symposium
CCC Special Symposium
Exploring the Continuum . . . between High School and
College Writing
The following essays derive from presentations on a panel at the CCCC annual convention in 2007.
An Immodest Proposal for Connecting High School and College
Gerald Graff
University of Illinois at Chicago
Cathy Birkenstein-Graff
University of Illinois at Chicago
We would like to start by spotlighting what we take to be an important challenge suggested in the conference session out of which this essay grew: how
to bridge the gap between high school and college. It seems fair to say that
American high schools and colleges have long been and still are what Christine Farris, in her essay in this symposium section, calls “different cultures,”
and that the disconnections between these cultures undermines the ability of
many students not just to go on to college, but to succeed once they get there.
The problem, then, is before us: how do we get these two cultures to become
one connected culture? And how do we do so without ignoring the necessary
differences between high school and college education?
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In this essay we want to suggest that answering these questions and
improving the state of American education requires educators to identify a
set of basic literacy practices that these two domains have in common, and
then highlight those practices as central in both the high school and college
curricula. In other words, to heal the divide between high school and college,
and ease the often confusing transitions that students experience between
the academic world’s disconnected domains, educators need to identify some
one set of skills or practices that students can hold on to as they move from
one domain to another, that is framed broadly enough to win the assent of
educators from a wide range of subjects, disciplines, grade levels, and types of
educational institutions. To put it bluntly, we believe that healing the divide
between high school and college requires that educators be able to fill in the
blank in the following sentence: “The name of the game in academia is ______,”
and then make good on this bold claim in curricular and pedagogical practice.
Our own candidate to fill in this blank is argument, which has the virtue
of being both deeply comprehensive on the one hand—(Everything, after all, as
the title of a popular writing textbook puts it, Is an Argument)—and yet simple
and accessible on the other.1 On the one hand, argument—which in our view
can be reduced to the art of entering a conversation, of summarizing the views
of others in order to set up one’s own views—is inclusive or comprehensive in
that it is central to every academic department and discipline, from history
to microbiology, where practitioners are required to state their views not in
isolation, but as a response to what others in the field are saying. Argument is
also inclusive in that it involves a broad range of other academic skills such as
statistical reasoning, factual knowledge, interpretative and narrative abilities,
and the ethical sensitivity to fairly represent the views of others, especially
those with whom we disagree. And finally, argumentation, as we define it, is
inclusive in that it taps into the discourses of the workplace and public citizenship, and into non-academic skills that students learn as members of families
and communities at a very young age. On the other hand, at the same time that
argumentation has these deeply inclusive qualities, it is also elegantly simple,
giving students a dependable anchor to hold onto as they move through the
academic world, transitioning not just from high school to college, but from one
discipline to another and from one instructor within each discipline to another.
You, of course, may have a better candidate than argumentation for the
name of the game in academia, in which case we look forward to hearing what
it is. Or, more likely, you may reject the very notion of “the name of the academic game” to begin with, feeling that what teachers want students to learn
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is so diverse and multiple that it cannot be reduced to any one skill or skill set.
In our view, however, as long as academia’s basic nature remains a mysterious
blank—or is presented as a multiplicity of practices with no apparent common
ground—schooling will remain nebulous, overwhelming, and mysterious to
most students. Unless we can formulate a unitary, overarching meta-vision
of what unites us across the academic world, we will continue to make the
experience of schooling a hodge-podge experience of rupture and disjunction
for most students, and continue undermining their ability to see schooling
as a developmental, teleological process in which what is learned in any one
course is reinforced and built upon in the next course rather than contradicted
or undermined. Ultimately, without such an overarching vision of academic
culture, we will abandon the majority of students to an uncoordinated institution in which the left hand has little sense of what the right hand is doing, and
no one is apparently responsible for the experience of schooling as a totality.
Although she does not present it as such, Christine Farris’s essay in this symposium seems to us a telling commentary on the problems that arise when
high school and college fail to articulate any common ground, particularly
when it comes to the ever-important domain of academic discourse or literacy. Because there has been little communication between colleges and high
schools, Farris explains, many high school teachers have no clear sense of the
college-level literacy for which they are preparing their students. Thus, Farris
notes that while college instructors tend to assume (although usually without
saying so explicitly, or with any consistency) that students will master various
disciplinary conventions and enter into scholarly conversations, high school
writing instructors (although again without complete consistency) tend to
encourage students to read literature for enjoyment, to write personal essays,
and to use correct grammar and punctuation. Indeed, Farris explains, many
high school English teachers, holding expressivist views, actually encourage
students to shun the “obfuscated and alienating scholarly discourse” that the
colleges valorize, and to take their personal experiences—rather than academic
subjects and texts—as their central mode of reference. In the end, we agree with
Farris on the need to build “a strong bridge between high school and college
writing,” and we applaud school/college collaboration projects of the kind in
which she is involved at Indiana University.2
We would add, however, that building such a bridge requires finding some
singular game or practice upon which it can be built. We would also add (and
hope that Farris would agree) that many more bridges are needed—that the
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confusing disjunction that Farris describes between high school and college is
but one of the many disjunctions with which students must contend as they
move not only from high school to college but from discipline to discipline in
college, and often even from instructor to instructor in the same discipline.
In Clueless in Academe, one of us, Gerald, has coined the term “the mixed
message curriculum” to highlight these disconnections, showing that because
college courses are generally isolated from each other and instructors rarely
meet to compare notes, those instructors are usually unaware of what their
own colleagues are doing down the hall or across the quad. Consequently our
lessons not only fail to reinforce each other but often conflict, and we are so
isolated in our privatized classrooms that we’re oblivious to these disparities
and contradictions when they occur.
Gregory Jay has called this syndrome the “Volleyball effect,” in which college students are batted from one course and set of expectations to another
as the rules mysteriously change without notice. Thus one instructor wants
students to develop arguments and interpretations of their own, while another discourages it, wanting only evidence that the students grasp a body of
information; one instructor, who remains faithful to the expressivist outlook
common in high school, welcomes personal narrative and the use of “I,” while
another prohibits them. One teacher encourages explicit road-mapping in
student writing (e.g., “In this paper, I will show, first, that . . ., and, second, that
. . .”), while others express irritation at it, invoking a supposed golden rule of
writing that demands doing, not telling. Making matters even more confusing,
instructors are often not explicit about these expectations and prohibitions,
leaving students to guess them, if they can, on their own. No wonder students
often approach us with questions like “Do you want my ideas in this paper or
just a summary of the reading?”3
A minority of high achievers manage to see through these curricular mixed
messages to detect the fundamental critical thinking skills that underlie effective writing in any course or discipline. The majority of students, however,
must resort to the familiar tactic of giving each instructor whatever he or she
seems to want in a given assignment and then doing that again with the next
teacher and assignment and again with the next. For these students, giving
instructors what they want—assuming they can figure out what that is in the
first place—replaces real socialization into academic ways of thinking and
writing. Given the lack of correlation between courses and disciplines, students
come away with the disabling impression that they must start all over again
and reinvent the rhetorical wheel each time they enter a new grade level or
discipline or encounter a new instructor.
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Making matters worse, some academics speak as if curricular disconnection were actually a good thing. According to this logic, “If the perspectives and
styles of academic work students are exposed to as they move through college
are multiple and diverse, so be it. Exposure to such multiplicity will only help
students realize sooner rather than later that all experience is contingent, that,
as the saying goes, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of literacy can be adduced to fit
all situations and purposes.” We would reply that exposing students to multiple perspectives is obviously a good thing, but this multiplicity only tends to
overwhelm students if they are not equipped with the fundamental rhetorical
skills needed to negotiate it.
Taken together, we believe, the mixed-message curriculum and the uncritical valorization of curricular multiplicity give students an exaggerated view of
the differences between the academic disciplines, and thereby make academic
literacy look much harder than it actually is. Ultimately, the mixed-message
curriculum and the valorization of rhetorical contingency prevent students
from seeing the common rhetorical fundamentals needed to negotiate the
different domains not just of high school and college but of the workplace and
public citizenship.
What, then, are these common rhetorical fundamentals that cut across all the
disciplines and grade levels, and that in our view need to be put at the center
of high school and college curricula? What common rhetorical practices and
principles can be used to bridge academia’s many disconnected domains? As
we have already suggested, they can be reduced to one very comprehensive
skill of making arguments, which for us entails not necessarily attacking others but entering a conversation or debate. To enter a conversation you have
to be able to listen carefully to what others around you are saying, be able to
summarize it in a recognizable way, and then use that summary as the motivation or launching pad for your own response—for putting in your own oar, as
Kenneth Burke says in his famous passage likening intellectual exchange to
a never-ending conversation in a parlor. To put it another way, the one move
that can give greater coherence to schooling and connect its dissociated parts
is implicit in the widely touted ideal of critical thinking, which again is for us
reducible to the ability to read and summarize a text (whether of high school
or college-level difficulty) and to offer a relevant and cogent response.
Our remedy, then, for the problem of the mixed-message curriculum and
the disconnect between high school and college is to begin letting students in
on the big secret that (1) the name of the game in academia—and in the public
or working world beyond—is making arguments, and (2), that you play this
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game not by thinking of something true or brilliant to say in a vacuum—by
retreating, that is, to some empty, uninhabited space—but by entering into
conversation with other perspectives, often by challenging and disagreeing
with them. Furthermore, we believe that the only way to let students in on these
academic secrets, to demystify them on a democratic scale for large masses
of students, is by making them common across a broad range of academic
domains: that is, by representing them with enough consistency, redundancy,
and transparency across grade levels, disciplines, and courses that students
can recognize them as fundamental practices rather than one teacher’s (or set
of teachers’) arbitrary preferences among many.
As David Bartholomae points out in his widely read essay “Inventing the
University,” the best student writing
works against a conventional point of view. . . . The more successful writers set
themselves . . . against what they defined as some more naïve way of talking about
their subject—against “those who think that . . .”—or against earlier, more naïve
versions of themselves—“once I thought that . . .” (607)
If Bartholomae is right—and we think he is—then why withhold this crucial
information from students? Why not identify this fundamental move of pushing
off against (which can mean agreeing with as well as disagreeing with) other
ways of thinking for students as clearly and explicitly as possible?4
But let us be clear. In suggesting that high schools and colleges highlight
the common rhetorical conventions that cut across the disciplines, we are not
suggesting that students be excused from negotiating multiple contexts and
contingencies, which are indeed the stuff of contemporary global culture. Nor
are we suggesting that the curriculum become a homogeneous monolith that
erases all difference and complexity. English is different from biology, and both
are different from economics, just as academic writing differs from personal
writing or journalism, and high school writing differs from college writing.
What we are saying, rather, is that students will be able to negotiate these different educational domains only if they are first equipped with the transcendent
rhetorical move of entering into dialogue with other thinkers and writers.
For those who still insist that no such transcendent rhetorical practices
exist in the academic world, we would suggest that they do exist but appear not
to only because they are so pervasive—because, like the air we breathe, we fail
to notice them, and we take them for granted. Indeed, even to oppose the idea
of transcendent academic practices itself requires the type of conversational,
argumentative literacy that we have been defending, since such opposition
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involves grasping the views of others (ours, in this case) in order to motivate
one’s own critical response. Those who are successful in the academic world
and beyond (even as opponents of our views) are successful not because they
learn to do something completely different each time they encounter a new
subject, audience, or situation, or because they all do something different from
each other, but because, often without noticing it, they have mastered this
conventional summary/response pattern. It is precisely these argumentative
conventions, however, that have neither been clearly articulated for students
nor consistently reinforced throughout the high school and college curriculum.
It is precisely these argumentative conventions that are crucial to academic
success but that remain hidden for most students beneath the curriculum’s
disconnected messages. It’s time, then, to develop high school and college
programs that highlight argumentative critical literacy as the key to academic
success at all levels and disciplines.
Notes
1. We are referring to Andrea A. Lunsford’s and John J. Ruszkiewicz’s Everything’s
an Argument.
2. The many summer Bridge Programs that have grown up at colleges and universities across the country offer yet another laudable model for connecting high
school and college writing instruction. These programs are designed to help ease
the transition between high school and college writing for “at-risk” students. The
problem, however, with these programs is that, through no fault of their own, they,
like the composition programs that sponsor them, are often sequestered from the
rest of the college curriculum. Colleges and universities have not done enough to
integrate these programs and their sponsoring composition programs into the
larger university curriculum, or to take seriously their concern with rhetoric and
academic literacy. As a result, these programs may end up adding to the curricular disjunctions that students are exposed to as they move through the academic
system, rather than resolving these disjunctions and helping students negotiate
them, as they are intended to do.
3. For more on this topic, and on Gregory Jay’s comment, see Graff ’s “The Mixed
Message Curriculum,” 62–80.
4. Another compositionist with a similarly conversational view of academic discourse is Irene Clark, who advises thesis and dissertation writers, regardless of
their discipline, as her book’s subtitle suggests, to “enter a conversation” and present their arguments as interventions in a field. Still another is Joseph Harris, who
sees academic writing as “writing that responds to and makes use of the work of
others,” writing in which one “situate[s] what one has to say about texts or issues
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in relation to what others have had to say about them” (578). These statements by
Bartholomae, Clark, and Harris seem to us evidence of an emerging consensus on
the conversational nature of academic discourse.
Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A
Reader. 2nd ed. Ed: Victor Villanueva.
Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers
of English, 2003. 623–53.
in High School.” College Composition and
Communication 61.1 (September 2009).
Elsewhere in this symposium.
Graff, Gerald. “The Mixed Message
Curriculum.”Clueless in Academe: How
Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind.
Burke, Kenneth. “The Philosophy of Literary
New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. 62–80.
Form.” The Philosophy of Literary Form:
Studies in Symbolic Action. 3rd ed.
Harris, Joseph. “Opinion: Revision as a
Berkeley: U of California P, 1941. 1–137.
Critical Practice.” College English 65.6
(July 2003): 577–92.
Clark, Irene. Writing the Successful Thesis
and Dissertation: Entering the ConversaLunsford, Andrea A., and John J. Ruszkiewicz.
tion. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice
Everything’s an Argument, with Readings.
Hall, 2007.
3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004.
Farris, Christine. “Inventing the University
The Nation Dreams of Teacher Proofing: Neglected Expertise and
Needed Writing Research1
Doug Hesse
University of Denver
The No Child Left Behind website defends yearly testing with the avuncular
analogy that “Most Americans see the importance of visiting a physician for an
annual checkup. They also recognize the importance of maintaining a healthy
lifestyle and monitoring their health throughout the year.” The analogy crumbles
on telling levels, from assumptions of how many Americans can afford annual
physicals to differences between tests that people choose for themselves and
those imposed by others. Still, schools that fail to make adequate progress on
federal colonoscopies are eventually subject to “takeover and complete reorganization.” Education Secretary Rod Paige declared that “Anyone who opposes
annual testing of children is an apologist for a broken system of education
that dismisses certain children and classes of children as unteachable.” While
a textbook example of the either/or fallacy, such rhetoric has had Orwellian
effects. Consider fourth-grade teacher Cheryl Krehbiel’s desire to have “the
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courage to learn about my own professional needs from the [testing] data”
(Dept. of Education, Testing).
NCLB is clearly ancient news. So, by now, is the report from the Spellings
Commission on Higher Education that, in fall 2006, called for colleges and
universities to measure learning outcomes in ways “comparable across institutions.”2 Why? To help consumers choose and policymakers decide “whether
the national investment in higher education is paying off ” (Dept. of Education,
Test of Leadership 14). Because most of us in composition studies embrace
using assessment to improve teaching, our quarrel with NCLB and wariness
of Spellings have mostly to do with the nature of tests being wielded and the
use of their results.
As Spellings’s bell tolls faintly for higher education (albeit its sound decaying with the fortunes of the Bush presidency), I raise some questions. What
could composition studies, if asked, say about the current state of reading and
writing among America’s students, both secondary and post? What do—and
should—high school students write and how well? How does that relate to
college writing and expectations there? How might we justify our teaching to
audiences who don’t know or believe what we do, people for whom something
like a literacy cholesterol count is a commonsense goal?
As much as I’d like to wend toward answers inductively and narratively,
I’ll be blunt. As a profession of teachers and writers, we’ve bungled this rhetorical situation. The good news is that we can do better. The bad news is that the
rhetorical situation is framed in ways that vex even our most astute rhetoric.
To make matters worse, our access to that situation is largely blocked.
When I say we’ve bungled, I mean that our responses to calls for evidence
have been stubbornly critical, at best theoretical rather than empirical. They say,
“Show us evidence of learning,” and we say, “Here’s what’s wrong with you for
asking.” I’ll grant that we may be right to follow George Lakoff ’s advice to reject
inappropriate frames rather try to repair them. However, in mainly producing
critique, we come across as aloofly self-interested in ways that education pundits have suspected all along, playing into doubts that teachers can be trusted
and stirring dreams that schooling can be teacher-proofed.
Consider, for example, the widely reported finding from NAEP in February 2007 that even though twelfth-grade reading scores hadn’t changed since
1992, overall high school GPAs had increased one-third of a point (National
Assessment). The most common implication was that teachers were inflating
grades rather than something might be amiss with the test. Or consider the
2006 report that only 51 percent of high school graduates performed at the
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ACT “College Readiness Benchmark for Reading” and how it fuels popular lore
about college grade inflation: how possibly, corporate America wonders, can
students be passing classes when they can’t read (ACT, Reading)?
Now, we’re well justified in our reluctance to feed this kind of informational
beast. After all, the kind of evidence that many policymakers would accept
trickles through pipette-thin theories of learning, literacy, and life in which
the single variable is pedagogy and “real” findings are numbers. So I agree that
critique is warranted. But critique alone can’t do us enough good. Hewing only
to it, we violate a core principal of rhetoric, ignoring external audiences, instead
composing the kind of critical chorales we like to sing to ourselves. We rightly
complain that our expertise is neglected or dismissed, but we fail to present
that expertise in forms valued by those whom we need to value it. Perhaps even
worse, we’re caught in defensive postures, responding to published studies and
reports with protestations rather than data.
I fully admit—and here’s a strong dose of pessimism—that even if we
speak in acceptable forms, our message will be refracted through scratched
and fogged commonsense lenses. For example, so pervasive is the belief that
writing abilities have gone to hell that a robust finding that, for example, students write pretty well would likely be dismissed. The right rhetoric is not just
numbers but the right numbers.
Despite my gloom, I’m convinced we need to play the empirical game, and
we need to play it seriously rather than cynically, as Elbovian believing rather
than doubting. Unless we’re too postmodernly paralyzed to say anything about
writing abilities and the effects of pedagogy, it behooves us to do and report the
kinds of research that attempt just that. That absent data hastens rhetorical
forfeits is hardly a new observation. It has surfaced off and on over the past
decade on the Writing Program Administrators listserv (see, for example, the
thread “Research Question” in November 2001), and Chris Anson has analyzed
the consequences of our failing to support practice with evidence.
Reinvigorating empirical research for strategic ends might mean sublimating our collective personal interests, and I’m not sure we have the collective
heart for it. I’m struck, for example, by the radical difference between Peter Smagorinsky’s Research on Composition and its ostensible predecessors: Hillocks
in 1984 and Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer in 1963. Gone is the attempt to
make comprehensive synthetic statements about the effects of teaching strategies on student writing. Instead is a series of bibliographic essays that thumbnail
a range of studies. The new volume well represents the state of research in
composition studies, as we’ve moved away from any large- or medium- or even
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small-scale research on effects and toward more qualitative research reported
narratively rather than quantitatively. For twenty years many of us have been
pulling Hillocks off the shelf to answer with empirical evidence the question,
for example, “Why aren’t your students doing grammar exercises?” Hillocks will
continue to be our most authoritative source. I contribute as much as anyone
to the inertia against this kind of research, being reluctant to set aside many
of my own personal scholarly interests for the kinds I think we need.
As a result, our profession has had little current research to answer when
someone like the Alliance for Education provides a rather backward-looking
synthesis, Writing Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents
(Graham and Perin). We can counter with the professionally sound eleven
principles explained in the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, but
someone looking for “proof ” of them would be hard-pressed to find it. When
the National Commission on Writing determines, from a survey of business
leaders, that a third of employees in blue-chip corporations “do not possess
adequate writing skills” and speculates that “writing deficiencies may be more
pronounced elsewhere” (14), we can neither confirm nor deny this evaluation.
Or consider one more example, the stunning report from test-maker
ACT that “college [English and writing] instructors place more importance
on basic grammar and usage skills than do high school teachers. Many college instructors express frustration that their students often can’t write a
complete sentence” (ACT National 12). Perhaps, ACT implies, this is because
secondary teachers rank “Topic and Idea Development” much higher than
their college counterparts (7), and those high school teachers are shirking
their real duties. Not only will these pronouncements strike most CCC readers as counter-intuitive, but they also suggest a fairly retrograde curriculum.
Yet, what counter-evidence can we offer that ACT’s findings aren’t accurate or
that the college teachers surveyed aren’t well-qualified (to cite a NCLB term)?
My claim that we need to sponsor more empirical studies (by which I
broadly mean the gathering and analysis of student-generated artifacts) is
primarily rhetorical, not epistemological. That is, I don’t see such studies as
inherently superior. Rather, they support rhetorical strategies that theory, history, or interpretation cannot—and, of course, vice versa.
Recently, CCCC began funding strategic research, awarding some $115,000
to eighteen different projects during 2004–6. In their January 2004 meeting,
the CCCC officers discussed how the lack of certain kinds of research not only
hindered the advancement of knowledge and teaching but also compromised
the organization’s ability to conduct advocacy. The profession’s keen intellectual
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attention has been elsewhere (and importantly so), with obvious effects. If our
collective research gaze has recently been critical, theoretical, interpretive, and
occasionally historical, then someone who uses a different epistemology finds
smaller audiences and less status (not to mention fewer publishing opportunities) within our community. Steep opportunity costs thus discourage some
would-be researchers from empirical studies. The disincentive is compounded
by the dearth of external funding in our field relative to other fields. Believing an infusion of funding and recognition might counter this, we developed
the CCCC Research Initiative. Additionally, in 2005 CCCC formed a Research
Committee, initially chaired by Chuck Bazerman and charged in part with
identifying strategic research areas in composition studies.
The CCCC Research Initiative funded two kinds of work. Syntheses consolidated what the profession has already learned with regard to the teaching
and study of composition, rhetoric, and literacy, especially for public policy
discussions. New investigations were studies imagined to have widespread value
or strategic implications for teaching (CCCC). Two of the funded projects—by
J. S. Dunn and Michael Williamson, and by Kathleen Yancey, Emily Dowd, and
Tamara Francis—had implications for the high school/college connection, but
the officers and executive committee determined we needed to know more.
In 2006, they decided to call for proposals on a single research project
considered of strategic importance, providing enough funding for a relatively
more substantial study. Of what? A series of conversations led to calling for
empirically based descriptions of student writing in high school and college
settings. While there are anecdotal impressions of what high school and college
writing students were being assigned, we don’t have systematic descriptions.
Any discussion of what should be the relationship between writing in high
school and in college would best begin by understanding where things stand
now. After considering several strong proposals, CCCC awarded a $25,000 grant
to support work by Joanne Addison and Sharon McGee. The amount was paltry,
really, barely enough to conduct a strong pilot, developing a methodology that
could be applied more broadly. Nonetheless, it represented a clear commitment
to understanding the high school/college transition.
We need more. I’m wary of those who would imagine high school as
proto-college, who seek to reproduce “college writing” instruction in a setting
hugely unlike college, among students cognitively and circumstantially different from college students. I have even less patience with the blame game
of wondering just what “those high schools” are doing wrong in failing to
prepare students. Some of this apparent disconnect might be the failure on
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both parts to understand each other’s goals and curriculum, some from the
lack of compelling findings on the effects of pedagogies. Consider a modest
declaration from a recent survey that found high school teachers ranking the
interpretation of literature as the fourth most important purpose of writing,
while college writing teachers ranked it no higher than eleventh (ACT National
10). It may be that this difference makes complete sense, that writing about
literature in high school develops students in that setting more strongly than
do other kinds of tasks. It may be that the knowledge, reading, and writing skills
developed in high school writing about literature provide an especially useful
stage for college writing. But we haven’t analyzed enough student writings
either to confirm or (and my money’s here) to debunk it. Consider research I’ve
done with seven hundred freshmen at the University of Denver, who generally
characterize their high school instruction in formalistic terms: the structure
of essays and the paragraphs they contained (Hesse). College professors often
complain about having to teach against the five-paragraph theme or even more
formulaic mutations like Power Writing or the Jane Schaffer Writing Program
(Wiley). Would research show that students taught through one of these approaches perform better or worse in college writing tasks than do students
whose teachers focused on rhetoric or genre?
Among the many studies our profession needs to put before policymakers
are ones that intelligently bridge writing in high school and writing in college.
Some of those might address the question of “how well do students write?”
though that isn’t the only tactic we might take. Space is short, so let me just
sketch five questions that have strategic value for composition studies:
1. Do high school writers who read and write extensively about nonfiction
texts perform differently in college than do those who read and write
extensively about literary texts?
2. What syntactic and rhetorical features emerge—or can emerge—when?
Are certain features such as subordinate constructions or the intentional manipulation of ethos more or less subject to instruction at
different times?
3. What are the relationships between student performance in traditional
essayistic genres and performance in multimodal genres? What is an
effective interplay between these genres in school settings?
4. What factors encourage the most writing practice in high school and in
college? Under what circumstances do students produce—and teachers
read—the most text?
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5. What would eight-year longitudinal studies, high school freshman to
college senior, of significant numbers of students in significant numbers of settings reveal about development of writing abilities as a function of those different settings?
I’m less interested in defending these particular questions than I am in
stressing the need for us to produce strategic research that bridges the high
school and college years. By strategic, I mean research that can be made meaningful to policymakers in a climate smitten and smirched by benchmarking.
Of course, it should inform writing teachers at both levels, too, and with every
new cringe-worthy method packaged by a curriculum consultant, heaven
knows we can use solid grounding. But we need that research done with its
clearest eye toward external audiences. Some people would reasonably worry
about this recommendation, perhaps citing our inability to win a game whose
field we don’t control. After all, so much of the current furor about education
stems from the desire to have a scapegoat in troubling economic times; if
only schools were better, the nation would be wealthier. Still, I think the effort
worthwhile. The absence of this research enables a vacuum too easily filled by
those who would too happily blunder into a terrain they little understand but
would eagerly reshape.
Notes
1. A version of this article was delivered at CCCC, New York, 24 March 2007, in a
session entitled “’It’s All Your Fault’: Who’s Really to Blame for the ‘Literacy Crisis?’”
2. Brian Huot has published a useful summary and critique of The Spellings Commission Report. In June 2007 the commission held a series of hearings around
the country. Paul Bodmer, NCTE Senior Program Officer for Higher Education,
arranged for several CCCC members to receive formal invitations to participate
in those hearings.
Works Cited
ACT. ACT National Curriculum Survey
2005–2006. Iowa City: ACT, 2007. 23 July
2007 <http://www.act.org/research/
policymakers/pdf/NationalCurriculum
Survey2006.pdf>.
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the ACT Reveals about College Readiness
in Reading. Iowa City: ACT, 2006. 23 July
2007 <http://www.act.org/research/
policymakers/reports/reading.html>.
Anson, Chris A. “The Intelligent Design of
Writing Programs: Reliance on Belief or
a Future of Evidence?” Chattanooga, TN:
Council of Writing Program Administrators, 14 July 2006.
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Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones,
and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written
Composition. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.
Report Card.” Press Release. 22 February
2007. 11 May 2009 <http://www.nagb.
org/flash.htm>.
Hillocks, George, Jr. Research on Written
Composition: New Directions for Teaching. Urbana, IL: National Conference on
Research in English and ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading and Communication
Skills, 1986.
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Future of U.S. Higher Education: A Report
of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
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National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges. WritConference on College Composition and
ing: A Ticket to Work—or a Ticket Out.
Communication. “Announcing the 2006–
New York: College Board, 2004.
2007 CCCC Research Initiative Projects.”
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National Council of Teachers of English.
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Writing Study Group. NCTE Beliefs about
the Teaching of Writing. Urbana, IL:
Dunn, J. S., and Michael Williamson. “A
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Study of the Implications for College2004. 11 May 2009<http://www.ncte.org/
Level Literacy Instruction and Aspositions/statements/writing
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Reform Movement.” Preliminary report.
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Smagorinsky, Peter, ed. Research on Comawards/researchinitiative>.
position: Multiple Perspectives on Two
Decades of Change. New York: Teachers
Graham, Steve, and Dolores Perin. Writing
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Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High
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Huot, Brian. “Consistently Inconsistent:
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Wiley, Mark. “The Popularity of Formulaic
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Lakoff, George. “Simple Framing: An
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Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Emily Dowd, and
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Tamara Francis. “‘The Things They Car“High School Students Show No Progress
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No Students Left Behind: Why Reports on the Literacy Crisis from the
Spellings Commission, the ACT, and the ETS Just Don’t Read America’s
Literacy Right
Dennis Baron
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education in America held
a number of hearings in 2005 and 2006 and issued a number of white papers
highly critical of the American college system. The commission bore the name
of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who had been in charge of the
Texas schools under then-governor George W. Bush, and it was stocked with
commissioners and staffers who had implemented the state’s No Child Left
Behind legislation under Governor Bush as well as the federal version of the
NCLB programs under President George W. Bush.
Throughout the year, the controversial commission chair, Charles Miller,
faulted American colleges for failing to teach efficiently and economically, and
Miller repeatedly advocated requiring standardized exit tests for graduating college students so that their schools could be held to the same rigorous standards
that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had imposed on the nation’s elementary and
secondary schools. While the commission’s long-awaited final report proved
tamer than what the higher education community had feared, it still called
for more testing to document exactly what college students had learned, or
failed to learn, in their university years, and it strongly suggested that higher
education in America was not doing its job.
But blaming the schools for perceived shortfalls in literacy is nothing
new. In 2005 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy was already blaming
colleges for failing to teach students to read and write well enough to meet
the demands of the twenty-first-century workforce. Another report that year,
this time from the ACT, showed colleges blaming high schools for not preparing graduates for college-level reading. In turn, high schools, citing the results
of nation-wide No Child Left Behind testing, regularly blame the elementary
schools for student illiteracy.1
These and other responses to standardized assessments of reading and
writing assume that early levels of literacy education don’t address the needs of
subsequent ones. They assume as well a gap between levels—elementary and
high school; high school and college; college and the world of work—a gap that
is in need of bridging. In this essay, I look at ways in which the “blame game”
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plays out in the work of the Spellings Commission and some of the most recent
reports of literacy in crisis. I suggest that if problems do exist with American
literacy, then the solution demanded by most of the commissions and reports,
more testing more often, won’t help to get us where we need to be.
The perennial complaints about the inadequacy of earlier stages of education
all seek to assign blame: after all, the claim goes, the literacy crisis is real, so
it must be somebody’s fault. If we are to believe news reports from the past
century, not to mention accounts from earlier points in human history, readers
have never been up to the demands put on them by texts, and writing skill has
always lagged far behind the imaginary benchmarks that purport to measure
successful composition. In short, our literacy has always been in crisis.
Most earlier crises have been fueled by anecdote and impression: children
were not learning their lessons, not taking school seriously, not writing as well
as earlier generations of students. Blame was placed on the schools, the teachers,
educational methodologies, inadequate funding, too much funding, textbooks,
textbook shortages, parental permissiveness (or strictness), television (or now,
computers), rock ’n’ roll, or the Vietnam War. Some critics even blamed the
1970s crisis in letters on Webster’s Third, the version of Merriam-Webster’s
unabridged dictionary published in 1961.
But believers in today’s failures in reading and writing base their case not
on vague impressions that most of our kids are not as smart as we were, but
on what they take to be the hard data of standardized tests, whether regular
instruments like the SAT, ACT, or the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), or purpose-driven ones like the National Adult Literacy Survey,
the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, or the many state tests devised to
meet the demands of federal No Child Left Behind legislation.
And just as today’s crises are based on facts, not opinions, critics of education seek remedies for deficiencies in America’s literacy that are both testable
and quantifiable. Leading the call for testing, and seeking to extend it up from
K–12 to the university years, was the Spellings Commission.
In September 2005, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed a
Commission on the Future of Higher Education in America to consider just how
well the nation’s colleges were preparing students for the twenty-first-century
workforce and “whether the current goals of higher education are appropriate
and achievable.” As Commission Chair Charles Miller put it, “There is no solid,
comparative evidence of how much students learn in college, or whether they
learn more at one school than another.”
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Miller, a Texas businessman who served as head of the University of Texas
Board of Regents and put in place an elaborate assessment system for that state’s
colleges during the Bush governorship, worked from the paradoxical premise
that higher education in America is both the best in the world and yet in need
of significant remediation. His commission’s charge was to focus attention
on issues of access, affordability, achievement, and accountability. Secretary
Spellings asked the commission to devise a measuring stick to allow objective comparisons of the nation’s two- and four-year public, private, nonprofit,
and for-profit colleges and universities. And early on in his tenure, Chairman
Miller indicated that such a measuring stick should include tests of student
outcomes similar to those mandated by No Child Left Behind legislation. He
further anticipated tying such value-added measures to a radical restructuring
of the college accreditation process.
In the commission’s view, accreditation and outcomes testing went hand
in hand. The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy reported that as
many as one-third of recent college graduates do not qualify as “proficient” in
literacy (NAAL). A commission white paper called this a “shameful outcome”
and lay the blame partly on inadequate instruction and testing and partly on
the current accreditation process, conducted by colleges themselves under the
direction of a number of private regional accrediting agencies. Miller wanted to
replace this system of educational self-monitoring with a National Accreditation Foundation and link each institution’s accreditation to defined learning
outcomes as measured by standardized tests.
The commission also wanted to marshal data furnished by the colleges
so that the Department of Education could produce National College Report
Cards. But unlike those now issued for K–12 schools, education consumers
would be able to sort this college data to create individualized profiles to help
them decide where—and whether—to spend their higher education dollars,
and the nation’s employers would be able to estimate with some precision the
impact of a given college on the brains of their job applicants.
The unspoken promise of the Spellings Commission was that all colleges
would be ranked on a standard scale—meaning it might be necessary to put
colleges that failed to rise high enough in their test scores on watch lists. And
as with our K–12 schools, no students would be left behind, particularly on
testing day. For there seems to be no way to collect the necessary data short of
not one but multiple batteries of standardized tests, tests to give our institutions of higher education the vision and direction that the commission, or at
least Chairman Miller, felt they currently lacked.
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Transcripts of the commission’s meetings show that many of the commissioners saw American higher education as overpriced, unfocused, poorly managed, and seriously under-regulated (Spellings Commission). Many commission
members viewed the variety of colleges and the diversity of their missions with
alarm. The commissioners, many of whom were corporate executives who
would surely resist government interference in their own highly diverse market
endeavors, saw the free marketplace of ideas that constitutes American higher
education as sorely in need of monitoring and regulation. One commissioner
complained, there is no bottom line in education, no way to tell if an institution
had a good year. His unstated message was, “If I ran my business like you run
your university, I’d have to sell out to someone who actually made money, like
the University of Phoenix, and close my doors.”
Of course, he was wrong, though none of the college presidents on the
commission reminded him that even nonprofit organizations have budgets
and measure their annual achievement in dollars—appropriations, grants,
contracts, and gifts received are certainly factors in any institution’s sense
of achievement or failure. But colleges also measure bottom-line “profits” by
published research; by the ability to attract talented high school graduates; by
retention and graduation rates; and by where students go next. And while colleges have become increasingly digital, the size of the library still matters as well.
Scripted testimony before the commission from specially invited speakers confirmed what the majority of commissioners already believed, that the
curriculum needs more math and science, while reading and writing, the cornerstones of literacy, even in technical fields, often went unnoticed. Witnesses
and commissioners rehearsed some other common themes: that more people
need to go to college; that college costs too much; and that students don’t learn
enough once they get there, because traditional education has failed. The model
of teachers chaining students to desks just seemed so twentieth century to the
commissioners, who warmed to the idea of replacing teachers with coaches on
the assumption that the coach is a more user-friendly figure who won’t drive
away the paying customers.
This administrator’s mantra, that we should replace “the sage on the
stage” with “the guide on the side,” makes assumptions about coaching that
seem inapt. Coaching is not a kinder, gentler way to boost either literacy or
performance on the field. Coaches start practice at 6 a.m. when players would
rather be sleeping. They cut players who don’t measure up and punish them if
they break the rules. Coaches make players do their homework and go to bed at
a reasonable time. Coaches do all this using carefully researched motivational
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strategies that involve a lot of yelling and screaming, leavened with the occasional fine or suspension (college sports, after all, should prepare players not
for ivy-covered stadiums but for the real world). And then there are coaches
like Bobby Knight.
But what the commission found attractive in this coaching model is the
knowledge that when the team fumbles, it’s the coach who’s fired. If literacy
levels plummet, the remedy is to get new coaches. The commission also felt
that today’s students need to learn not in stuffy classrooms but free and unfettered on the Web, where they can pay by credit card to take courses at a variety
of nontraditional institutions, work at their own pace, IM their friends, and
download movies while sitting home in their underwear or chugging lattes at
Starbucks. If we are to believe the testimony before the commission, a combination of for-profit schools, online classes, and standardized tests will fix all
the ills of American higher ed. That and an iTunes account.
Chairman Miller was optimistic that new testing instruments developed
by such groups as the Educational Testing Service (ETS) would reveal whether
college improved students’ “critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving, and written communications.” Commission member James Hunt, who
as governor of North Carolina instituted that state’s rigorous school testing
strategy, commented at one commission meeting, “We need to teach creativity
and inventiveness and figure out how to measure it.” Think outside the box; just
draw inside the lines when you fill in the computerized answer sheet.
In the face of a literacy crisis in which our best and brightest students
learn to take tests instead of learning to think, Chairman Miller lauded “new
educational delivery models” such as Western Governors University, an online
“competency-based” school whose president happened to be a commission
member. “Competency-based” is code for “fill-in-the-bubbles.” Also on the
commission was the CEO of Kaplan, Inc., a company that not only makes its
money by prepping students to take standardized tests, but that also runs
Kaplan University, the nation’s first online, for-profit law school, where all that
students need to bring with them to their virtual classes is the digital equivalent
of a no. 2 pencil.
And speaking of no. 2 pencils and the need for more of them to be used
in standardized tests, the SAT was in the news in 2006 for inaccurate scoring
of tests, an error the company blamed on damp answer sheets caused by rainstorms in the Northeast. That seems to be the least of America’s testing woes,
however. Another report, by EducationSector, charges that testing companies
are overextended and under-regulated. Our testers can’t keep up with the 45
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million tests that must be administered to satisfy No Child Left Behind, not to
mention the millions of certification and admissions tests they also field (Toch).
In addition to being of questionable educational value, adding another layer of
these tests at the college level is a recipe for technical disaster.
Among its panoply of tests, the SAT currently administers a national writing sample to college-bound students. Whatever one thinks about the wisdom
of pegging college admissions to a twenty-five-minute essay on a general topic
where poor handwriting may result in low grades but students are not marked
down for getting their facts wrong, at least the scoring of these essays is not
affected by the humidity level of the paper on which students write. But it is
simplistic to think that a second writing sample administered just before graduation, one suggestion that surfaced at a Spellings Commission hearing, will
allow consumers to see in concrete terms the value added by higher education.
Or the value subtracted, for according to the National Assessment of
Adult Literacy, adults with postsecondary degrees saw their prose literacy
actually drop 9 points, while adults with graduate degrees dropped 10 points
for prose literacy and a whopping 14 points for document literacy (NAAL). Not
surprisingly, such figures are producing warnings that college might actually
be harmful to the nation’s intellectual health.
But standardized tests like the NAAL don’t tell the whole story. The 1992
National Adult Literacy Survey that served as a baseline for the NAAL was created and administered for the Department of Education by the Educational
Testing Service (Kirsch, Jungeblut, et al.). It led to headlines screaming that
almost half of America’s grown-ups—41 million people—were functionally
illiterate. But the results of that survey were wrong. When the government’s
experts actually took a minute to check their work, they discovered flaws in
their own testing of literacy (Kirsch, Yamamoto, et al.).
The original analysts had set the pass rate too high. To be proficient, testtakers had to get 80 percent of their answers right, which meant that people
who passed probably knew how to use the skills being tested. But the 80 percent
passing grade also produced an unacceptable number of false negatives: many
people who were marked wrong on the test could probably perform the tasks
in question in nontest situations. They really could figure out where to sign a
check, what a newspaper article meant, or how to take the bus so that they’d get
to work on time. So the government revised its calculations and quietly reported
that not half but only 13 percent of adult Americans demonstrated significant
reading and writing problems. And if all the false negatives were eliminated,
only 5 percent of the adult population had really serious literacy issues.
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Like its predecessor, the NAAL doesn’t give the whole picture. Using the
same test as the NAAL, a new study commissioned by the Pew Charitable Trusts
entitled “The Literacy of American College Students” finds that current college
students have significantly higher literacy levels than adults who had previously
received a college degree (Baer, Cook, and Baldi). Two studies, using the same
test, come up with conflicting data. The Department of Education has yet to
weigh in on that paradox, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they concluded that
further testing was warranted.
But more tests are not the answer. If we’ve been testing reading for well
over a century and we still haven’t figured out how to measure national literacy
levels accurately, how are we going to come up with dependable value-added
tests for college? Even if we could develop such instruments, I think that neither
the benefits nor the downsides of college can be quantified and translated into
the kinds of charts and graphs that comparison shoppers will find useful. Sure,
I want to know the likelihood that an applicant will be admitted; how many
students drop out before graduation; and the campus crime stats. But I don’t
see the use of dividing sentence complexity by cost per credit hour to produce
a National Literacy Intelligence Quotient. Yes, I’m exaggerating, but my point
is this: We don’t know how to produce—we shouldn’t even want to produce—a
National Report Card for postsecondary institutions that’s comparable to the
ways we rate our K–12 schools.
Those user-friendly DOE report cards won’t really show the public what
college will do for students, who won’t see much that they can’t already get
from commercially available college guides. But the rankings envisioned by
the Department of Education will give education consumers the illusion that
national education standards exist, when in fact they don’t, and they’ll give
consumers and legislators the false impression that choosing college can be
as straightforward as choosing what toaster to buy.
In its final report the Spellings Commission backed away from a plan to implement college testing, but almost every other recent report has emphasized the
need to extend our testing to find out who to blame for educational failures
and to measure how well the situation is being corrected.
For example, the Commission on No Child Left Behind, chaired by former
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson and former Georgia
governor Roy E. Barnes, published “Beyond No Child Left Behind: Fulfilling
the Promise to Our Nation’s Children.” That report, funded by such prestigious
education supporters as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie
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Corporation, and the MacArthur Foundation, consists of a 200-page celebration of the impact on our schools of No Child Left Behind legislation, followed
by warnings that the United States isn’t competitive internationally, and that
there are racial disparities in student achievement scores.
The solution, according to this commission: make teachers effective; institute more accountability measures in schools; and ensure more accurate data
collection. Though the report recommends that districts be allowed to choose
their own curricula free of Department of Education influence, it essentially
calls for strict application of NCLB standards and testing.
The ACT agrees that despite what are already massive testing efforts,
we need still more tests. In its pessimistic “Reading between the Lines: What
the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading,” ACT reports that only
51 percent of high school graduates met its College Readiness Benchmark for
Reading, a measure designed to demonstrate students’ readiness to handle the
reading requirements for typical credit-bearing first-year college coursework.
The ACT warns us that student readiness for college-level reading is at its lowest point in more than a decade. Although scores for nine-year-olds have risen,
scores for seventeen-year-olds have dropped.
A second ACT report, “Ready to Succeed: All Students Prepared for College and Work,” finds that state standards also fall short of college readiness
standards. If students are failing to read, the schools must be to blame. ACT’s
answer: more reading in high schools and, of course, more ACT testing.
Not content to let ACT take the high ground on literacy report writing, the ETS gives us “A Culture of Evidence: Postsecondary Assessment and
Learning Outcomes” (Dwyer, Millett, and Payne). The ETS report argues that
“postsecondary education today is not driven by hard evidence of its effectiveness. Consequently, our current state of knowledge about the effectiveness of
a college education is limited. The lack of a culture oriented toward evidence
of specific student outcomes hampers informed decision-making by institutions, by students and their families, and by the future employers of college
graduates” (1).
In order to find evidence of specific student outcomes, ETS wants to
test “Workplace readiness and general skills; domain-specific knowledge and
skills; soft skills, such as teamwork, communication and creativity; and student engagement with learning” (1). The report sounds like it was written by
the Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education in America. The
Spellings Commission has added its own report to the mix, one that recommends aligning the high school and college curriculums (Kirst and Venezia).
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As I mentioned earlier, there is one report that paints a more optimistic
picture of the impact on literacy of higher education in America. The Literacy
of America’s College Students (Baer, Cook, and Baldi) looks at the same data
that the National Assessment of Adult Literacy did. But instead of finding that
college actually detracts from literacy ability, this survey concludes that the
average prose, document, and quantitative literacy of college students exceeds
that of adults. It concludes as well that college seems to erase many of the gender
differences in literacy performance we traditionally assume, and that literacy
among college students, even those for whom English is a second language, is
actually higher than literacy rates among noncollege, English-only speakers.
With the exception of this one last bright spot, all the reports on today’s literacy
crisis assume
• that literacy tests reveal declines in literacy ability
• that there is a disconnect between high school and college
• that smoothing over the high school–college gap will make high school
students ready for college and the workplace
But I disagree.
I believe that higher education must always be accountable to its various
constituencies, and that despite Secretary Spellings’s claims to the contrary,
higher education already produces reams of statistics to demonstrate our
strengths and shortcomings. But the reports that call for all testing, all the
time, have got it wrong.
Adding standardized testing to the existing mix presumes a standard
body of skills and knowledge that is being tested. In writing, this is certainly
not the case. I don’t think it’s true in reading either. Valid assessments of literacy practices are those that are situated in actual in-school and out-of-school
contexts, not those gleaned from asking students to pick out grammatical
errors in a sentence or to reorder the sentences in paragraphs that exist only
on standardized tests or in study guides for taking those tests.
I used to think that my colleagues in science and engineering placed great
faith in the ability of standardized tests to measure their students’ quantitative
literacy, while those of us in the humanities were the skeptics who saw talents
and flaws in our students that no test could ever reveal. But it seems that the
numbers really do lie. My sci-tech friends complain about the false positives
of high-scoring students who can calculate the point of impact of two trains
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leaving their respective stations at different times and traveling at different
velocities along the same track, but who can’t figure out what made the trains
embark on this suicidal mission in the first place. Recently I complained to a
colleague in electrical engineering about our many high-scoring students who
can’t read with insight or write convincingly. He replied in surprise, “These
test scores are meaningless to me. I thought you people in English used them
for something.”
EducationSector warned in 2006 that standardized tests are being increasingly dumbed-down to meet federal testing demands, and that as more and
more students are tested, schools turn to fill-in-the-bubble tests rather than
essays or problem-solving exercises to control grading costs.
Not only are tested subjects being tested poorly, but other subjects are
suffering as well. The Center on Education Policy reports that while schools
have increased the amount of time devoted to reading and math, the subjects
covered by NCLB tests, half of the nation’s schools have significantly reduced
classroom time devoted to science, history, art, and music. While the Department of Education denies that NCLB has a negative effect on curriculum, or
that it forces anyone to teach to the test, the Center’s president, Jack Jennings,
insists that “What gets tested is what gets taught,” and during the five years
that NCLB has been in place, time spent on subjects that used to be part of the
educational core but are not among the NCLB’s 2 Rs (reading and ’rithmetic)
has decreased 31 percent (Center on Education Policy).
This makes it even more likely that scores on standardized tests won’t give
us as education providers the information we need about our students, either
when they come to us or when they leave. And it means that no National College
Report Card based on exit testing can hope to give education consumers the
information they need to judge the effectiveness of their tuition and tax dollars.
But there’s a more important reason why literacy tests don’t tell us what
we need to know about students’ actual reading and writing performance. In
focusing our attention on tests, we ignore the most basic nature of literacy:
its dependence on context. Literacy is more than a skill that can be deployed
in any circumstance and measured at will. There is no one way to write, no
just-add-water formula for instant prose. Every writing task presumes many
ways to get from A to B, from start to finish, some of them successful and others not so successful.
The assumption that high school writing should somehow prepare students for college, that one level of writing leads directly to the next, is also
flawed. Nor do the perennial complaints about the inadequacy of earlier stages
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of writing education necessarily mean that either students or their teachers
are failing. Instead, the feeling that our writers are not prepared may be read
as a sign that each stage in the writer’s life has its own criteria for success, that
each time writers enter a new part of the writing-education cycle they—we—
become beginners who need to learn the ropes and master the conventions
before making the grade.
It is perhaps the most frustrating part of the writer’s lot that just when we
think we’ve got some expertise, we’re faced with a new kind of task that forces
us to learn to write all over again.
I agree that there is a gap between high school and college writing. Calling
for high schools to anticipate what colleges really want assumes that colleges
know what they want when it comes to writing. But those of us who teach
writing in colleges have come up against the reality that we ourselves don’t
really agree on what students need to write in college, or how to teach them to
write that way—since there is no “that way” to teach that will be true in every
circumstance, or even in most circumstances.
Saying I’m teaching you to do this now so you will be successful later on
is about as convincing, and as useful, as the math teachers who used to tell us
we had to learn algebra or geometry so we could make change and balance our
checkbooks when we grew up. They had no idea that someone would invent
Quicken, and in any case, the future was too far away for it to motivate us.
So maybe instead of focusing on erasing the gap, whether through standardized tests or improved methodologies, we should start focusing on working
with our students where they are. True, we can’t even agree with one another
on what writers need to know to be successful now, let alone in the future.
And while we can all recognize whether or not a particular piece of writing
is successful or how to improve it, we know, though we’re reluctant to admit
it, that individual readers may have sharply divergent ideas about the success
or failure of a piece of writing. In writing, as in movies and music, what I like,
you may hate.
With that in mind, successful writing instruction should focus more on
the immediate contexts of writing, the immediate demands being made on
writers, rather than a hypothetical future whose demands neither teachers
nor students can successfully anticipate. It should focus as well on the needs
and demands of a real, individual reader, not those of a supposed or idealized
audience. That is the best way to ensure that students aren’t left behind, when
it comes to writing.
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Note
1. This essay combines elements of two talks that were delivered at two recent
CCCC Conferences: “No Students Left Behind: Literacy Measurements and the
Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education in America” (Chicago,
2006), and “It’s All Your Fault: Who’s Really to Blame for the Literacy Crisis?” (New
York City, 2007).
Works Cited
ACT. Reading between the Lines: What the
ACT Reveals about College Readiness
in Reading. 2006. <http://www.act.org/
research/policymakers/reports/reading.
html>.
. Ready to Succeed: All Students
Prepared for College and Work. 2006.
<http://www.act.org /research/policy
makers/pdf/ready_to_succeed.pdf>.
Baer, Justin D., Andrea L. Cook, and
Stéphane Baldi. The Literacy of American College Students. Washington, DC:
American Institutes for Research, 2006.
Kirsch, Irwin S., Ann Jungeblut, Lynn
Jenkins, and Andrew Kolstad. Adult
Literacy in America: A First Look at the
Findings of the National Adult Literacy
Survey. Washington, DC: National Center
of Education Statistics, U.S. Dept. of
Education, 1993. <http://nces.ed.gov/
pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=93275>.
Kirst, Michael W., and Andrea Venezia. Improving College Readiness and Success
for All Students: A Joint Responsibility
between K–12 and Postsecondary Education. Washington, DC, 2006. <http://
www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/
hiedfuture/reports/kirst-venezia.pdf>.
Center on Education Policy. Choices,
Changes and Challenges: Curriculum and National Assessment of Adult Literacy
Instruction in the NCLB Era. Washington,
(NAAL). Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of
DC: Center on Education Policy, 2007.
Education, 2003. <http://nces.ed.gov/
<http://www.cep-dc.org>.
naal>.
Dwyer, Carol, Catherine M. Millett, and
Spellings Commission Reports and Papers.
David G. Payne. A Culture of Evidence:
2005–6. Washington, DC, 2005–6.
Postsecondary Assessment and Learning
<http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/
Outcomes. Princeton, NJ: Educational
list/hiedfuture/index.html>.
Testing Service, 2006. <http://www.ets.
Thompson, Tommy, and Roy E. Barnes.
org/Media/Resources_For/Policy_
Beyond No Child Left Behind: Fulfilling
Makers/pdf/ cultureofevidence.pdf>.
the Promise to Our Nation’s Children.
Kirsch, Irwin S., Kentaro Yamamoto, Norma
Washington, DC: Aspen Institute, 2007.
Norris, Donald Rock, Ann Jungeblut,
Toch, Thomas. Margins of Error: The Testand Patricia O’Reilly. Technical Report
ing Industry in the No Child Left Behind
and Data File User’s Manual for the 1992
Era. Washington, DC, 2006. <http://
National Adult Literacy Survey. Washingwww.educationsector.org/research/
ton, DC: National Center for Education
research_show.htm?doc_id=346734>.
Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2001.
<http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/
pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2001457>.
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Inventing the University in High School
Christine Farris
Indiana University
Some years back there was a piece in the satirical newspaper The Onion that
you may have seen: “Freshman Term Paper Discovers Something Totally New
about Silas Marner.” Freshman Lori Durst’s three-page paper #1 had been found
to contain “a revolutionary insight into a key piece of symbolism in the novel
which has previously escaped scholars.”
“You have to understand, many of us have read Silas Marner 10, 20 times,” the
professor said. “Maybe we had a vague sense that this adorable, golden-tressed
waif who comes along to redeem Silas’ soul could have something to do with the
gold coins that, prior to her arrival, had been the focus of Silas’ life. But we, and
apparently every reader before Ms. Durst, simply dropped the ball.” (“Freshman”)
Lori Durst’s paper comparing the golden curls and the gold coins perhaps
calls to mind the old-school approach of professors who expected the goods
they delivered in lecture returned to them undamaged in student papers, or
maybe our own high school appropriation of literary scholarship. Most of us
are probably laughing too hard to think this swipe at the expectation that
first-year students will somehow stake out original territory in their analyses
has anything to do with our teaching—say, the extent to which we help a Lori
Durst find a way to locate herself, as Bartholomae would say (627), in terms of
the boatload of criticism on Silas Marner that has preceded her.
While most compositionists would claim that the business they’ve chosen is that of demystifying academic discourse for students coming from high
school, some would claim that the field’s refusal, however theoretically justified, to reach consensus on what constitutes effective writing now renders that
business ineffectual if not obsolete (Smit). Gerald Graff maintains in Clueless in
Academe that the failure of higher education to clarify the “culture of ideas and
arguments” that it takes for granted is what hampers the preparation efforts
in the secondary schools (3). If Graff is right that it is pedagogically possible
to make visible “this game that academia obscures” (3), and if we want to do
more to prepare high school students and ease their transition from secondary
to postsecondary work—a task at the top of the to-do lists of the U.S. Department of Education and various corporate foundations—then why don’t we
introduce college-level writing skills earlier in high school? Why not just teach
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college—not college prep—courses in high school? Because access for teachers
and students to the rhetorical moves characteristic of academic disciplines,
while desirable, is not a simple matter. Work with texts and ideas that leads
to something other than the lockstep golden curls = golden coins term paper
comes about, not as a result of sharing syllabi or formulae, but from a certain
kind of inquiry in a course—which we hope the writing that students ultimately
produce will reflect. Actual participants in discourse communities, as Anne
Beaufort claims, know “how to frame the inquiry and what kind of questions
to ask or analytical frameworks to use in order to ‘transform’ or inscribe documents with new meaning(s)” (19). Fostering that college-level inquiry in high
school takes more than a workshop or an act of the state legislature.
As director of composition at Indiana University, I also serve as liaison to
the Advance College Project (ACP), a twenty-five-year-old cooperative program
between IU and more than a hundred high schools in Indiana, Michigan, and
Ohio. The program, with which I have worked for seventeen years, offers college
credit to seniors who qualify for enrollment in IU courses offered in their high
schools by teachers who participate with IU faculty in a summer seminar, fall
and spring colloquia, and classroom site visits. I run the seminars that introduce the teachers to current methods in college composition and strategies for
teaching the IU English Department’s first-year course emphasizing analytical
reading and writing.1 I have nothing but praise for the capacity of high school
teachers to reflect upon and change their practices, but I don’t lose sight for
a moment of the extent to which we teach, despite common textbooks and
syllabi, not just in different locations, but in different cultures.
In decades past, K–12 and college teachers shared in the wisdom of
shifting much of their emphases from the structure and correctness of written products to stages of the writing process. Tenets of the process approach
advocated in college, particularly the value placed on the personal narrative as
opposed to lifeless “school writing,” were consistent with the decentered classroom philosophy familiar to secondary teachers from their methods courses
and inservice workshops. High school and college courses that centered on
replicating the stages of the writing processes of successful writers included
constant reflection on one’s writing practices. Connections between teachers’
writing and pedagogy aimed at improving student writing remain a part of
college composition lore—thanks to prolific and influential teacher-writers
like Peter Elbow, Donald Murray, and Wendy Bishop—but perhaps receive
greater emphasis now in K–12 initiatives like the National Writing Project, the
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longevity of which can be attributed in part to a model that encourages teachers
to become reflective writers themselves and thus practice what they preach.
While many secondary teachers of writing have melded prewriting,
drafting, and peer review easily enough with current trends and a lingering
emphasis on the modes of exposition, some have remained lifelong expressivists, refining their principles in opposition to what they, like some postsecondary compositionists, view as obfuscated and alienating scholarly discourse
(Bishop; Hairston).
As college composition programs turned to an emphasis on the rhetorical
moves of writing across the curriculum in an effort to extend access to academic discourse, the bridge between high school and college English became
more of a challenge to cross. Surprising, perhaps, to those members of the
university culture for whom, in theory, writing as a contextual and intertextual
act goes without saying, many high school teachers still work comfortably out
of process and current-traditional lore. Their identity and authority may lie
primarily in the encouragement of self-discovery through reading and writing,
a love of literature, and, in some cases, the maintenance of form and correctness—contrary to the findings of the ACT survey of high school and college
teachers’ expectations and practices.2
In the years following a shift in our concurrent-enrollment course toward
reading and writing across the disciplines, we found that form and correctness—especially proper quotation, paraphrase, and citation of sources—often
received more attention than students’ engagement with ideas. When we would
visit classrooms, we encountered lively discussions of issues, but not always
analysis of the language, assumptions, and implications of the arguments in
the readings that addressed those issues. Teachers using suggestions from
Writing Analytically (Rossenwasser and Stephen) for generating more complex
claims about a text or an image were sometimes tempted to assign heuristics as
prompts. An assignment to write a critique might morph into the “It seems to
be about X, but it is really about Y” paper. Consequently, the academic moves we
thought we were unpacking became formulae for papers—what Ann Berthoff
once called “a set of muffin tins into which the batter of thought is poured” (744).
Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein identify similar useful academic
heuristics in their book “They Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic
Writing. These moves can make visible to students what some may well intuit
on their own, but, as I am sure Graff and Birkenstein would agree, any such
templates for writing should be the result of—rather than take the place of—
inquiry typical of disciplines and professions. Reliance on formulae is perhaps
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an understandable result of high school teachers’ long-time position vis-à-vis
the university. Rather than create actual opportunities themselves that socialize students in the university’s habits of mind, teachers of concurrent enrollment classes, perhaps more familiar with “college prep” courses, may resort
instead to “brokering” (Sperry) for the university, having students write more
for the purpose of admonishing them about the expectations of future college
professors, who undoubtedly will grade harder and care less. In the brokering
position, teachers are more likely to nail down format and rules and oversimplify the distinction between personal and academic writing. As a result, their
students may copy and paste facts and received opinions into longer but no
more analytical papers, unable to locate themselves in terms of the arguments
of others or to generate earned positions of their own.
Making visible academic writing’s common moves, like the “X/Y thesis”
or “They Say/I Say,” is certainly a good way to complicate the personal writing/
term paper binary. In workshops for secondary teachers, this demystification
of what academic writing does, along with the sharing of model syllabi, assignments, and actual student papers that successfully make complex analytical
claims backed by evidence, goes a long way toward revising old notions of
“good college writing” and the role experienced teachers have in its production.
However, I believe we also need to anchor the demystification of academia in a
collaborative professionalization, not just in lip service “articulation with high
schools,” if our ultimate goal is the improvement of students’ preparation for
college writing.
Let me return to the notion that effective teachers of writing share their
own practices with their students. While some may be continuing work on
advanced degrees, many secondary teachers have not had recent opportunities to engage in scholarly conversations as readers and writers. While most of
the high school instructors with whom we work jump at the chance to teach
something new, some are reluctant to extend their authority beyond what they
consider their traditional area of English. They may have reservations about
teaching nonfiction readings from cross-curricular anthologies or assembling
their own thematic units, believing they are not the authorities on issues like
cyber identity and public space that they are on Silas Marner.
I realize that when I encourage high school teachers (or the instructors on
campus) to put inquiry at the center of their composition course and ask them
to make the students’ writing reflect that inquiry, I am inventing a university
also, not the one with mean graders who never want to see a personal pronoun,
but an ideal one that positions students and teachers in dialogue with experts
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and critics in ways that we imagine our colleagues do when they assign writing,
present at conferences, or write for journals in their fields. This ideal “academic
writing” conducted in “discourse communities,” of course, has more to do, as
Joseph Harris reminds us, with shared habits and references than with people
who actually ever meet (101).
Nevertheless, we can build better bridges from high school to college when
high school teachers see their roles as not so much about inoculating students
against future writing tasks or forecasting success or failure but making the
next stage in students’ intellectual curiosity and development possible.
To that end, in the summer seminar for high school teachers, we have
been emphasizing how to get students invested in the sort of inquiry that
will generate papers with some intellectual work to do. Recalling the National
Writing Project practice-what-you-preach model, if we want the teachers to
invite college-level inquiry, we have to invite it too, instead of acting as brokers
ourselves—merely telling, rather than showing, how “the moves” work.
While we demonstrate how instructors of undergraduate courses might
juxtapose primary and secondary texts to construct the conversations that
students will be invited to join, we have become more interested in having
teachers work directly with the rhetorical moves and analytical tools—deciding how one expert’s ideas might test, extend, or contradict another’s on issues
like obesity, obedience, or right to privacy.
Now we spend more workshop time tracing the original impulses behind
the sort of scholarly investigation that eventually produces the claims student
writers typically appropriate. We first practice on puzzling phenomena that
invite both expert and non-expert interpretation. After gathering and analyzing
“evidence,” I might ask teachers how they would explain the significance of a
store like Urban Outfitters or the popularity of a reality show like The Biggest
Loser. One of our goals has been to shake loose the often-assigned trend analysis research paper from the inevitable “Three Causes” format. Rather than just
introducing new expert sources as theoretical lenses to be applied or mandating
the structure of the paper (“The Biggest Loser seems to be about individual will
and hard work, but it’s also about cutthroat strategic competition”), we find it
helpful to practice the behaviors that social scientists or media critics might
employ when they are still asking why something is happening or working the
way it does. We introduce sociologist Howard S. Becker’s invention techniques
for thinking not so much about the “causes of a trend,” but, ideally, what conditions would have to be in place for a particular trend to take hold. As a result,
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teachers are more likely to see the reasons for research (both that of academics and students) when they themselves raise questions and possibilities that
invite further investigation.
A strong bridge between high school and college writing has to be built
on teachers’ and students’ critical investigation of phenomena and ideas—not
just on teaching to a mandated set of outcomes or to a standardized test that
legislators believe will ensure college success. Further professionalization of
teachers should also include more reflective practice and greater access to
recent work in composition and literary studies—disciplinary conversations
teachers can join for real. Several years ago we began awarding fellowships that
permit concurrent-enrollment high school teachers to return to the university
for additional graduate courses that will strengthen their teaching of collegelevel English courses. An enhancement grant for “Bridging High School and
College Writing” also enabled us to design a collaborative structure for reflection and research that we hope to continue: the integration of (1) a graduate
course in composition pedagogy for English graduate students and returning high school teachers with (2) an advanced expository writing course for
undergraduate preservice English teachers, and, when possible, (3) multiple
sections of first-year composition taught by the university instructors and the
high school teachers taking the graduate-level course.
Don’t get me wrong—I am aware of the attractiveness of concurrentenrollment initiatives for school administrators and lawmakers in search of an
easy fix. Despite state, federal, and corporate foundation pressure to address a
very real disconnect, merely increasing the presence of concurrent-enrollment
and Advance Placement (AP) courses is not enough to strengthen the bridge
between high school and college English and to ensure greater access to college for all students. Rather than forfeit responsibility, however, for what is
becoming a matter of increased accountability, we need to take more of a role
as a discipline in this alignment, sharing what we know in a professional collaboration with high schools.
Notes
1. For a fuller description of the Indiana University dual-credit composition course,
see my chapters in Yancey and in Hansen and Farris.
2. A survey of high school and college instructors conducted by ACT in 2005–06
found a gap between what high school teachers emphasize in college prep courses
and what college instructors say students need to know in English/writing, math,
reading, and science. Survey results suggest that colleges want students to have
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mastered fewer but more in-depth fundamental skills, while high schools are
covering a broader range of topics. With regard to English/writing, surprisingly,
“[p]ostsecondary instructors ranked mechanics more frequently among the most
important group of skills for success in an entry-level, credit-bearing postsecondary
English/writing course, while high school teachers’ rankings of these strands were
generally lower” (“Aligning” 5). However, the survey also found that while secondary
reading instruction generally stopped at the ninth grade, postsecondary teachers
want to see more “focus on reading strategies with complex texts” (6).
Works Cited
“Aligning Postsecondary Expectations and
High School Practice: The Gap Defined.”
Policy Implications of the ACT National
Curriculum Survey Results, 2005–2006.
<http://www.act.org/research/policy
makers/pdf/NCSPolicyBrief.1>.
Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can’t Write: Studies
in Writer’s Block and Other Composing
Process Problems. Ed. Mike Rose. New
York: Guilford, 1985, 134–65. Reprinted
in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader,
2nd ed. Ed. Victor Villanueva. Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English,
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Farris, Christine. “Minding the Gap and
Learning the Game: Some Thoughts on
the Differences That Matter between
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“Taking Care of ” Business. Ed. Kristine
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Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: “Freshman Term Paper Discovers SomeA New Framework for University Writing
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You’re Doing It. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
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Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible?
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Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and
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National Writing Project. “Because Writing
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<http://www.writingproject.org/press
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