Why many DCPS students can’t write

Many DCPS high school students have trouble writing a grammatically correct sentence, let alone a cogent essay. If they can’t write, how will they fare in college? Or in life?

For the past few months, I’ve been a volunteer writing tutor at a DCPS high school, working with 4 students selected by the school for their motivation and their promise. I wanted to help these kids, of course. But I also wanted some first-hand experience of what it was like to teach (albeit not in a classroom) in a high-poverty DCPS school.

It’s been an eye-opening experience. I didn’t have high expectations, knowing something about the state of writing skills in the general population. Still, I’ve been surprised, if not shocked, by the deficits I’ve found. And although the sample size has been small, from conversations with teachers and others, it’s clear that this problem is widespread. DCPS teachers, like teachers elsewhere, just haven’t focused on teaching kids how to write.

I’m not saying teachers are to blame. Teaching writing is highly labor-intensive, and teachers with 4 or 5 classes of 25 or 30 kids each simply don’t have the time to give meaningful feedback on writing assignments. And standardized tests have emphasized multiple choice answers in reading and math rather than writing, partly because it’s a lot harder to grade writing. That means even if teachers had the time to focus on writing, the system hasn’t given them much incentive to do it.

The problems are both micro and macro. Students don’t know what subjects and verbs are, and they don’t understand why a phrase like “Running to catch the bus” is not a complete sentence. (One of my students defined “subject-verb agreement” this way: “That’s like, if you’re talking about a subject, and the audience agrees with you.”)

Perhaps more worrisome, students don’t know how to construct a logical argument. If you ask most of my students to write a paragraph consisting of a topic sentence followed by sentences with supporting evidence, you may well get an almost random dump of information. I recently tried to help a couple of them with an assignment to write a 5-paragraph essay. The experience was so frustrating that I found myself in tears on the way home.

All of my students are intelligent and hard-working, and they’re able to make good points orally. But, with one exception, they all have difficulty organizing their thoughts into coherent writing. (The one exception is a student who told me she reads a book a week for pleasure; obviously, that’s helped her.)

It’s hard to imagine these students writing a college-level term paper in a few years, or even a decent college application essay. DCPS has worked hard to instill in students the expectation that they’ll attend college (all of my students say they plan to go). But if we don’t teach them how to write, we’re setting them up for failure.

Lately there’s been a good deal of attention focused on writing instruction on a nationwide level. That’s partly because the Common Core State Standards, which DC and 45 states have adopted, are looming on the horizon. These standards place a lot of emphasis on writing, which they divide into three types: narrative, explanatory, and “argumentative.”

“Argumentative” writing involves marshaling evidence in support of a claim, and is probably the most difficult of the three. Narrative writing, which basically involves telling a real or imagined story, is undoubtedly the easiest. The Common Core standards introduce the idea of “opinion pieces” as early as kindergarten, but the standards ascend gradually from grade to grade in terms of difficulty. A student who has been schooled in a Common Core-aligned curriculum beginning in kindergarten may well be equipped to tackle argumentative writing by the time she reaches high school.

The problem is that DCPS, along with other school districts, is expecting current high school students to tackle complex argumentative writing before they’ve learned how to write coherent narratives. Trying to help my students with their 5-paragraph essays, which were aligned to the 10th-grade Common Core argumentative writing standards, put me in mind of a comment from a physics teacher at a DC alternative public school in the PBS documentary 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School: “Words cannot describe how hard it is to teach physics to students who can’t multiply.” It isn’t any easier to teach argumentative writing to students who haven’t learned how to write a decent sentence.

What can be done about this situation? One possibility, from a much discussed piece in The Atlantic, is “writing across the curriculum.” In a low-performing Staten Island high school, all teachers, not just those teaching English, began to use a program that focused on analytical writing skills. Within a year or two, test scores had risen dramatically. After four years, the school’s graduation rate, which had been 63% before it adopted the writing program, reached 80%.

Whatever the solution, it will almost inevitably involve a lot of work on the part of teachers. Recently a nonprofit called EdX has devised computer software that assesses student writing, a development that has predictably unleashed a hailstorm of criticism from English teachers. I can see a use for computers in helping students recognize basic grammatical errors, but for anything more sophisticated a human being is probably necessary.

It won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap. But teaching kids how to write is vitally important, and not just because test scores are likely to plummet next year when DC will begin to align its standardized tests to the Common Core. Nor is it just a matter of giving kids a skill that will enable them to succeed in college or in the job market, important as those things are.

Learning how to write is, ultimately, learning how to think. And given that we live in a democracy, the more people we have who can think in a clear and sophisticated way, the better it will be for all of us.