Theodora JohnsonFinal Project Intro and beyond

Cause for Alarm Cause for ConcernCause for Alarm

Reading Next Only 70 percent of high school students graduate on time with a regular diploma, and fewer than 60 percent of African-American and Latino students do so (Greene & Winters, 2005) Students who enter ninth grade in the lowest 25 percent of their class are twenty times more likely to drop out than the highest-performing students (Carnevale, 2001) Approximately 32 percent of high school graduates are not ready for college level English composition courses (ACT, 2005). Over half of adults scoring at the lowest literacy levels are dropouts and almost a quarter are high school graduates (NCES, 2005). Approximately 40 percent of high school graduates lack the literacy skills employers seek (Achieve, Inc., 2005) US dropouts literacy skills are lower than most industrialized nations, performing comparably only to Chile, Poland, Portugal, and Slovenia (OECD, 2000). (Biancarosa 7) Writing to Read

Forty percent of high school graduates lack the literacy skills employers seek (National Governors Association, 2005). Lack of basic skills costs universities and businesses as much as $16 billion annually (Greene, 2000). Poor writing skills cost businesses $3.1 billion annually (National Commission on Writing, 2004) Only one out of three students is a proficient reader (Lee, Grigg, and Donahue, 2007). Only one out of four twelfth-grade students is a proficient writer (Salahu-Din, Persky, and Miller, 2008). One out of every five college freshman must take a remedial reading course (SREB, 2006). Nearly one third of high school graduates are not ready for college-level English composition courses (ACT 2009). Three out of ten high school students do not graduate on time (Gewertz, 2009). Over half of adults scoring at the lowest literacy levels are dropouts ( (S. a. Graham 7)

Writing Next Seventy percent of students in grades 4-12 are low achieving writers (Persky et.al, 2003). Every school day, more than 7000 students drop out of high school (Pinkus, 2006). Only 70 percent of high school students graduate on time with a regular diploma, and fewer than 60 percent of African-American and Latino students do so (Greene & Winters, 2005) Students who enter ninth grade in the lowest 25 percent of their class are twenty times more likely to drop out than the highest-performing students (Carnevale, 2001) Nearly one third of high school graduates are not ready for college level English composition courses (ACT, 2005). Over half of adults scoring at the lowest literacy levels are dropouts and almost a quarter are high school graduates (NCES, 2005). College instructors estimate that 50% of high school graduates are not prepared for college-level writing (Achieve, Inc., 2005). US graduates literacy skills are lower than those of most industrialized nations, performing comparable only to the skills of graduates in Chile, Poland, Portugal, and Slovenia (OECD, 2000). (Graham and Perin, 7)

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Committee Chair: Dr. Karen KuraltReader 2: Dr. Toran IsomReader 3: Dr. Michael KleineIntroduction

In 1976 I walked across the stage at Southern State College, now Southern Arkansas University, with my degree in Secondary English in hand and high ideals in mind of how I was going to be an all-star teacher who would reach students down through the years by teaching them how to become master thinkers and writers. It was a great dream, but I was totally nave about how outside the cozy, structured world of college, theory, and practice teaching that there was a totally different environment waiting for me in the schools. I did not know I would encounter high school students who could not read. I did not know that I would be teaching high school students who had never written a formal paper. I did not know that I would be assaulted by a student because she didnt want to do an assignment based on the fact that she had never been required to do one. My secondary education classes had done little to prepare me for this glaring reality about real school. What I discovered was what I considered to be a crime being committed every day in the majority of the schools; students were being robbed of the right to a valid education to become productive citizens in this country. They were being warehoused through a system that was broken, even then, and had no plausible cure. Here, years later and many fix-its later, the system is still broken. Books have been written about ways to reach the unreachable, how to teach the un-teachable, and how to implement strategies that would work classroom miracles; yet, more than 50 percent of public school students are dropping out of school, and a large number of those who stay and graduate are ill-prepared for the next steps in their liveswhether it be going to college or going to work. In the article Too Many Children: How Can We Close the Achievement Gap? Fannie Flono of the Kettering Foundation notes that far too many students in U.S. public schools are lagging behind. They leave school unable to make change at the local McDonalds when the computerized cash register fails (Flono).Six years ago I left my position as a classroom teacher and now work as an Instructional Facilitator (Literacy Coach). Now, instead of being confined to one classroom, I can see firsthand, school wide, what goes on in most of the classrooms. In my first two years, there was little to no writing going on. Even now, I dont see a great deal of evidence that indicates that the students in the traditional content area classes are writing substantive papers or that they are being given challenging work that requires higher-order- thinking skills (HOTS). In most classes, the students are still delegated to using worksheetsnot summaries, open responses, or essay questionsto show what they have learned in the class. I believe that the end result of this low level work, according to Blooms Taxonomy, is the reason many of the students cant write a readable essay or sometimes a readable sentence. It is heartbreaking to see and hear how their education has been diluted to a level that renders the students at a disadvantage in society. Nearly 30 percent drop out yearly and never complete high school (Flono, 1).Having been a classroom teacher on all grade levels, I have seen examples of educational neglect. I spent summers teaching 4 -7 year olds who had never heard nor could read nursery rhymes. In the late 1980s during the industrial meltdown in Flint, Michigan, I taught at a junior college there that was designed to re-educate/train laid-off factory workers and to empower women who were enrolled in the welfare-to-work program with job skills needed for the workplace. The majority of those students came to school with little to no writing skills whatsoever. Teaching essay writing to my Freshman Comp class was more like teaching essay writing to a seventh-grade English class due to their lack of writing skills and low reading levels. They had been educated in the same school district I had been educated in, but many of them had gone to school at the inner-inner city schools where many students were first-generation Flint-ites, as was I, whose parents had moved from the South without high school educations to go to work in the factories. Some of the students were my age, so I knew they had been a part of a system where students were seated by academic levels: smart (A-B) students were seated in the first row; lower level students (D-F) were seated in the last row. One heartbreaking essay that one of my students wrote was a piece titled Fifth Row, Last Seat. In the essay she candidly talked about her experiences in the dumb row throughout elementary and secondary schools. She lamented about how she felt untaught and ignored, and how she felt doomed to lifelong failure. She ended up having two children while in high school, dropped out of school, and ended up on welfare. She enrolled at Jordan College in hopes of reaching back to get the education she had missed and to get off the welfare rolls. My time with the preschoolers and the students at Jordan College were my first memorable encounters with what I call disenfranchised students. Another encounter happened in my early years during a time when I was working as a long-term substitute teacher. Malcolm, a young African-American male who had been passed on to the twelfth grade without being taught to read, was enrolled in the Modern Novels class I was teaching. I learned of his deficiency one day during class when I asked him to read a paragraph from the story the class was reading. He became agitated, so I called him outside the classroom into the hall and asked what I had said or done to upset him. He explained to me that he had never learned to read. He had learned early on that as long as he was quiet in class he wouldnt be called on or challenged, so he was just passed on to the next grade. I was shocked! I left that school before he did, so I dont know what became of him, but the idea that he was left to be another possible statistic made me want to ensure that no child would leave my classes that way.At my current school, I have ninth graders who read on the average at the fifth grade level. I have been asked if the regular students go to college. I see students being given the most insultingly low-level work in their classrooms. Teachers ask whether students at certain grade levels should be writing essays. One frustrated student who didnt want to take a formative assessment screamed at me that these teachers aint teaching us nothing! It is heartbreaking to see students working around this disservice in school. In this project, I will be using research as well as formative and summative assessment data to investigate how a few of the educational shortcomings in my school result from the lack of substantive writing and reading skills. I will also present current research-based information about ways that writing can be used as a learning tool to increase literacyreading and writing--levels in my and other schools.

Reading, Writing, and the Freshman Composition Student

During a local high school English department meeting, one of the new teachers asked the question Should the Ninth Graders Be Writing Essays? The responses to her question were varied. The seasoned teachers, those with ten or more years of experience, felt that they definitely should be writing essaysat least a five-paragraph piece. The new and less experienced teachers felt that ninth grade students werent ready to take on essays. They voiced that these kids cant. They arent ready. The feelings of doubt about the ninth graders ability to write were not just in the minds of teachers attending that meeting. In many cases, the freshman students believed they could not write as well.I cant write! are words that freshman writers have moaned, cried, and shrieked when they are issued their first essay writing assignment. In a perfect world, the teacher would simply nod, smile, and reply, Yes, you can and will. It is not that hard at all, and the students would write. The themes/essays would not be perfect at the onset, but with more practice they would improve. But this is not a perfect world, and the process is not that cut and dried. There are many factors that determine whether a freshman will pass or fail ninth-grade English or freshman English at the college level--Comp I, but two factors stand out above the rest. The first factor is that they know how to effectively write, edit, and rewrite (add research). The second factor is that they know how to read and write with grade-level fluency (add research). The relationship between these two entities is necessary to produce good writers because writers learn through imitation. It is unlikely that students will be able to write well without being able to read well and without being well read. According to the Alliance for Excellent Educations report Writing Next by Steve Graham and Delores Perin from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the following is stated: If todays youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what theyve read, and then write clearly and effectively about what theyve learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential (Graham and Hebert, 1).

When I was a classroom teacher, I found by conducting informal, in-class surveys of freshmen and keeping careful tabs on those who read and those who did not, I found that those students who did a great deal of reading, or had been exposed to good literature in primary and secondary school tended to be far better writers than those who did not. They had a better command of spelling, word use, punctuation, and syntactic structure. They tended to have a tendency to use a broader vocabulary, formulate more creative topics and ideas, and possess a broader base of knowledge on various topics for writing and discussion. Those reading writers gave me essays that had clear thesis statements, strong details and examples, dialogue, fewer sentence errors, as well as well-organized, concise paragraphs that came together to create an easy-to-read and pleasant-to-read document. An example of this was an essay written by one of my freshmen that gripped my attention in the beginning statement and held it until the end. She told me that she was an avid readerthat she read volumes of books, magazines, cereal boxes, and anything else with text written on it. Her love for and fluency in reading showed in not only the essay spoken of and but also in all other writing she did during the semester. On the other hand, the freshmen who come to composition class with low reading levels and poor reading fluency or who dont read at all, struggle with writing. They struggle to form a concrete idea; they struggle with mechanics, spelling, word use, and sentence structure. They have a very limited base of background knowledge on most topics, low vocabulary, and a tendency to only want to address areas that are current in the mediawhat they pick up on the television or radioand write what they feel about those issues. Also, these writers tend to usually want to write about whats going on in their immediate surroundings. To address the first factor, I have learned that freshmen, as well as other grade levels, must write other than what they are assigned in classes to get comfortable with the writing process; therefore, I assign journal writing. By keeping a journal in classes, the students write every day in a low-stakes environment. Journal writing is not limited to essays and paragraphs. The writing can range from poetry to prose, from fiction to frustration, or from wishes to silent whispers. Under these conditions, the student doesnt feel as if writing is always an assignment, but that it can be something fun to doan avenue for expression that can graduate into something more, if need be or wanted. Not only were the students encouraged to write, but they could also read their thoughts aloud to the class. They did not have to read if the piece was too private, but reading was left as an option. Being able to read their own writingtheir own thoughts--helped the students get more comfortable with reading and their fluency improved. Some even began to get library cards so they could read on a regular basis.Keeping a journal also allowed the students to watch their writing skills improve during the semester. One young woman came to Comp I with no knowledge of how to form a complete, coherent sentence, but after keeping a journal for six weeks along with editing her assigned papers, her writing improved vastly. She stopped writing sentence fragments, her sentences and paragraphs became more coherent, and as her compositions, as a whole, got better; so did her grades. I have even had students get so attached to journal writing that they continued to keep journals after they were out of the class.Reading well and writing well are two main factors that are the keys to success in Composition I or ninth grade English. One cannot be without the other, and once students realize the correlation between the two and put them to work together, the better their reading and writing outcomes will be in the course. In the foreword in Steve Graham and Michael Herberts report for the Alliance for Excellent Education for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (2010), Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, says the following about the importance of students achieving proficient reading and writing skills: Around the world, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which may be 25,000 years old, to the images left behind by the lost Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, to the ancient aboriginal art of Australia, the most common pictograph found in rock paintings is the human hand. Coupled with pictures of animals, with human forms, with a starry night sky or other images that today we can only identify as abstract, we look at these mens and womens hands, along with smaller prints that perhaps belong to children, and cannot help but be deeply moved by the urge of our ancestors toleave some permanent imprint of themselves behind. Clearly, the instinct for human beings to express their feelings, their thoughts, and their experiences in some lasting form has been with us for a very long time. This urge eventually manifested itself in the creation of the first alphabet, which many attribute to the Phoenicians. When people also began to recognize the concept of time, their desire to express themselves became intertwined with the sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy, a message about who they were, what they had done and seen, and even what they believed in. Whether inscribed on rock, carved in cuneiform, painted in hieroglyphics, or written with the aid of the alphabet, the instinct to write down everything from mundane commercial transactions to routine daily occurrences to the most transcendent ideasand then to have others read them, as well as to read what others have writtenis not simply a way of transferring information from one person to another, one generation to the next. It is a process of learning and hence, of education.

Ariel and Will Durant were right when they said, Education is the transmission of civilization. Putting our current challenges into historical context, it is obvious that if todays youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what theyve read, and then write clearly and effectively about what theyve learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential. (In that regard, the etymology of the word education, which is to draw out and draw forthfrom oneself, for exampleis certainly evocative.) Indeed, young people who do not have the ability to transform thoughts, experiences, and ideas into written words are in danger of losing touch with the joy of inquiry, the sense of intellectual curiosity, and the inestimable satisfaction of acquiring wisdom that are the touchstones of humanity.What that means for all of us is that the essential educative transmissions that have been passed along century after century, generation after generation, are in danger of fading away, or even falling silent.

In a recent report, the National Commission on Writing also addresses this concern. They say, If students are to make knowledge their own, they must struggle with the details, wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into language they can communicate to someone else. In short, if students are to learn, they must write.

It is in this connection that I am pleased to introduce Writing Next. As the report warns, American students today are not meeting even basic writing standards, and their teachers are often at a loss for how to help them. In an age overwhelmed by information (we are told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and writein other words, to organize information into knowledgecan be viewed as tantamount to a survival skill. Why? Because in the decades ahead, Americans face yet anotherchallenge: how to keep our democracy and our society from being divided not only between rich and poor, but also between those who have access to information and knowledge, and thus, to powerthe power of enlightenment, the power of self-improvement and self-assertion, the power to achieve upward mobility, and the power over their own lives and their families ability to thrive and succeedand those who do not. Such an uncrossable divide will have devastating consequences for the future of America. Those who enrich themselves by learning to read with understanding and write with skill and clarity do so not only for themselves and their families, but for our nation as well. They learn in order to preserve and enhance the record of humanity, to be productive members of a larger community, to be good citizens and good ancestors to those who will follow after them. In an age of globalization, when economiessink or swim on their ability to mine and manage knowledge, as do both individual and national security, we cannot afford to let this generation of ours or indeed, any other, fall behind the learning curve. Let me bring us back to where we began: For all of us, the handprint must remain firmly and clearly on the wall (Graham and Herbert).

Gregorians words ring true in light of what testing data tells educators. The students do struggle with reading and even more so with writing. What the Alliance for Excellent Education states in three of its reports is that America is facing a literacy crisis. The information in the chart below is a crosswalk of statistics and findings from the three reports published by the Alliance: Writing Next, Reading Next, and Writing to Read:

Work Cited:BibliographyBean, John. Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd Ed. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011. Book.Biancarosa, Gina and Catherine Snow. Reading Next--A vision for action and research in middle and high school literacy: A report for Carnegie Corporation of New York (2nd Ed.). Research. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006. Booklet.Elbow, Peter. "Writing for learning--not just for demonstrating learning." Elbow, Peter. Writing for learning--not just for demonstrating learning. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1994. 1-4. Book section.Emig, Janet. ""Writing as a Mode of Learning"." Villanueva, Victor and Kristin L. Arola. Cross-Talk In Comp Theory. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 7-15. Article.Flower, Linda and John Hayes. ""A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing"." Villanueva, Victor and Kristin L. Arola. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, A Reader. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 253-277. Article.Graham, Steve and Delores Perin. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2007. Report.Graham, Steve and Dolores Perin. Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High Schools--a report to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Corporation of New York, 2007. Report.Graham, Steve and Michael Hebert. Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading. New York: Carnegie Corporation, 2010. Report.Hicks, Troy. The Digital Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009.Kordalewski, John. Incorporating Student Voice into Teaching Practice. 00 11 1999. 25 June 2011. .Lunsford, Andrea A. ""Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer"." Villaneuva, Victor and Kristin L. Arola. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 279-290. Article.Moss, Andrew and Carol Holder. "Integrating Reading and Writing." Moss, Andrew and Carol Holder. Improving Student Writing: A Guidebook for Faculty in All Disciplines. Pamona: California State Polytechnic University at Pamona, 1982. 27-34. Book Section.Nagin, Carl. Because Writing Matters, Improving Student Writing in Our Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Anthology.National Writing Project with Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks. Because Digital Writing Matters,Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Book.Nilson, Linda B. "Using Writing-to-Learn Assignments to Actively Engage Students in the Learning Process." Nilson, Linda. Teaching At Its Best. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Incorporated, April 2007. 141. Book Section.Shaughnessy, Mina P. ""Diving In"." Villanueva, Victor. Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, A Reader. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 291-297. Article.Villanueva, Victor and Kristin L. Arola, Ed. Cross Talk In Comp Theory. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011.

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