“Professional writing” has vanished from the curriculum, writes Ed Week‘s Sarah D. Sparks. Employers and educators are pushing for students to learn writing skills they’ll need in the workplace. But students don’t even know how to write an email, said Amanda Barker, a Michigan teacher who’s developed a course on professional writing. “The vast majority of my class have never attempted to write email; they only text,” she told Sparks. When students are taught writing, the focu

Students can do everything asked of them in school, yet fail to meet grade-level standards, charges TNTP’s new Opportunity Myth report. Assignments are too easy. High expectations aren’t magic, writes Wexler. When students lack background knowledge, vocabulary and academic skills, teachers need to know how to “scaffold instruction” to help them “access grade-level work.” About five years ago, I volunteered to help students at a high-poverty high school who were enrolled in an

Political indoctrination is destroying the value of college writing courses, argues Stephen Combs, who teaches composition at Florida’s Valencia College, on the Martin Center site. Students desperately need to be taught how to write — not how to ape their instructors’ views, he argues. At “too many colleges,” politics comes first. Instead of showing students how to present and defend positions with empirical evidence, many teachers use classroom time to lecture on white privi

Fordham’s Reading and Writing Instruction in America’s Schools looks at how teaching has changed in the Common Core era. Middle and high school teachers report students are better at citing evidence from the text, a Core priority, the report finds. However, teachers are “more likely to assign texts based on students’ current reading levels—as opposed to their grade levels—contrary to the intent of the standards.” In addition teachers are assigning fewer classic works of liter

The ability to write cogently, quickly and under pressure, helped me get into and through college. However, a growing list of selective universities have stopped requiring applicants to take SAT and ACT essay tests, reports  Nick Anderson in the Washington Post. Brown, Princeton and Stanford dropped the requirement this month, following Dartmouth, Harvard and Yale. The University of Michigan followed suit yesterday. The essay test unfairly burdens low-income students, who oft

Pearson’s “automated scoring program graded some 34 million student essays on state and national high-stakes tests last year,” she writes, and there are competitors. Computers analyze essays graded by humans to “learn” how to grade, says Peter Foltz, a Pearson vice president and a University of Colorado professor. “We have artificial intelligence techniques which can judge anywhere from 50 to 100 features,” Foltz says. That includes not only basics like spelling and grammar,

“Cursive handwriting instruction is returning to elementary school classrooms in New York City,” reports NBC News. Penmanship remains relevant, states the city’s instruction manual for cursive handwriting. “First, learning to form letters by hand improves perception of letters and contributes to better reading and spelling,” the manual advises. “Second, automatic letter writing promotes better composing—both amount written and quality of writing.” There’s “no evidence” that w

Grammar is “racist,” proclaims the writing center at the University of Washington, Tacoma. In fact, everything’s racist. Language structure is “unjust.” “We promise to emphasize the importance of rhetorical situations over grammatical ‘correctness’ in the production of texts,” announces a poster. Students won’t be taught to communicate in standard English at the writing center, since there is no such thing. “Language is constantly changing.” For all the “social justice” talk,

Teacher have outsourced grading at two Michigan public schools that are “teacher-powered,” reports Education Week Teacher. Washtenaw Educational Options Consortium schools, say paying an outsider to do the grading frees teachers to design curriculum and work more closely with students. Dan is lead teacher at Washtenaw International High School (WIHI), an International Baccalaureate school that hires graduate students as aides and graders. Sarah works at Washtenaw Alliance for

Nearly 500 people — all college graduates — applied for a communications job at Marc Tucker’s organization. Candidates were asked to write a one-page summary of a report published last year. “Only one could produce a satisfactory summary,” writes Tucker. The kids can’t write, he concludes. . . . we do not build our curriculum around the assumption that we will be asking students to read demanding books—not just parts of books, but whole books—and then asking them to write, at