Nancy Bailey did not like Dana Goldstein’s article in the New York Times About teaching writing. It sounded to her like an infomercial for the Common Core. In this post, she offers 15 experienced-based ways to help children learn to write and express themselves.
“New York Times journalist Dana Goldstein, who isn’t a teacher but likes to write about them, recently wrote “Why Kids Can’t Write,” an infomercial for Common Core.
“A takeaway from the article is that Common Core may not be working to teach writing, but it’s the teacher’s fault. The real danger here, however, is the idea that student words don’t matter–that writing instruction is only about mechanics.
“Goldstein highlights Dr. Judith C. Hochman who founded a nonprofit called The Writing Revolution. Hochman believes in teaching children writing mechanics and she poo poos student self-expression. She just doesn’t think it’s necessary.
“If that sounds eerily like the College Board’s David Coleman, chief in charge of Common Core, who said no one gives a “shit” about what students write, well, surprise! Coleman sits on The Writing Revolution’s Board of Trustees.
“Goldstein has gotten pushback by Furman education professor P.L Thomas in “Why Journalists Shouldn’t Write About Education,” and Jim Horn’s “Bad Writer? Blame a Teacher, Says Goldstein.” Those authors especially note the disgraceful way Goldstein slams teachers.
“Kate Walsh, who also doesn’t like teachers or student self-expression, is mentioned in the article. Walsh is with the National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ), highlighted in Goldstein’s article. This is a group supported by Bill Gates that pretends to know what makes good teachers.
“I have known many career English teachers. I don’t remember one of them not being confident in their ability to teach writing.”
If you want some sound ideas about teaching writing, read Bailey’s post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Common Core may not be working to teach writing, but it’s the teacher’s fault.”
Of course it’s the teacher’s fault. Went to an edudeformer conference in KC put on by the libertarian “the Show Me Institute” (Rex Sinquefield’s supposed think tank) entitled “Failure to Fixes” where the panelists including Rick Hess, with host Jay P Greene, were bemoaning that their prescribed education deforms weren’t working, that the implementation was flawed. Never gave a thought to the fact that perhaps, indeed, it is the shitty ideas and malpractices that they have pushed and clamored for that are the problem. So now the same edudeformers who have caused all their “woe is me” gnashing of teeth think that they will have the answers. It was a bizarre experience to be one of the only anti-deformers in the crowd.
On a side note, of the 12 or so panelists only two have any k-12 teaching experience. One for four years and the other for 3 1/2 years. And they wonder why they don’t know what the f$#k they are talking about, why their “failures” now need “fixing”. Ay ay ay!
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Ha!
Me English teacher. I not no how too rite words in English. That why me took all those classes on righting, grammar and linguistics, and graduate from fully accredited university with literature degree. Cause I not no how.
Ha!
By the way, have you noticed that every organization with ‘Revolution’ in its name is based on bunk? Ha.
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LCT,
When a billionaire funds a group with the word “Revolution” in its name, beware.
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Actually I was taught the opposite, that the mechanics of writing were secondary to the child’s ability to express themselves.
Of course, that was in the 1970’s when the college professors did not understand the qualities of a good teacher.
Not like now when the new experts have been able to pinpoint “everything you need to know about education” into a five week course instead of four years of study.
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I guess it depends on what you consider the point of writing to be. If producing the “perfect” five paragraph essay is it for you, then Goldstein may be right.
But if, on the other hand, you have some crazy notion that writing is about communicating what you have to say, well, that’s just so, well, 1970s I don’t even know what to say.
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Where’s the like button for this comment? As always, delightfully said, Dienne!
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Besides Common Core Infomercials, K12, Inc, and Connections (owned by Pearson) Virtual Schools are filling the television screens their infomercials that are totally misleading and walk the thin line of false advertisement. People that buy into this educational cr___ need to take a seriously look at what they really want in the way of education for their children. States that allow these for-profit companies into their educational systems really are doing an injustice to their children. This are must two money making schemes to go down the road to privatization of public schools.
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According to the foundation website, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $14,422,641 to the misnamed National Council on Teacher Quality.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has tried to shape writing to the Common Core and tech assisted writing, offering grants amounting to $14, 497,272.
Of these, $6,045,062 went to Common Core-centric National Writing Project.
Back to the misnamed National Council on Teacher Quality, source of contrived and misleading stack ratings of all things in education
The funders include but are hardly limited to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,
Noteworthy funders include six people/groups who want to be “Anonymous. Here are the rest, many of them known to be arrogant and unwilling to think that teachers may know anything well without their preferred interventions and surveillance systems for compliance with these. The failure of their ideas is always attributed to “faulty implementation,” never to their bad ideas.
In addition to the six anonymous funders, here are the rest of the funders of the misnamed National Council on Teacher Quality.
Abell Foundation, Achelis Foundation, Anschutz Foundation
Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock, Belk Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Boston Foundation, Bruni Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chamberlin Family Foundation, Charles Cahn, Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, Exxon Mobil Corporation, Finnegan Family Foundation, George Kaiser Family Foundation, Heinz Endowments, Hyde Family Foundations, J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation, James M. Cox Foundation, Joyce Foundation, Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Longfield Family Foundation, Louis Calder Foundation, Lynch Foundation, Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation, Osa Foundation, Powell Foundation, Rodel Foundation of Delaware, Sartain Lanier, Family Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, Sid W. Richardson Foundation, Sidney A. Swensrud Foundation, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, Trefler Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Walker Foundation , Walton Family Foundation, William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund, William E. Simon Foundation
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Some of their funders are notoriously hostile to public schools and enthusiastically support privatization:
The Walton Foundation
Smith Richardson
Albertson Foundation
The Broad Foundation
The Arnold Foundation
The Simon Foundation
The Bradley Foundation
Perhaps more unfamiliar to me
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14.5 Million because, as I’ve read more than once, Melinda Gates is personally convinced that our nation struggles with a plague of “bad” educators.
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Thank you, Diane. And thanks to all who commented. Interesting points.
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Great piece, Ms. Bailey!
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Coleman’s comment about narrative writing is vile. Now, more than ever, student self-expression is critical. I always found that students were more interested in the mechanics if it applied to what they had to say. My students had writing disabilities. Expressing themselves and writing mechanics did not come easy.
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I found it a challenge to help kids who had learned that their writing was terrible because of poor mechanics. It was a real challenge to get them to ignore spelling until after they had their ideas down. In the early days of composing on the computer, I frequently turned off spell check, so my most anxious students wouldn’t spend the whole time correcting spelling errors. It was no wonder they couldn’t get a coherent thought down! My fallback strategy was to have them tell me what they wanted to say. Together we could get their thoughts down. Once they saw their own words in print and had been through the whole editing and proofreading process with me, they could give up that quest for perfection at first writing. It was a revelation to realize that I struggled with how to say things and what words to use and that I didn’t try to solve all those problems on the first draft. Writing instruction has so improved since my days as a student.
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“My fallback strategy was to have them tell me what they wanted to say. Together we could get their thoughts down. Once they saw their own words in print and had been through the whole editing and proofreading process with me, they could give up that quest for perfection at first writing.”
Yes! That was definitely my experience as a teacher. I’d start by trying to correct on my own…not all of their journal…just special pieces. But sometimes the writing could not be deciphered. They’d dictate. Then it worked. Thank you for describing so well.
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Excellent advice from Ms. Bailey. One thing I would like to add: one cannot learn to write without reading a lot. Much of the learning of writing comes from unconsciously integrating models picked up from reading. Now, here’s the important point: one will not become a reader via a steady diet of Common Core test prep exercises. In many of our schools, as most readers of this blog know, enormous amounts of instructional time in English is given over to inane test prep exercises due to policies like test-based school grading. Fortunately, there are great teachers who are pushing back against this and doing real reading and writing with their students when the doors are closed.
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Great point. I find most discussion of teaching writing to be woefully lacking in real understanding but rife with wonderful-sounding cliches. None of our great writers learned to write via today’s fashionable methods. As you say, a diet of well-written readings is the key ingredient, and this is totally absent from most programs that purport to teach writing. Writing, aside from mechanics and a bit of fine tuning, can’t really be taught directly. Writing ability is mostly a combination of having something to say (which cannot be obtained in writing class, and is much better obtained in the other subject areas), and having the means to say it, i.e. an ample vocabulary, and mental impressions of proper grammar, usage and style obtained from hearing and seeing language used. These core ingredients of writing competency are not and cannot be taught in “writing class”. Paradoxical as it may sound, writing is not learned by “teaching writing”. Free writing and personal narratives may lubricate the writing powers, but they do not impart the core of writing power.The essense of writing ability comes from acquiring a lot of general knowledge, reading, and listening to literate adults use English well.
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Well said, Ponderosa. There are, however, some writing programs that involve a lot of careful analysis of good readings. I’m thinking, for example, of what often occurs in classes that prepare students for taking the AP Language exam. The texts for those classes are typically rhetorics, and students spend most of their time reading models of superb writing and thinking carefully about what the writers of these have done–what tricks of the trade they have employed. That said, much of what students learn about writing they learn unconsciously, from reading, and, as you wisely say, a lot of the trick in good writing is having acquired knowledge that gives one something to say. Shockingly, a lot of texts for high-school kids on writing the research paper haul off with having the kids write a thesis statement. Of course, before that happens, the kids need to do A LOT of study so that they can formulate a rational thesis. One cannot write well about something one knows nothing about, and to a significant extent, if one has something to say, it will say itself.
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Well said. Thank you.
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Yes, reading is important, especially if kids enjoy what they’re reading! Which I think you understand from what you said. Glad to hear teachers are pushing back Common Core. Thank you for commenting.
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Only if they become readers will they become writers, and they won’t become readers unless they have opportunities–lots of them–to read material they enjoy. So, yes. I agree.
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And thank you, Ms. Bailey, for being a voice against the idiocy of these “standards”
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I like to turn kids on to substantive works–classics. I believe, fervently, that one can do Plato and Shakespeare with fifth graders, if one is a sufficiently gifted teacher.
However, I recently taught with a middle-school reading teacher who had a VAST familiarity with popular YA lit. A lot of the YA stuff that she shared with kids was of very low literary quality. It was really puerile stuff. But I could not argue with her results. She knew YA lit and her students well enough to do a lot of spot-on pairing up of them. I saw many students who had never been readers carrying around, engrossed in, and animatedly discussing OUTSIDE CLASS the independent reading books she had loaned to them from her large pop YA library. When one ex-nonreader is animatedly telling another, “You’ve got to read this!” that’s progress, and when that same student is going on to read the next books in the series . . . that’s a breakthrough.
This was inspiring. Sure, a lot of this stuff was drek, but as Christopher Frye once said in response to a negative review of a new playwright, it makes no sense to chastise an acorn for not yet being an oak. She hooked kids on reading, and they were on their way somewhere for a change.
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HI Robert.
As a librarian I met many a “nonreader” when in essence the child had never been exposed to that special book, you might call it a “hook”, to draw them into the idea that books were relevant to them. Each child was different, but once I was able to match that child to the right book then everything fell into place. (In my son’s case, it was audiobooks as he was dyslexic, although he was fascinated by The Guiness Book of World Records and loved the poetry of Shel Silverstein.) The Harry Potter series really indoctrinated a whole generation of readers. The same might be said about Twilight and The Hunger Games.
However, it was not my place to judge the particular genre or literary quality of the books they enjoyed, just to keep finding new ones they might like to read next.
Ellen Klock
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cx: dreck, not drek
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For the life of me I cannot understand why so many people in education want to take sides about what should be a common-sense approach to the teaching of K-12 writing. Just as everything in education should combine the objective and subjective to create a harmonious balance so too should the art of teaching writing contain the balance between the mechanics and creativity of writing. Since children are only formally taught of about 20% of their life spans a primary goal has to be to teach them in a way that will not only encourage a life-long love of learning but also how to self-educate and express that education as in writing about it. In the pedagogical methodology of andragogy (not to be confused with androgyny), often used in adult-education, mechanics are stressed over content. But both mechanics and content have the elements of the objective and subjective. Just as content is need to grab the reader’s interest mechanic are need to retain that interest and to fulfill the reading experience. And just as writing creativity and imagination can be enhanced through the mechanics of sentence restructuring, writing mechanics can also enrich creativity. It seems to me that all people in this article and debate have a self-serving ax to grind and totally miss the goal of teaching writing. And to criticize a person for writing about the teaching profession because they have never taught seems very narrow minded and also self-serving. What matters is what is being said. Could you imagine what our country would be like if we couldn’t criticize politians because we never were one? I think all adult involved in this conversation should look at their positions from more than one point of view in an effort to actually help improve the art of teaching K-12 writing.
Michael Haran
The Institute of Progressive Education and Learning
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Michael, there are many different approaches to teaching a child how to write, but the most boring approach is one where the mechanics of the writing process is the main or sometimes the only focus.
While journalists are welcome to have an opinion on education (hopefully based on their own experiences and not what they’ve been “told” to write), they have no right to pretend to be experts dictating policies to the teachers in the trenches or, even worse, bad mouthing public school teachers on their perceived lack of ability based on faulty, skewed data.
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Michael, do you agree that the bulk of writing ability comes from having read good writing, and that, therefore, reading is the most important part of a writing education? And do you agree that the stronger one’s general knowledge and vocabulary base, the stronger one’s general writing ability is? And that, therefore, acquiring knowledge about the world and the words that describe it is an integral part of a writing education?
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The Common Wh-re S— Standards and ENDlESS, ridiculous testing are there to: 1) CONTROL THOUGHT and THINKING, 2) BLAME Public School Teachers, of course (easy targets), 3) MONEY & PROFITS, and 4) Political FUNDING.
The DFERS and GOP saw themselves as both winners in the Public School BASHING games. They probably opened a lot of champagne bottles celebrating our demise.
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And thank you, Nancy Bailey.
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I don’t recall what page but i was taken to The 74 about Rocketship. Rocketship will now call itself Rocketship Public School. How in the world can The 74 stand behind Rocketship with its abysmal record? I don’t get it. It seems the reformers are only about misappropriating tax dollars for profit. Other than than, there really doesn’t seem to be a reason for their existence. That Shavar Jeffries would distance himself from Success Academy/Eva Moskowitz/Trump is interesting – perhaps he is opening his own charter school.
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Flos56
I totally agree with you and, as I stated in my comment, a blended and balance approach to teaching writing, as with most thing in life, allows for the creative and the process of expressing that creativity to flourish. If expressed as either/or it becomes the old chicken and egg dilemma which is really an unnecessary argument to what should be obvious. I have the utmost respect for teacher and one of my primary crusades is to get teacher paid at the same rates as first responders so they can afford to live in and have the respect of the communities they teach in. Next to parents teachers are arguably the second most important people regarding education in a community. My argument is that just because someone is something or other that they cannot be held accountable. That accountability, again like all things, is open to interpretation which has been debated in regards to public education since Mann and Jefferson first laid out their reasons for why the nation needed public schools (Mann wanted an educated populace and Jefferson wanted an educated ruling class). The open debate is the most important thing.
Ponderosa
I one hundred percent agree with your take on teaching writing. When we were putting together the curriculum for our virtual charter school, the WHATZIT Academy, we interview many school district directors of curriculum and the overwhelming sentiment was “just teach them how to read and write!” Not only was writing joined at the hip with reading, reading was always mentioned first. Also, many foreign language teachers stress the importance of vocabulary over grammar and sentence structure because if one simply has a strong vocabulary they can communicate with native speakers and through that the nuances of the language will develop. Reading is absolutely crucial in the development of writing skills.
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