Why Writing is Dead in Public Schools

Because it's the other half of literacy.

Back in 2006, I was teaching full-time while enrolled in a Masters of English program at a top five California public university. I was surprised when the esteemed, aged head of the English department sought me out and asked me to speak informally at a meeting of his faculty. I accepted because he wasn’t the kind of guy to sandbag a student and followed him to the meeting room.

When I was seated comfortably and his team had assembled, he sat on the edge of the long walnut conference table and said simply, “Our freshmen enter with an average GPA of 4.3. Please help us understand why they can’t write.”

At the time my answer was not very nuanced, but I offered it. I shrugged my shoulders and told him the truth: “We don’t ask them to.”

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While the infrequency of writing was (and still is) a big part of the issue, it’s not the core of the problem. However, I wouldn’t recognize it for what it was for another four years, and only because I switched from teaching English to teaching History.

I’m a bookworm with a strong proclivity to hypermasculine novels set at the height of the Cold War. I’m the granddaughter of a naval aviator busted down from squadron leader three separate times during WWII due to his inability to submit to authority, but talented enough to be recruited and handsomely remunerated for years of illegal black ops in places where the US government was shameless enough to pretend plausible deniability even in the clear aftermath of the explosion of American-made munitions. And I am fascinated by the Brain Trust policies that turned a bad recession into the decade-and-change-long Great Depression, threatening the Constitution in the offing.

My principal at the time made the grave mistake of turning me loose on unsuspecting 11th graders who had thus far in their academic careers been responsible for knowing exactly nothing in any of their classes that couldn’t be guessed at on a multiple-choice test.

Frankly, I blindsided them and shocked myself by teaching that class like a whirling dervish. I pulled from all my knowledge, little as it was back then. I collated multiple levels of primary sources on major historical events from multiple books I bought used on eBay in desperation when I found out the campus resource room only had the Teacher’s Edition of the history textbook. The sheer force of my enthusiasm and their growing knowledge-base ensured most kids, disaffected, at-risk, 1st- and 2nd-generation Americans, actually read what I gave them. They’d sometimes even bring up things they were curious about the next day.

Maybe they just did it because I was different—I clearly cared—and they didn’t want to let me down. Maybe they just wanted the show to go on. Whatever it was, I machine-gunned information at them and they lapped it up. The boys loved the wars, the weapons, the evolution of battle tactics. The girls loved the human stories, the suffering, the loss. None had come from war-torn nations except a handful of Afghan refugees, but the Depression and wars and Jim Crow and and the 60’s-peace-dope-love reaction to the TradCon, Normalcy-First 50s grabbed them by the throat and wouldn’t let them go.

They were awed by Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Langston Hughes and the heroes — students and teachers alike — in segregated school houses. They saw the Okies in themselves. Their brothers and cousins were just like the boys who landed on Normandy and Iwo. They loved 1950s film of the clean, vibrant American cities of the Midwest and bubble-gum rock. Vietnam gripped them in ways I didn’t expect. They were fascinated by Vietcong guerrillas, the Huey, napalm, and Agent Orange. They took apart “Fortunate Son” and put it back together like a kid who wants to understand exactly how his favorite toy works.

All the while, I had done what seemed natural to me but was rare in other classrooms. I asked them to write about it all. Summarize a primary source. Compare two sources on the same topic; what do we learn from both? A People’s History or A Patriot’s History: who wins? Tell me who the good guys in WWII were, if you think there were any. What caused the Great Depression? Did the hope offered by the New Deal outweigh its ineffectiveness? Now that you know what you know, how does Of Mice and Men resonate with you? What about Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 and Helmet for My Pillow? What the hell was Dylan (and Hendrix) on about in “All Along the Watchtower”?

It was weird. They really could write. I hadn’t seen that before, and we had a history. I had worked with these same kids in English and poured my heart into lessons meant to unpack literature for them, but it just didn’t stick the same way. They dutifully went home and read, but they just couldn’t connect to the great western stories. They couldn’t understand Maycomb and never got Scout’s jokes. They didn’t see the connection between British public school boys and tyranny. They liked Animal Farm all right, but even though I shared my statistically-aberrational knowledge of Stalin’s regime before we ever opened the book, my students struggled to uncover any symbolic meaning, though they universally took great offense to Boxer’s unjust end.

Yes, they listened while I explained metaphors and similes and unreliable narration. Of course I explained allusions to other great works, but then I had to explain the significance of the great works too but there wasn’t enough there there to hook even my most motivated, attentive students. Their ignorance of the source material that motivated the great authors to put pen to paper was an Everest-sized obstacle. That knowledge belonged to me, not to them, and there just wasn’t enough time to transmit both sides of the equation.

Enter history. While I’m aware this is up for debate as it pertains to current practice in U.S. schools, history taught in junior high and high schools centers around facts. It is chronological. The names students hear in class are names they have heard in the past. McKinley the mountain becomes McKinley the man. The $1 Sacajawea coin becomes a remarkable 15-year-old woman. Their teddy bears point them to Teddy Roosevelt. The name New Mexico suddenly makes total sense. Everything that happens can be pointed out on a map. As soon as you begin any discussion of the 20th century, photographs of real life abound. Film becomes available. Students recognize skylines and monuments and natural landmarks. America is so young, people alive in the 19th and early 20th centuries don’t seem all that different to us.

In other words, in a U.S. History students bring certain bits of foundational knowledge that allow them to hold tight to new information. Neuroscientists sometimes refer to these bits of data as neural hooks. This made U.S. History was way stickier, learning-wise, than English.

In history, knowledge alone can express competence and that, I believe, is what made students willing to write and what made their writing, more often than not, competent. They were careful and honest. Where English students tried to BS their way through five paragraphs, history students would just stop writing when they ran out of relevant information. For the first time my students were not just writing to fill a page, but dealing thoughtfully with a meaningful question. I taught in what my students lovingly referred to as “ghetto schools” so while their responses were riddled with grammar, mechanics, and spelling errors their answers were occasionally excellent, sometimes good, and mostly adequate.

This brings me back to the title of this essay and its subheading, “writing is the other half of literacy”. I’ll make this simple because it seems to be something we have lost hold of in American public schools. Before students can answer a question, they have to have an answer. Teachers mostly realize now that students don’t know anything about their subject, even after they’ve taught it. What a teacher often fails to see — and what no one has any real impetus to uncover — is that if he is still trying to instruct students directly, it’s not necessarily that his instruction is faulty, it’s that students are bringing no foundational knowledge to his subject.

And then there’s the whole other Oprah of the move towards discovery or experiential learning, an outworking of the anti-human philosophy that there is no objective truth, only personal preference. Nobody is writing anything useful in those classes. High schoolers have learned how to turn essays in that say nothing but fill the page requirement under the frail guise of speaking “their truth”.

Many teachers, understanding the reality they face even if they can’t name it, no longer assign essays. Even the courageous souls pigheaded enough to take on student writing are undermined by the practice of Equitable Grading that has infiltrated American public schools. When students know they have unlimited rewrites and, therefore, unlimited time, there’s little to no way to prevent them from utilizing AI to produce a response. With a class load approaching 200 in some urban metros and zero administrative will to enforce consequences for academic dishonesty, no sane teacher would create the work of assigning, grading, conferencing, re-grading, and policing plagiarism when the payoff in terms of learning is so low. It’s much, much easier to give them a multiple-choice quiz (with the requisite unlimited guess-able retakes for those who fail) and just be done with it. The only other way to manage it is to give students points for whatever writing they turn in and, like Elsa, let it go.

Writing is learning expressed. It’s why up until recently (for reasons I’ve touched on above) most college midterms were written in those little blue books students were expected to bring with them to exams. As a teacher, it’s very easy to see what kids know when you give them a broad question on a detail rich-topic. Well, in history classes it is, at least.

If you’ll recall your middle and high school days, I hope you had at least one history teacher who was great. One whose stories held you captive. One who maybe did accents or dressed up or made dark jokes or was in love with the art of the period. One who really, really knew what he was talking about. I won’t say his job was easy, but I will say that teaching history is a much simpler job than teaching literature. And the reason is that when teaching history, there’s only one narrative for the students to attend to: the teacher’s. In literature, the kid has to follow the story in the book and the story the teacher is telling about the story in the book.

So here’s where the rubber meets the road on this topic: if you want your kid’s brilliance not to be dimmed—and yes, brilliance is inherent— she must read early, often, and widely. Young humans devour facts and stories as their interests rampage wildly across the broad, flat plain of childhood. You must not wait for the school to teach your child to read. If you do, it may never happen. You must do it yourself, like the Little Red Hen. Buy this book and fill your house with science and history and story and picture books. Read books with a harrowingly high vocabulary like those by Beatrix Potter and James Herriot and J.R.R. Tolkien to your children at night. Your local library is often hugely helpful here, but if it’s less well-stocked than you’d like, used booksellers on eBay can get you a library of children’s classics for under $100. They may whine at first, but your child will never regret learning to read well early. Doors will be open to your children that other kids will never realize exist.

I don’t have space to tell you the stories of all those students who had a parent give them this priceless gift, but I can tell you without hesitation that once a student realized it was safe to reveal they had breadth of knowledge, she would soar above the rest of the class. Her progress rocketed as she connected literature to history to science to song to art while her classmates struggled to hold onto the details of the simple stories I was telling.

It’s weird, right, that someone who primarily taught high school would say that it took a determined parent to build this kind of literacy in her kids and that it would happen at home. You’re thinking, Hadn’t your students nine years of schooling at least before they ever got to you, DT? Yes, they had, but my point stands. Those who’d come all the way from Pre-K to me knew little, despite all those years in-house. For my take on this, I recommend you open a bottle of wine and start with part 1 of 5 of this series: Your Kids Aren’t Learning. At All.

I’ll close with what might seem an odd question, but I promise it’s relevant.

Do you know why page requirements on essays came into existence? It wasn’t to ensure a student hit a minimum number of words. Au contraire, mon frere: when instituted, page requirements were a maximum: a limit. In days of yore, students knew so much, the page maximum was put in place to force them to evaluate the information, ranking it by relevance so students would include only the facts and commentary necessary to formulate the most coherent, concise response in the space allotted. Tomes have been written to explain the proximate causes of World War I, yet if you ask the modern high school student what got the Great War rolling, you’d be lucky if they responded with “that Hitler guy” even though that would be laughably wrong.

The problem, my friends, is not that students can’t write. The problem is that school has taught them nothing worth writing about.

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If you’ve made it this far and don’t have the desire to curse me and my posterity, please hit the “Like” button. This makes my posts more visible to other parents who don’t understand how much worse schools have become since they graduated. The public school system actively robs American children of their full potential in order to maintain power in the hands where it currently rests. Only parents can reverse this trend; American authoritarianism is born in its “free” public schools.