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!