During my student days in the 1940s and ’50s, I was never required to write anything more than an occasional book report. We filled in blanks in workbooks, diagrammed sentences and took exams that rarely called for responses extending beyond a few words or sentences. It wasn’t until my freshman year of college that I was introduced to the radical idea that all the grammar and spelling we had learned could be used to express thoughts and ideas that others might actually be interested in reading.
So much for the notion that we are in retreat from a Golden Age of Education. Writing instruction and expectations for student writing have, in fact, advanced in remarkable ways in the last 40 years. Students have opportunities to write stories, poems, memoirs and research papers, which I would have relished. In many classrooms across the country, substantial blocks of time are set aside for what is known as writers’ workshop, during which students can draft, revise and publish their work in many genres under the thoughtful direction of teachers. They write daily in their journals and correspond with their teachers about the books they are reading. Many teachers have participated in rich professional development that equips them with a deep understanding of how to engage students in writing.
If you’re looking for the newsworthy “hook” in this story (as our writing students are trained to do), it’s buried right here. The Illinois State Board of Education, in its infinite lack of wisdom, announced recently that as a cost-cutting measure it is eliminating, effective immediately, the writing section of the ISAT test for the state’s 3rd, 5th and 8th graders. What remains are tests in reading, math and science, matching the areas for which students are held accountable under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
I am no fan of mandated standardized tests, but the ISAT writing assessment was a rare bright spot in an otherwise dismal landscape. The existence of the test required teachers to think deeply about what constitutes good writing, to look closely at student work and to craft instruction from the lessons learned. Good writing maintains focus, is organized, contains rich detail and reaches for engaging openings and closings. When you’re teaching to the writing test, you are actually teaching meaningful skills.
With the state board’s decision, much of this is threatened. A handful of passionate educators will stay the course and retain writing as a centerpiece of their curriculum. Their commitment stems from the belief that writing is a powerful tool to carry into the adult world and that writing and thinking are integrally intertwined. In the words of the British novelist E.M. Forster, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
However, across most of the embattled educational landscape, teachers and administrators are already realigning their priorities in ways that will make writing an also-ran. It is an axiom that teachers will only teach what they are accountable for. The elimination of the writing assessment is a particular setback in Chicago, where the two-headed testing monsters of ISAT and ITBS (the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) reign. The former’s inclusion of a writing component, which allowed students to do something less robotic than bubbling in circles on a machine-scored answer sheet, distinguished it as the more serious and meaningful of the two enterprises.
The state board’s plan to eliminate the writing assessment, along with the 4th and 7th grade social studies test, will save a paltry $6.4 million out of a mammoth education budget. The real cost lies in the way it puts Illinois at odds with a number of other significant national trends. We are jettisoning writing just when other states are adding it to their assessment batteries. The SAT and the ACT, the traditional gateways to college admission, are introducing mandatory writing tests in the near future. Last year a national commission issued a report on the state of writing instruction in America called “The Neglected R,” which called for significant upgrading in this area.
It is short-sighted for Illinois to be headed south, against the flow of everything we are discovering about the role of writing in supporting intellectual growth.
