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April 24, 2011

National Writing Project Is Innocent Victim in War on Earmarks, Educators Say

By Tushar Rae Washington The loss of federal funds for a national project that seeks to improve how writing is taught could damage the quality of students' writing on college cam-puses and in elementary and secondary schools, say faculty members who are now urging lawmakers to reconsider. And the cut, which Congress and President Obama made last month as part of their war on earmarks, comes amid growing concerns about the state of students' writing. College faculty continue to work with large numbers of students who arrive on campus unprepared for collegelevel writing. Scaling back the National Writing Project will hinder its ability to curtail the need for remedial education and hamper progress the program has made in bridging divides between university professors and elementary and secondary teachers, program advocates say. Proponents of the project also say the program has improved writing instruction at universities, something that recent critiques of undergraduate education, like Academically Adrift by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, indicate is ur-gently needed. The National Writing Project, which has relied on the federal government annually for $25.6-million, or just over half its budget, provides both elementary and secondary teachers and university professors with what participants say are needed and effective techniques for how to teach writing. The project, which began in 1974 with the goal of highlighting best practices in teaching writing across the curriculum, brings together school and college instructors at campus-based regional centers that offer professional-development programs and workshops. The project's advocates say it provides a critical platform for teachers and professors to talk about what kinds of writing students need to master at each level, including discussions about competencies that should be required under core standards. "It's one of the few places that university faculty and K-12 teachers, as equals, have conversations about what we value about writing," says Troy Hicks, assistant professor of English and director of the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University. A Scramble to Survive The president and members of Congress eliminated funds for the writing project as part of their broad effort to eradicate earmarks, the spending that individual lawmakers direct to their home states and favorite projects outside of competitive processes. That effort led to the elimination of all money Congress directly provided to literacy projects, including the writing project, even though the money that project has been getting from Washington goes to its national office rather than to individual states or program sites. Sharon Washington, executive director of the writing project, says the program's sites across the country are now scrambling to survive. The cut not only wipes out half of the project's budget, but it also imperils other sources of money. Most of the money the project receives from states, universities, and local sources comes in

the form of grants that match some portion of what the federal government gives, she says. Cindy O'DonnellAllen, associate professor of English and director of the Colorado State University Writing Project, says the federal cuts have been met with "despair and righteous anger." "Its not an earmark in the traditional sense," Ms. O'Donnell-Allen says of the writing project. "This cut is a bad policy decision on the part of politicians who want to be re-elected, and it's a result of poli-ticians not wanting to make a nuanced argument." And some lawmakers agree. On the same day President Obama signed the bill eliminating earmarks, Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, a Democrat from Louisiana, sent a letter to Sen. Dan Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, asking for the National Writing Project and other national, Congressionally authorized programs to be reclassified so that they are not deemed earmarks. In the letter, which was signed by 10 other senators, she said that those programs "are quite different from Congressionally directed spending items, which only benefit a specific state, Congressional district, or region, and change yearto-year" and that they "are not what has invoked the public's demand for earmark reform." An aide to Senator Landrieu says she has made this issue a priority and intends "to come out fighting" for exempting these programs from Congress's earmark moratorium, including in meetings with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. But critics of federal financing for the National Writing Project, including Citizens Against Government Waste (which cited the project in its 2006 Pig Book, which lists spending the group considers wasteful), say that the project has not provided enough evidence of its results. They also say that it duplicates other federal efforts to create better teachers. Ms. Washington and other members of the project's national office have begun to reach out to senators and representatives who have been vocal supporters of the writing project in the hopes that federal spending for literacy efforts will be restored in the next budget cycle. The recent budget deal, struck this month by Republicans and Democrats to finance programs through the rest of this fiscal year, did make the writing project eligible to compete with other national projects designed to improve teacher quality for a $29-million pot of money. But Ms. O'Donnell-Allen says the idea of having a constant competition among literacy projects isn't appealing or healthy. She says she is "very pessimistic" that there will be enough momentum at the federal level for the project to receive the same amount of money it had before this year's cut in next year's budget, especially given the general emphasis on belt-tightening in Washington. For now, she is broadening her role as director to include an increased emphasis on seeking private donations. "We are having to think more like entrepreneurs without sacrificing our principles, which have been linked with access and equity," she says. Ms. O'Donnell-Allen adds that she has received a sympathetic ear from local and state politicians. But even if they are able to increase their spending on the project, she says, she is concerned that reducing the federal stake in the program will "compromise the mission of the National Writing Project." "If you move the funding to the state level, that network is lost," she says. "It's the loss of a national brain trust." Kathy Kurtze, English and drama teacher at Carson City-Crystal High School and a co-director of the Chippewa River Writing Project, says the National Writing Project has helped her to understand the writing skills that colleges want incoming students to have. The project has also facilitated conversations with fellow elemen-tary and secondary teachers that give her ideas for how to help her students. She has linked some of her ninth graders who have low literacy skills with second graders in an effort to help both groups improve their skills. Together, the students have built a wiki, a collaborative Web site, and the ninth graders recorded "vokis," which are audio additions to wikis. The project

helps the ninth-grade students better understand the concepts of audience and purpose, and the second graders gain a new literacy tool, the wiki. Because of the federal cuts, some programs have already been scaled back. Ms. O'Donnell-Allen at Colo-rado State has reduced the length of the summer professional-development program offered at her site, and Mr. Hicks is considering a similar cut. Benefits for Universities Ms. O'Donnell-Allen says the project has improved writing instruction at the university level, too. During her work as a site director, she had an anthropology professor who had been teaching for close to 15 years tell her that the writing project had broadened her understanding of how to teach writing in anthropology. The professor realized that writing does not need to be confined to traditional research papers but could be broadened to include much of the day-to-day writing that anthropologists do and also to embrace digital media. College professors will also suffer consequences if elementary and secondary teachers lose access to the professional development offered by the project, says Ms. Washington, who had been a faculty member and provost before assuming her role at the writing project. If ineffective writing instruction is not improved in elementary and secondary schools, large numbers of high-school graduates will continue to show up at colleges needing remedial help, she said. Remedial courses slow down students' progress and are costly to students and institutions. Increasingly professors are asking, "How come we have to spend so much in remedial writing instruction?," she says. "For years I have heard from colleges that students are not coming in with college-level writing skills." In response to the budget cut, teachers and professors who have taken part in the writing project have started a blogging campaign called #blog4nwp. Chad Sansing, a middle-school language-arts and social-studies teacher at the Community Public Charter School, in Charlottes-ville, Va., was one of the first to suggest such an effort. Hundreds of blog posts have been collected. "People care very deeply about this project," Mr. Sansing says. "It's one of the most visible connections between public K-12 and higher education."