In this important article in The Atlantic, author/foundation staffer Peg Tyre tells the story of how New Dorp High School on Staten Island, New York addressed students’ writing deficits. In 2006, 82 percent of freshmen entered the school reading below grade level, and most students did poorly on the state Regents exams. “Many would simply write a sentence or two and shut the test booklet,” says Tyre. The staff had watched the principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, get rid of some bad-apple teachers, win foundations grants, and break the school into small learning communities – but student achievement didn’t budge. “Although New Dorp teachers had observed students failing for years, they never connected that failure to specific flaws in their own teaching,” says Tyre. The prevailing belief was that the students weren’t smart enough to write at the high-school level. One teacher said, “It was my view that these kids didn’t want to engage their brains. They were lazy.” Because of its rock-bottom results the school was in danger of being closed down, and DeAngelis led a last-ditch effort to identify the root causes of student failure. Staff members zeroed in on writing. “Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects,” says Tyre. “Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page.” The school began to do its own action research on why students’ writing was so poor. Was it a lack of reading skills? A few teachers administered diagnostic reading tests and reported that students with low writing skills could read fairly well. But a history teacher noticed that struggling students’ sentences were mostly short and disjointed, whereas more-successful students used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas – words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher gave a quick quiz to see if students knew how to use these simple words, and the results astonished the staff: most could not. “The harder they looked,” says Tyre, “the teachers began to realize the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not – the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.” As teachers continued their search for answers, they noticed that the best-written student paragraphs contained complex sentences with dependent clauses like although and despite, signaling a shift in logic within a sentence. Struggling students, on the other hand, were unable to complete a complex sentence. After reading Of Mice and Men, teachers asked them to complete the sentence, “Although George…” What they expected was a sentence like, “Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream,” but they got variations on, “Although George and Lenny were friends.” Tyre says that New Dorp had an epiphany: “These 14- and 15-year-olds didn’t know how to use some basic parts of speech. With such grammatical gaps, it was a wonder they learned as much as they did.” Prose like that of the Gettysburg address was way beyond them. They hadn’t learned that the key information in a sentence doesn’t always come at the beginning. How had students gotten to high school without these basics – without knowing how to use the word although? Tyre says this lack of basic writing skills is actually quite common in American schools. Twenty-five years ago, she says, schools shifted from the old-fashioned approach to teaching writing to the theory that writing should be “caught, not taught.” The theory was that if students were given creative assignments, put in a social context, and told that writing was fun, they would become good writers. Formal grammar and sentence-structure lessons were passé. But this approach didn’t work for all kids – especially those who grew up in poverty, had learning difficulties, and had weak early instruction. Then in 2001, No Child Left Behind de-emphasized writing, and it was taught less and less. “Writing as a way to study, to learn, or to construct new knowledge or generate new networks of understanding has become increasingly rare,” says Arthur Applebee of the University of Albany. Desperate for a program, DeAngelis took a group of New Dorp teachers to visit the Windward School, a small grade 1-9 private school in White Plains, NY known for a writing approach developed by former teacher Judith Hochman. After the visit, DeAngelis said, “I had one question and one question only: How can we steal this and bring it back to New Dorp?” She invited Hochman to a series of meetings with her staff, and they became convinced that there was a close link between writing, thinking, speaking, and reading. They concluded that improving writing would be a gateway to boosting achievement in the other three areas. In the fall of 2009, with Hochman’s guidance, New Dorp began a complete revamp of its curriculum, with a laser-like focus on a highly structured approach to teaching students to write expository essays. “The thing is,” said Hochman, “kids need a formula, at least at first, because what we are asking them to do is very difficult. So God, let’s stop acting like they should just know how to do it. Give them a formula! Later, when they understand the rules of good writing, they can figure out how to break them.” Teachers began to teach students how to construct complex sentences from simple ones by using three prompts: but, because, and so. Students learned how to use appositive clauses to vary sentence beginnings – for example, in a chemistry class, students were guided to write sentences beginning with three words: “Although hydrogen is explosive and oxygen supports combustion, a compound of them puts out fires.” “Unless hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they are explosive and dangerous.” And “If hydrogen and oxygen form a compound, they lose their original properties of being explosive and supporting combustion.” Later, students learned how to recognize sentence fragments, pull the main idea from a paragraph, and write the main idea. By the sophomore year, students were learning how to map out an introductory paragraph and then how to write body paragraphs. One student said, “There are phrases – specifically, for instance, for example – that help you add detail to a paragraph. Who could have known that, unless someone taught them?” Teachers assigned more homework at a more demanding and rigorous level. And there was less emphasis on creative, narrative writing. In classroom discussions, students were required to follow specific prompts posted on the wall: “I agree (or disagree) with ____ because….” “I have a different opinion….” “I have something to add…” “Can you explain your answer?” In a discussion of the play Death of a Salesman, students responded to the teacher’s question about why the protagonist seemed tired. “Willie Loman seems tired because he is getting old,” said one student. Why? asked the teacher. “The stage direction says he’s 63,” said another student. “That’s old!” Another said, “I agree that his age is listed in the stage direction. But I disagree with your conclusion. I think he is tired because his job is very hard and he has to travel a lot.” Another student joined in: “I disagree with these conclusions. The way Willie Loman describes his job suggests that the kind of work he does is making him tired. It is repetitive. It can feel pointless. It can make you feel exhausted.” The Hochman curriculum quickly produced results. As students developed a better understanding of the parts of speech, their reading comprehension improved dramatically. “Before, I could read, sure,” said one student. “But it was like a sea of words. The more writing instruction I got, the more I understood which words were important.” Students who entered New Dorp in 2009 had an 89 percent pass rate when they took the English Regents as sophomores – up from 67 percent for the preceding class. The Global-History pass rate went from 64 to 75 percent. Regents-repeater classes shrank from five classes of 35 students to two classes of 20, and the number of students in college-level classes went from 148 to 412. And last spring, the school’s graduation rate was 80 percent – up from 63 percent before the writing program was introduced. “In a profoundly hopeful irony,” concludes Tyre, “New Dorp’s reemergence as a viable institution has hinged not on a radical new innovation but on an old idea done better. The school’s success suggests that perhaps certain instructional fundamentals – fundamentals that schools have devalued or forgotten – need to be rediscovered, updated, and reintroduced. And if that can be done correctly, traditional instruction delivered by the teachers already in classrooms may turn out to be the most powerful lever we have for improving school performance after all.”
“The Writing Revolution” by Peg Tyre in The Atlantic, October 2012 (Vol. 310, #3, p. 96-101), http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/
Stephen Anderson
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