CCC Special Synposium: Exploring the Continuum ... - NCTE

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? CCC 61:1 / september 2009 W409 Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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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. W412


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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 W413


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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? W421


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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 . . Reading between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading. Iowa City: ACT, 2006. 23 July

2007 . 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 .

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.

. A Test of Leadership: Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education: A Report of the Commission Appointed by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education, 2006. 11 May 2009.

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.” 11 May 2009 . Writing Study Group. NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing. Urbana, IL: Dunn, J. S., and Michael Williamson. “A National Council of Teachers of English, Study of the Implications for College2004. 11 May 2009. Reform Movement.” Preliminary report. 11 May 2009. position: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change. New York: Teachers Graham, Steve, and Dolores Perin. Writing College Press, 2006. Next: Effective Strategies to Improve Writing of Adolescents in Middle and High United States. Dept. of Education. Testing Schools. Washington, DC: Alliance for for Results: Helping Families, Schools and Education, 2006. 23 July 2007 . U.S. Dept. of Education, 2004. 23 July 2007 . Unpublished study.

Huot, Brian. “Consistently Inconsistent: Business and the Spellings Commission Report on Higher Education.” College English 69.5 (May 2007): 512–25.

Wiley, Mark. “The Popularity of Formulaic Writing (and Why We Need to Resist).” English Journal 90 (Sept. 2000): 61–67.

Lakoff, George. “Simple Framing: An Introduction to Framing and Its Uses Writing Program Administration Listserv in Politics.” Rockridge Institute. 23 July (WPA-L). Archives. 23 July 2007 Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Emily Dowd, and National Assessment Governing Board. Tamara Francis. “‘The Things They Car“High School Students Show No Progress ried’: A Synthesis of Research on Transfer in Reading, According to the Nation’s in College Composition.” Work in 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. . . Ready to Succeed: All Students Prepared for College and Work. 2006. . 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. . 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. .

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. . 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 . Testing Service, 2006. . 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. . Statistics, U.S. Dept. of Education, 2001. .

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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. . 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, 2003, 623–53.

Farris, Christine. “Minding the Gap and Learning the Game: Some Thoughts on the Differences That Matter between High School and College Writing.” College Credit for Writing in High School: The “Taking Care of ” Business. Ed. Kristine Hansen and Christine Farris. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English (forthcoming). . “The Space Between: Dual-Credit Programs as Brokering, CommunityBuilding, and Professionalization.” Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon. Ed. Kathleen Blake Yancey. Boynton/Cook, 2006, 104–14.

Beaufort, Anne. College Writing and Beyond: “Freshman Term Paper Discovers SomeA New Framework for University Writing thing Totally New about Silas Marner.” Instruction. Logan: Utah State UP, 2007. Onion 32-08 (23 Sept. 1997). 15 June 2007 . to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing It. Chicago: U of Chicago P, Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How 1998. Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Berthoff, Ann E. “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Rea- Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. “They soning.” College English 46.8 (Dec. 1984): Say/I Say”: The Moves That Matter in 743–55. Academic Writing. New York: Norton, 2006. Bishop, Wendy. “A Rhetoric of TeacherTalk—Or How to Make More out of Lore.” Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice. Ed. Christine Farris and Chris M. Anson. Logan: Utah State UP, 1998, 217–33.

Hairston, Maxine. “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” College Composition and Communication 43.2 (May 1992): 179–95. Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997.

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National Writing Project. “Because Writing Matters: Key Points.” 26 October 2003 . Rosenwasser, David, and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically. 5th ed. Boston: Thomson, 2006.

Smit, David W. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004. Sperry, Sharon Lynn. “Constructing College Writers: High School Composition Teachers as Cultural Brokers.” Ph.D. diss. Indiana U, 1997.

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