826DC uses volunteers to get students to write

The tutoring program 826DC has hundreds of volunteers working with 3,000 DC students on writing every year. It’s fun and quirky, and kids seem to love it. But can the program really teach them how to write?

826 National, the parent organization for 8 branches scattered across the country, has been getting a lot of attention lately. The program, founded by writer Dave Eggers, recently won a literacy award of $50,000 from the Library of Congress. And it’s been featured in a market research study on how to attract tweens to afterschool arts programs.

Like the other local branches, 826DC operates a tutoring center that shares space with a store that has a whimsical theme. There’s a Pirate Store at the original location, 826 Valencia Street in San Francisco, and a Superhero Supply Store in Brooklyn. DC’s store, at a busy location in Columbia Heights, is The Museum of Unnatural History.

Kids may be lured in by the live iguana, the mounted animal heads labeled with names, or the cans of condensed “Primordial Soup.” But behind all the whimsy there’s an ambitious agenda: getting kids who may have little or no experience with writing to fall in love with the written word.

The organization employs a variety of free programs to achieve that goal. Some kids—mainly younger ones who live in the neighborhood—drop by for afterschool tutoring. Behind the store there’s a large room with tables, chairs, and a comfortable couch.

There are evening and weekend writing workshops at the tutoring center as well, and school “field trips,” when an entire class will come in for a couple of hours to work on a specific project, such as creating a book.

The organization also sends groups of volunteers into schools, last year holding programs in 35 DCPS and charter schools. This year one group is working with an English class at Wilson High School that’s participating in National Novel Writing Month. Another group is working with students at Ballou High School in Ward 8, and a third is visiting a creative writing class at the SEED charter school in Ward 7 twice a week.

At one school, Harriet Tubman Elementary in Ward 1, volunteers have been working with students in nearly every classroom. Tubman saw double-digit increases in its scores on DC’s standardized tests last year, and this year students are continuing to make significant gains on widely used reading assessments. At this point it’s hard to know how much of the improvement stems from 826DC as opposed to other initiatives at the school, although that data is in the works.

Hundreds of volunteers

826DC has a staggering 1,100 volunteers on its rolls, although Executive Director Joe Callahan says that only 400 to 500 are “active,” meaning they’ve volunteered at least once in the last 6 months. That’s still an impressive number. Some are published writers, holders of MFAs in writing, or retired teachers. They also tend to skew white, female, and in their 20s, although Callahan says the organization is trying to diversify the demographics.

Harnessing all that talented free labor leads to cost efficiency. 826DC has only a handful of paid staff members (two full-time, one part-time, and two Americorps volunteers), but it served 2,800 students last year and hopes to expand to over 3,000 this year. It gets about a quarter of its funding from the DC government, with the rest coming from private sources. The schools who receive services pay nothing.

Judging from the statistics on the 826 website, students, teachers, parents, and volunteers all feel the program provides a valuable experience. One of the most popular projects is to have a class collaborate on a book of essays, stories, or poems, and sometimes a famous author will write the introduction. That can be a tremendous source of pride for students.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve acquired the kinds of writing skills they’ll need to make it through college or to get a good job. As someone who has written two novels, I’m not one to denigrate creative writing. The fact is, though, that there are few times in life when most people will be called upon to do it. It’s much more likely that they’ll be asked to write a term paper, a memo, or even a letter (or email) of complaint.

To be sure, there are some lessons that carry over from one kind of writing to the other, such as the importance of revision. But in my experience as a writing teacher and tutor, a student can be a terrific creative writer and still have no idea how to craft a coherent expository or analytical essay, paragraph, or sentence.

A more intensive approach is needed

Callahan and Gerald Richards, the CEO of 826 National, say that tutors do work with students on expository as well as creative writing, and that the program is aligning its approach to the new Common Core curriculum standards, which emphasizes writing that’s based on close reading of texts. But they acknowledge that to really improve writing skills, you need a far more intensive approach than 826 can provide.

Student writing often displays a host of problems, ranging from sentences that aren’t really sentences to entire essays that just don’t make sense. It can be hard to know where to begin. Callahan says 826DC encourages tutors to focus on the big picture, asking students what they think is successful in the piece and what they could improve. That’s probably the right approach, given time constraints. But if students never master the skill of writing a sentence, they’ll never be able to write solid paragraphs or essays.

Consider a recent book project done by high school students, all of them non-native English speakers, at the Boston branch of 826. It’s clear the students benefited from the project in many ways, according to a study done by an independent firm: they gained confidence and self-esteem, and 96% reported they learned to be “good writers.”

But on objective measures of writing skill, the results were less dramatic. Students gained an average of 12.8% in “story composition” (vocabulary, prose, plot) and only 2.6% in “contextual convention” (noun-verb agreement, punctuation).

This country is currently facing a writing crisis, especially in high-poverty urban schools, and it’s a crisis that no volunteer-based program will be able to address. What’s needed instead is a program embedded within schools that has students writing in every class, every day. Not only will a program like that teach kids how to write, it will boost their comprehension and get them to think analytically.

At least one such program does exist, but few schools have it in place now, and it’s not clear when more will. In fact, many teachers, faced with classes of 25 or 30 students, find it difficult or impossible to teach writing at all.

So there’s clearly a need for a program like 826DC, which may be the only exposure to writing that many students get. It may even produce a few poets or novelists, or at least readers of poetry and novels, and that’s no small accomplishment. We just need to understand that, given the dimensions of the problem, it’s simply not going to be enough.