Cause for Alarm Cause for Concern Cause for Alarm

Reading Next
Only 70 percent of high school students
graduate on time with a regular diploma,
and fewer than 60 percent of African-
American and Latino students do so
(Greene & Winters, 2005)
Students who enter ninth grade in the
lowest 25 percent of their class are twenty
times more likely to drop out than the
highest-performing students (Carnevale,
2001)
Approximately 32 percent of high school
graduates are not ready for college level
English composition courses (ACT, 2005).
Over half of adults scoring at the lowest
literacy levels are dropouts and almost a
quarter are high school graduates (NCES,
2005).
Approximately 40 percent of high school
graduates lack the literacy skills employers
seek (Achieve, Inc., 2005)
US dropouts literacy skills are lower than
most industrialized nations, performing
comparably only to Chile, Poland, Portugal,
and Slovenia (OECD, 2000). (Biancarosa 7)
Writing to Read

Forty percent of high school graduates lack
the literacy skills employers seek (National
Governors Association, 2005).
Lack of basic skills costs universities and
businesses as much as $16 billion annually
(Greene, 2000).
Poor writing skills cost businesses $3.1
billion annually (National Commission on
Writing, 2004)
Only one out of three students is a
proficient reader (Lee, Grigg, and Donahue,
2007).
Only one out of four twelfth-grade students
is a proficient writer (Salahu-Din, Persky,
and Miller, 2008).
One out of every five college freshman
must take a remedial reading course (SREB,
2006).
Nearly one third of high school graduates
are not ready for college-level English
composition courses (ACT 2009).
Three out of ten high school students do
not graduate on time (Gewertz, 2009).
Over half of adults scoring at the lowest
literacy levels are dropouts ( (S. a. Graham
7)



Writing Next
Seventy percent of students in grades 4-12
are low achieving writers (Persky et.al,
2003).
Every school day, more than 7000 students
drop out of high school (Pinkus, 2006).
Only 70 percent of high school students
graduate on time with a regular diploma,
and fewer than 60 percent of African-
American and Latino students do so
(Greene & Winters, 2005)
Students who enter ninth grade in the
lowest 25 percent of their class are twenty
times more likely to drop out than the
highest-performing students (Carnevale,
2001)
Nearly one third of high school graduates
are not ready for college level English
composition courses (ACT, 2005).
Over half of adults scoring at the lowest
literacy levels are dropouts and almost a
quarter are high school graduates (NCES,
2005).
College instructors estimate that 50% of
high school graduates are not prepared for
college-level writing (Achieve, Inc., 2005).
US graduates literacy skills are lower than
those of most industrialized nations,
performing comparable only to the skills of
graduates in Chile, Poland, Portugal, and
Slovenia (OECD, 2000). (Graham and Perin,
7)
Cause for Alarm Cause for Concern Cause for Alarm


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`
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Committee Chair: Dr. Karen Kuralt
Reader 2: Dr. Toran Isom
Reader 3: Dr. Michael Kleine
Introduction

In 1976 I walked across the stage at Southern State College, now Southern Arkansas
University, with my degree in Secondary English in hand and high ideals in mind of how I was
going to be an all-star teacher who would reach students down through the years by teaching
them how to become master thinkers and writers. It was a great dream, but I was totally nave
about how outside the cozy, structured world of college, theory, and practice teaching that
there was a totally different environment waiting for me in the schools. I did not know I would
encounter high school students who could not read. I did not know that I would be teaching
high school students who had never written a formal paper. I did not know that I would be
assaulted by a student because she didnt want to do an assignment based on the fact that she
had never been required to do one.
My secondary education classes had done little to prepare me for this glaring reality about
real school. What I discovered was what I considered to be a crime being committed every day
in the majority of the schools; students were being robbed of the right to a valid education to
become productive citizens in this country. They were being warehoused through a system that
was broken, even then, and had no plausible cure. Here, years later and many fix-its later, the
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system is still broken. Books have been written about ways to reach the unreachable, how to
teach the un-teachable, and how to implement strategies that would work classroom miracles;
yet, more than 50 percent of public school students are dropping out of school, and a large
number of those who stay and graduate are ill-prepared for the next steps in their lives
whether it be going to college or going to work. In the article Too Many Children: How Can We
Close the Achievement Gap? Fannie Flono of the Kettering Foundation notes that far too
many students in U.S. public schools are lagging behind. They leave school unable to make
change at the local McDonalds when the computerized cash register fails (Flono).
Six years ago I left my position as a classroom teacher and now work as an Instructional
Facilitator (Literacy Coach). Now, instead of being confined to one classroom, I can see
firsthand, school wide, what goes on in most of the classrooms. In my first two years, there was
little to no writing going on. Even now, I dont see a great deal of evidence that indicates that
the students in the traditional content area classes are writing substantive papers or that they
are being given challenging work that requires higher-order- thinking skills (HOTS). In most
classes, the students are still delegated to using worksheetsnot summaries, open responses,
or essay questionsto show what they have learned in the class. I believe that the end result of
this low level work, according to Blooms Taxonomy, is the reason many of the students cant
write a readable essay or sometimes a readable sentence. It is heartbreaking to see and hear
how their education has been diluted to a level that renders the students at a disadvantage in
society.
Nearly 30 percent drop out yearly and never complete high school (Flono, 1).
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Having been a classroom teacher on all grade levels, I have seen examples of educational
neglect. I spent summers teaching 4 -7 year olds who had never heard nor could read nursery
rhymes. In the late 1980s during the industrial meltdown in Flint, Michigan, I taught at a junior
college there that was designed to re-educate/train laid-off factory workers and to empower
women who were enrolled in the welfare-to-work program with job skills needed for the
workplace. The majority of those students came to school with little to no writing skills
whatsoever. Teaching essay writing to my Freshman Comp class was more like teaching essay
writing to a seventh-grade English class due to their lack of writing skills and low reading levels.
They had been educated in the same school district I had been educated in, but many of them
had gone to school at the inner-inner city schools where many students were first-generation
Flint-ites, as was I, whose parents had moved from the South without high school educations to
go to work in the factories. Some of the students were my age, so I knew they had been a part
of a system where students were seated by academic levels: smart (A-B) students were seated
in the first row; lower level students (D-F) were seated in the last row. One heartbreaking essay
that one of my students wrote was a piece titled Fifth Row, Last Seat. In the essay she candidly
talked about her experiences in the dumb row throughout elementary and secondary schools.
She lamented about how she felt untaught and ignored, and how she felt doomed to lifelong
failure. She ended up having two children while in high school, dropped out of school, and
ended up on welfare. She enrolled at Jordan College in hopes of reaching back to get the
education she had missed and to get off the welfare rolls. My time with the preschoolers and
the students at Jordan College were my first memorable encounters with what I call
disenfranchised students. Another encounter happened in my early years during a time when I
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was working as a long-term substitute teacher. Malcolm, a young African-American male who
had been passed on to the twelfth grade without being taught to read, was enrolled in the
Modern Novels class I was teaching. I learned of his deficiency one day during class when I asked
him to read a paragraph from the story the class was reading. He became agitated, so I called
him outside the classroom into the hall and asked what I had said or done to upset him. He
explained to me that he had never learned to read. He had learned early on that as long as he
was quiet in class he wouldnt be called on or challenged, so he was just passed on to the next
grade. I was shocked! I left that school before he did, so I dont know what became of him, but
the idea that he was left to be another possible statistic made me want to ensure that no child
would leave my classes that way.
At my current school, I have ninth graders who read on the average at the fifth grade
level. I have been asked if the regular students go to college. I see students being given the
most insultingly low-level work in their classrooms. Teachers ask whether students at certain
grade levels should be writing essays. One frustrated student who didnt want to take a
formative assessment screamed at me that these teachers aint teaching us nothing! It is
heartbreaking to see students working around this disservice in school.
In this project, I will be using research as well as formative and summative assessment data
to investigate how a few of the educational shortcomings in my school result from the lack of
substantive writing and reading skills. I will also present current research-based information
about ways that writing can be used as a learning tool to increase literacyreading and writing--
levels in my and other schools.
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Reading, Writing, and the Freshman Composition Student

During a local high school English department meeting, one of the new teachers asked the
question Should the Ninth Graders Be Writing Essays? The responses to her question were varied. The
seasoned teachers, those with ten or more years of experience, felt that they definitely should be
writing essaysat least a five-paragraph piece. The new and less experienced teachers felt that ninth
grade students werent ready to take on essays. They voiced that these kids cant. They arent ready.
The feelings of doubt about the ninth graders ability to write were not just in the minds of
teachers attending that meeting. In many cases, the freshman students believed they could not write as
well.
I cant write! are words that freshman writers have moaned, cried, and shrieked when they
are issued their first essay writing assignment. In a perfect world, the teacher would simply nod, smile,
and reply, Yes, you can and will. It is not that hard at all, and the students would write. The
themes/essays would not be perfect at the onset, but with more practice they would improve. But this is
not a perfect world, and the process is not that cut and dried. There are many factors that determine
whether a freshman will pass or fail ninth-grade English or freshman English at the college level--Comp I,
but two factors stand out above the rest. The first factor is that they know how to effectively write, edit,
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and rewrite (add research). The second factor is that they know how to read and write with grade-level
fluency (add research). The relationship between these two entities is necessary to produce good
writers because writers learn through imitation. It is unlikely that students will be able to write well
without being able to read well and without being well read.
According to the Alliance for Excellent Educations report Writing Next by Steve Graham and
Delores Perin from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the following is stated:
If todays youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what
theyve read, and then write clearly and effectively about what theyve learned and
what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their
potential (Graham and Hebert, 1).

When I was a classroom teacher, I found by conducting informal, in-class surveys of freshmen
and keeping careful tabs on those who read and those who did not, I found that those students who did
a great deal of reading, or had been exposed to good literature in primary and secondary school tended
to be far better writers than those who did not. They had a better command of spelling, word use,
punctuation, and syntactic structure. They tended to have a tendency to use a broader vocabulary,
formulate more creative topics and ideas, and possess a broader base of knowledge on various topics
for writing and discussion.
Those reading writers gave me essays that had clear thesis statements, strong details and
examples, dialogue, fewer sentence errors, as well as well-organized, concise paragraphs that came
together to create an easy-to-read and pleasant-to-read document. An example of this was an essay
written by one of my freshmen that gripped my attention in the beginning statement and held it until
the end. She told me that she was an avid readerthat she read volumes of books, magazines, cereal
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boxes, and anything else with text written on it. Her love for and fluency in reading showed in not only
the essay spoken of and but also in all other writing she did during the semester. On the other hand, the
freshmen who come to composition class with low reading levels and poor reading fluency or who dont
read at all, struggle with writing. They struggle to form a concrete idea; they struggle with mechanics,
spelling, word use, and sentence structure. They have a very limited base of background knowledge on
most topics, low vocabulary, and a tendency to only want to address areas that are current in the
mediawhat they pick up on the television or radioand write what they feel about those issues. Also,
these writers tend to usually want to write about whats going on in their immediate surroundings.
To address the first factor, I have learned that freshmen, as well as other grade levels, must
write other than what they are assigned in classes to get comfortable with the writing process;
therefore, I assign journal writing. By keeping a journal in classes, the students write every day in a low-
stakes environment. Journal writing is not limited to essays and paragraphs. The writing can range from
poetry to prose, from fiction to frustration, or from wishes to silent whispers. Under these conditions,
the student doesnt feel as if writing is always an assignment, but that it can be something fun to doan
avenue for expression that can graduate into something more, if need be or wanted. Not only were the
students encouraged to write, but they could also read their thoughts aloud to the class. They did not
have to read if the piece was too private, but reading was left as an option. Being able to read their own
writingtheir own thoughts--helped the students get more comfortable with reading and their fluency
improved. Some even began to get library cards so they could read on a regular basis.
Keeping a journal also allowed the students to watch their writing skills improve during the
semester. One young woman came to Comp I with no knowledge of how to form a complete, coherent
sentence, but after keeping a journal for six weeks along with editing her assigned papers, her writing
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improved vastly. She stopped writing sentence fragments, her sentences and paragraphs became more
coherent, and as her compositions, as a whole, got better; so did her grades. I have even had students
get so attached to journal writing that they continued to keep journals after they were out of the class.
Reading well and writing well are two main factors that are the keys to success in Composition I
or ninth grade English. One cannot be without the other, and once students realize the correlation
between the two and put them to work together, the better their reading and writing outcomes will be
in the course. In the foreword in Steve Graham and Michael Herberts report for the Alliance for
Excellent Education for the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Writing to Read: Evidence for How
Writing Can Improve Reading (2010), Vartan Gregorian, President of the Carnegie Corporation of New
York, says the following about the importance of students achieving proficient reading and writing skills:
Around the world, from the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, which may be 25,000
years old, to the images left behind by the lost Pueblo cultures of the American
Southwest, to the ancient aboriginal art of Australia, the most common pictograph found
in rock paintings is the human hand. Coupled with pictures of animals, with human
forms, with a starry night sky or other images that today we can only identify as abstract,
we look at these mens and womens hands, along with smaller prints that perhaps belong
to children, and cannot help but be deeply moved by the urge of our ancestors to
leave some permanent imprint of themselves behind. Clearly, the instinct for human
beings to express their feelings, their thoughts, and their experiences in some lasting form
has been with us for a very long time. This urge eventually manifested itself in the
creation of the first alphabet, which many attribute to the Phoenicians. When people also
began to recognize the concept of time, their desire to express themselves became
intertwined with the sense of wanting to leave behind a legacy, a message about who they
were, what they had done and seen, and even what they believed in. Whether inscribed on
rock, carved in cuneiform, painted in hieroglyphics, or written with the aid of the
alphabet, the instinct to write down everything from mundane commercial transactions to
routine daily occurrences to the most transcendent ideasand then to have others read
them, as well as to read what others have writtenis not simply a way of transferring
information from one person to another, one generation to the next. It is a process of
learning and hence, of education.

Ariel and Will Durant were right when they said, Education is the transmission of
civilization. Putting our current challenges into historical context, it is obvious that if
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todays youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what theyve
read, and then write clearly and effectively about what theyve learned and what they
think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential. (In that
regard, the etymology of the word education, which is to draw out and draw forthfrom
oneself, for exampleis certainly evocative.) Indeed, young people who do not have the
ability to transform thoughts, experiences, and ideas into written words are in danger of
losing touch with the joy of inquiry, the sense of intellectual curiosity, and the
inestimable satisfaction of acquiring wisdom that are the touchstones of humanity.What
that means for all of us is that the essential educative transmissions that have been passed
along century after century, generation after generation, are in danger of fading away, or
even falling silent.

In a recent report, the National Commission on Writing also addresses this concern. They
say, If students are to make knowledge their own, they must struggle with the details,
wrestle with the facts, and rework raw information and dimly understood concepts into
language they can communicate to someone else. In short, if students are to learn, they
must write.

It is in this connection that I am pleased to introduce Writing Next. As the report warns,
American students today are not meeting even basic writing standards, and their teachers
are often at a loss for how to help them. In an age overwhelmed by information (we are
told, for example, that all available information doubles every two to three years), we
should view this as a crisis, because the ability to read, comprehend, and writein other
words, to organize information into knowledgecan be viewed as tantamount to a
survival skill. Why? Because in the decades ahead, Americans face yet another
challenge: how to keep our democracy and our society from being divided not only
between rich and poor, but also between those who have access to information and
knowledge, and thus, to powerthe power of enlightenment, the power of self-
improvement and self-assertion, the power to achieve upward mobility, and the power
over their own lives and their families ability to thrive and succeedand those who do
not. Such an uncrossable divide will have devastating consequences for the future of
America. Those who enrich themselves by learning to read with understanding and write
with skill and clarity do so not only for themselves and their families, but for our nation
as well. They learn in order to preserve and enhance the record of humanity, to be
productive members of a larger community, to be good citizens and good ancestors to
those who will follow after them. In an age of globalization, when economies
sink or swim on their ability to mine and manage knowledge, as do both individual and
national security, we cannot afford to let this generation of ours or indeed, any other, fall
behind the learning curve. Let me bring us back to where we began: For all of us, the
handprint must remain firmly and clearly on the wall (Graham and Herbert).

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Gregorians words ring true in light of what testing data tells educators. The students do
struggle with reading and even more so with writing. What the Alliance for Excellent Education
states in three of its reports is that America is facing a literacy crisis. The information in the chart
below is a crosswalk of statistics and findings from the three reports published by the Alliance:
Writing Next, Reading Next, and Writing to Read:





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Work Cited:
Bibliography
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Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd Ed. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011. Book.
Biancarosa, Gina and Catherine Snow. Reading Next--A vision for action and research in middle
and high school literacy: A report for Carnegie Corporation of New York (2nd Ed.).
Research. Washington, D.C.: Alliance for Excellent Education, 2006. Booklet.
Elbow, Peter. "Writing for learning--not just for demonstrating learning." Elbow, Peter. Writing
for learning--not just for demonstrating learning. Amherst: University of Massachusetts,
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Nagin, Carl. Because Writing Matters, Improving Student Writing in Our Schools. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass, 2010. Anthology.
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National Writing Project with Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Troy Hicks.
Because Digital Writing Matters,Improving Student Writing in Online and Multimedia
Environments. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. Book.
Nilson, Linda B. "Using Writing-to-Learn Assignments to Actively Engage Students in the
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