prophets and evangelists deserve personal attention and will receive it in upcoming blogs.

You might think that “Everybody can write” would be a popular creed, but it is hardly a cultural norm . If you Google “Everybody can write” you will find lots of offers to make you a writer, including a company in the United Kingdom called “Rewrite,” which makes your miserable prose acceptable. If you are embarrassed by your writing or your employees’ writing, “The answer: put your message directly into the hands of the specialist yourself.” (http://www.rewrite.co.uk/).  This message corresponds to the memorable headline “Why Johnny Can’t Write” and other alarms that ring through the media.

So the gospel message that “Everybody can write” is not embraced by many, as the National Conversation on Writing has observed: “Public discussions about writing and writers rarely focus on the reading and writing that real people do every day. From essays for school to text messages, from grocery lists to business memos, everyone is a writer”(http://ncow.org/site/)

For the immediate future, let this gospel of the democratization of writing be proclaimed, Amen!

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Attention Deficit in the Statehouse

The National Governors Association is moving on after establishing National Standards in English Language Arts, Social Studies and Science.  With the final draft of the Standards posted on the community bulletin board, the sheriffs can move on to bring justice to another town. Left behind (uh-oh!) are the superintendents, principals, teachers, students and their families to implement these Standards on behalf of politicians on the move.

When the National Governors Association convened this week, the new chair,  West Virigina Governor Joe Manchin III “made good on his promise, announcing that his chair’s initiative would be Complete to Compete—an effort focused on increasing the number of students who complete college degrees and certificates from U.S. higher education institutions. His goal: Improve higher education degree attainment rates by 4 percent annually in each state” (“New NGA Chair Targets Completion,” Education Week, July 12, 2010).

Now this is a terrific agenda, addressing a real problem in the higher education continuum in the U.S.  The estimated 45% of students who do not complete four-year colleges is a tragic waste of time and money, both for students who leave college and the institutions that invest in them.  But what of the horse behind that cart? The students who have graduated, supposedly “college-ready,” yet somehow can not survive four years of post-secondary endeavor?

There must be something in the water at these annual conventions of the Governors that activates the attention deficit gene. They will not follow-through on a plan for education that requires them to get their hands dirty with the mechanics of schooling.  How will they align their state standards with the national standards, so that their states are best served? How can they preserve the jobs of numerous qualified teachers being cut this summer? How will they fund and preserve their most-deficient schools?  What kinds of continuous professional development can they fund in these schools? What new approaches to assessment can deepen the insights from standardized tests? What kinds of high school-to-college programs can they implement? These are a handful of implementation problems that the local sheriffs have left unsolved, as they moved on to the next town: college campuses.

Needless to say, the first year of their study will bring the startling revelation that students entering college are not prepared and thus more likely to drop out.  So when the K-12 system fixes itself,  the college attrition rate will be halved or quartered, at least. Needless to say, if they had spent that first year investing in formative assessment systems for high school performance, they might already be addressing the “college readiness” gap.  And maybe they wouldn’t bother studying “college readiness” for another year, since they were already addressing that problem.

But politicians (including some school boards and superintendents) have a need for an agenda to get them elected or hired or their contracts renewed. Whatever school reform accomplished over the last three years must be cast aside for a new plan, one that impresses their peers, the voters, or the school boards that they have the “change” that matters.  This cycle has sadly victimized public schooling, where change is measured over five to ten years and where real change must start in the classroom, not the statehouse.

Many of the teachers who leave the classroom this year will choose retirement to avoid this latest cycle of school reform, of unfunded mandates, of unresponsive regulation. They recognize when the sheriff has left town and left the hard work for the citizens. They know the NGA is too busy in the town on the other side of the county to be concerned with the town they “reformed.”

If the politicians in Washington seem unresponsive to local needs, we might assume they are just too far from us, but when the statehouse or even our school boards avoid  personal involvement with reform “on the ground,” we can only assume they don’t care.  Their careers are made by proposals, agendas and mandates, not the glacial changes from inside the school.  They suffer from the attention deficit that energizes campaigning and re-election and disillusions the stakeholders of reform.

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Due Process

When last I ranted about the Draft of the National Standards for Writing (8/2/09), they had spurned narrative and its disreputable cousins, ownership and voice, they had snubbed “genre,” preferring instead “structures” and “formats,” and they had dismissed the process of writing in short order, with no acknowledgement of “metacognition,” “reflection,” or “portfolios” to support it. A year later, the Core Standards have mellowed a bit, and so have I.  Considering the ultimate document “Common Core State Standards: English Language Arts and Literacy in History/ Social Studies and Science” I’ll gladly give credit for some improvements.

Of course, I will return to ranting about the shameful neglect of the writing process and indicting the Standards, as soon as I have given them their due process in court.

In the final version of  the Common Core Standards, Narrative has ascended to a “Text Type,” juxtaposed with “Argument” and “Informative/ Explanatory Texts.” This is a respectable promotion from its former status as a “Sidebar.”  The Narrative standards include engaging the reader, developing narrative elements (“with purposefully selected details that call readers’ attention to what is most distinctive or worth noticing” – Grades 11-12, # 1b), and attending to the writing process, including “trying a new approach.”   These all seem to be concessions to critics who attacked the narrowness of the Standards and their neglect of the craft of writing.

The final document also lays a significant burden on History/ Social Studies and Science  for addressing discipline specific skills in writing.  Not only are the content-area teachers enjoined to support the same modes of discourse cited for English Language Arts, they are required to guide students in “writing-to-learn” (“Write in response to informational sources, drawing on textual evidence to support analysis and reflection as well as to describe what they have learned,” Grades 11-12, #10).  This latter remarkable standard is an excellent example of a “process goal,” one which allows writers to move from reading a text to reflecting on it, before eventually incorporating it into an “argument” or “informational/ explanatory text,” which are the “product goals” of writing. “Writing in response to . . .” is a “process goal,” because it has no intrinsic value to the reader other than showing the writer’s understanding of a text at that moment.

The identification of “process goals” really opens a Pandora’s Box for the Standards, because in every other case they collapse the writing process into one single standard, forever known as #5- “Strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for  specific purpose and audience.”  In every place in the document, this statement (always numbered “5”) subsumes a multitude of skills that promote the writing process.

Thus, the English Language Arts Standards for Writing, 9-12 make no mention of “writing in response to. . .” anything, because they are fixated on products. All the intermediate forms of writing, from journals to learning logs to exploratory writing to reflective writing to blogging are ignored, because they are hidden in the process of producing higher-profile “formats,” such as a critical analysis of  “A Modest Proposal” or an argument against one of the Federalist Papers.  The Standards writers have a very “bottom line” view of the writing process, and, of course, it is a view entirely consistent with the values of the marketplace.  “Process” documents have very little marketable value, unless you are already a best-selling author, and everyone wants to know your secret to great writing.

This disregard for the process would be fine if writing were manufactured like iPhones or Toyotas, but writing grows out of a rich subsoil of pre-writing ( alluded to as “planning” in #5).  Donald Murray, the patron saint of the writing process, estimated that 85% of the writing process is pre-writing.  His discipline was to write in a “daybook,” and he drew ideas for articles and books from the seedlings of his daily writing.  This suggests that the Standards address only 15% of the writing we do in school each year.

I’ll admit that my daily writing does not approach Murray’s.   And I accept the chastening of Jenna McWilliams, who has observed of my blog,  “The writer published only seven posts in eight months (all of which were excellent, btw), and the last post went life a full two months ago. No audience has the patience to stick around through gaps that big”  (http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/?p=215).  So much the worse for my writing.  I could write more, better write more and will write more or turn in my poetic license.

Learning to write involves relentlessly writing and reflecting on the process and product. It involves commenting on writing (our own and others’), taking risks with writing, and self-assessment of our writing. This is not the message of the Standards on Writing.  Rather, they roll the process into a tight little ball by asserting about writers, “They must have the flexibility, concentration, and fluency to produce high-quality, first-draft text under a tight deadline, as well as the capacity to revisit and make improvements to a piece of writing over multiple drafts, when circumstances encourage or require it” (“Notes on Range and Content,” p. 37).  Between the lines of these “Notes” is an impatience with process, a sense that it is a luxury that the marketplace and the university can ill-afford. It also discriminates against the struggling writer, who relies on a process of acquiring habits and critical standards to move beyond a basic literacy.

To borrow from the legal culture that infuses the Standards, I do not feel writing has received its “due process” in this document.  As much as Standards represent the verdict of K-12 learning, they must also reflect the deliberation that produces the verdict. No attorney would claim the verdict was the most important element of a legal dispute and neither are the products of writing more important than their processes.  Writers must learn a process, not the mere format that emerges from the process. Therefore, the Standards should include the discourses of pre-writing, of feedback and of reflection that support the writing process.  They should advocate for the process-based pedagogy that makes everyone a writer, not merely the privileged, the writers by birthright.