Yesterday's New York Times ran an editorial on the sad state of literacy in American high schools, with special emphasis on what New York City is doing to confront a growing, deeply troubling problem. Noting that the U.S. now ranks seventeenth in the world in high school education, the Times observes that

The American high school is a big part of the problem. Developed a century ago, the standard factory-style high school was conceived as a combination holding area and sorting device that would send roughly one-fifth of its students on to college while moving the rest directly into low-skill jobs. It has no tools to rescue the students who arrive unable to read at grade level but are in need of the academic grounding that will qualify them for 21st-century employment.

New York City recently embarked on a plan to develop a range of smaller schools, some of them aimed at the thousands of students whose literacy skills are so poor that they have failed the first year of high school three times. The plan is to pull these students up to the academic standard while providing some of them with work experiences. The National Governors Association has begun a high school initiative that calls for remedial services and partial tuition reimbursement for students who complete community college courses that lead to technical or industrial job certifications. The White House, rushing to get ahead of the parade, recently announced a high school project of its own. And other school districts are tinkering with gimmicks like cash bonuses for good grades.

The emerging consensus is that the traditional high school needs to be remade into something that is both more flexible and more rigorous. But the rigor has to come first.

All this is of course easier said than done, and what's being easily said is also, of course, highly disputable: The editorial's apparent assumption, for example, that ed school ought still to be a gateway to public school teaching really cannot stand as an assumption at this stage of the public debate on education.

Something the article does not not mention--in fairness, because the issue is beyond its particular purview--is how independent schools are confronting the same pressing issues of declining literacy. We center our debates on literacy and education on public schools, and the working assumption there appears to be that the issue only really affects kids in public schools. While it seems clear enough that the most extreme manifestations of the problem are to be found in public schools, it's equally clear that independent schools are affected, too. It's just not that unusual for teachers in these schools to encounter serious deficits in their students, and to find themselves doing a depressing--and sometimes seemingly futile--amount of remediation. I would guess, too, that just like the public schools, these schools struggle at times to find teachers who are capable of doing that remediation.

One very basic reason for this--one of many-is that for more than a generation now, the study of grammar has been out of favor in American schools. Without solid grounding in grammar, a student is never really going to learn to write well. Even more to the point, without a solid grounding in grammar, that student's teachers are not only not going to be able to teach that student to write well, they aren't even going to know when a student cannot write.

I'd love to hear from teachers, parents, and students about their experiences learning to read and write in both public and private schools. In particular, I'd love to hear from people who teach English in private high schools. What kinds of literacy issues do you face with your students, to what do you attribute them, and how do you deal with them?

You write, "The editorial's apparent assumption, for example, that ed school ought still to be a gateway to public school teaching really cannot stand as an assumption at this stage of the public debate on education."

I'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on this.

"The standard factory-style high school was conceived as a combination holding area and sorting device that would send roughly one-fifth of its students on to college while moving the rest directly into low-skill jobs"...so, how was it that these institutions were once able to take a diverse student body, many of them immigrants with limited English skills, and achieve high literacy rates? Could something be learned from this experience?

I doubt that the various gambits proposed will seriously reshape the high school. Ted Sizer's research group had a thoughtful, serious critique in the mid-80s, but his Coalition of Essential Schools is still on the margins of even those school systems with coalition schools.

Part of the resistance is the fact that millions of Americans have a coherent idea of what "real" high school is (to borrow from Mary Heywood Metz's wonderful book chapter in 1991). And trying to vary from that experienced notion will encounter resistance. It's one thing to restructure schools in relatively small chunks of public (or private!) schooling where advantaged parents do not send their children. But just try to argue that the high school should focus its efforts on intellectual life in a concrete way—and eliminate course credit for student government, yearbook, newspapers, speech and debate, drama, sports, band, orchestra, driver's ed, health classes, study hall, community service, teacher's aide "classes," typing, shop, home ec, daycare lessons, cosmetology, web design, etc.—and you'll encounter fierce battles. That's what David Tyack and Larry Cuban call the "grammar" of schooling. The "shopping-mall high school" still exists.

And while it's mildly amusing to see vapid allegations issued against ed schools (didn't a guy named Bestor try that in the 1950s?), it's a far weaker case in connection with high schools than with elementary schools. Many states have long required that secondary teachers have a major in their content area. I suspect that's not a significant factor in high school achievement. But the proportion of out-of-field teachers is awful in many secondary schools.

David Foster, you're just talking craziness!

/sarcasm light is not *off*/

Re: my last post, I meant that the sarcasm light is NOW off. I agree completely with David's comments.

[This is a longish rant, which I at least think is relevant.] What? The Great Society did not work? Oh well, let's just follow the NYT's solution and create more of the same. That's always a rational solution according to socialists! The NYT solution actually tells what the problem is: the idea that magic socialism is a practical way to confront problems. It can't work. The people who end up designing and administering the programs are beset with dogma and congenital ingnorance, and gain employment with cushy benefits from these programs. [A "crisis" in the State budget in Oregon was defined as "being unable to meet State obligations" to benefit programs.]

What the solution is, I have no specific idea. Obviously parents should be the primary educators, at least closely monitering what schools do. Well, that's not going to happen either. How do you get people who have no desire or even capacity to do this to do it? Give them more money, always a favorite of the rationally and reality challenged socialists? Some parent agitators within the school system are more interested in whether free breakfasts are served at school, so maybe that would work?

At least those who see the problem and wish to escape the systems which perpetuate it should be allowed to do it. How can anyone be against vouchers? It's easy to see how, and it's not pretty: Why, it might destroy the failing systems! We can't have that. It would be "unfair".I think there is an overall really high ratio of public school employees to students. Why would this surprise anyone? Is the school for the students or for the employees?

Socialistic systems reach a point quickly where they only exist to perpetuate themselves, and almost need to create more of the problems they are designed to solve. They operate on an ecological niche mechanism. It's simple. Build it and they will come, and multiply.

More and more people and money will be needed for more and more people and problems, fed by the Government trough, the tax-payers doing the tithing. [Some academics and other Marxists literally think paying taxes is the epitome of patriotism.]

The Welfare State is a failure, or has at least gone beyond its relevancy. The poor aren't even poor but learn to game the system, settling into a comfortable rate of non-productivity. I know some technically poor people who own ranches. One of my friends has a family income of about $18-24,000/yr. There are 2 parents and 3 children. They have two houses, 5 cars on a bad day, and 3 horses. They are productive, however, and I don't begrudge them anything. I'm just saying they are 5 of the statistical poor we are always urgently exhorted to save.

Hell, according to the IRS I am poor, my sister is poor, one of my daughters has only recently escaped poverty. Another one is going to be poor in a year when she becomes emancipated. But we must help the least among us to show our moral worth. More innovative programs involving more diversion of money and effort.

My sister lives next door to some of the "real" poor. They have a two story house with basement, 3-4 adults, 4 dogs, 2 cats 40 pet rabbits and white rats, some snakes, a backyard full of enough equipment to outfit two public parks, 2-4 cars, a private dumpster, and so on. One to 3 children live there, only one consistently. The child, now 8, expresses herself maily by loud screams , and climbing upon my sister's roof. The 3-4 adults living there don't seem to notice. They don't notice they are poor. I wouldn't either, if I were them. One adult does work about 16 hours/month. My sister once went to school with the little girl who needed a "friend" for a day.

We can expect the NEA and social workers everywhere to do the same thing these poor are doing. It's only natural. But more of the same "innovative" programs by the same people is not a solution. This has brought us comic books, as you no doubt recall.

Pc dogma is deathly. It infests academia and either causes or is a manifestation of irrationality with regard to action. As we speak, over at Left2Right, one academic has put forth the proposition that grade competition should not be involved in getting into college. He even has misgivings about someone completely mastering his subject matter in order to score well on tests, wondering if such a student has not had enough out-of-class discussions to show his/her enlightenment, thus making the test scores virtually meaningless to him. So why choose your problem solvers on any objective basis, either? If they do the pc things, they must be good. Right.

Even Nursing and Medical schools are falling prey to pc. My daughter just graduated from a top five Nursing school, and you would not believe the things that go on there. Even the grant-loan system is a riot. You get rewarded for being pregnant and penalized for having good grades.[Because since you have proven you are functional, you then don't need the help as much as someone who is not functional.]

Then you get rewarded for practicing in a rural, therefore, cave-dwelling area. Fortuneately my daughter lives in just such a backward area, so she will make up the penalty for "having a degree in another field" by living like the Neanderthals, with me. [The County I live in gets about $460,000/yr. from the Violence Against Women Act, which seems to be used mostly to pay the administrators and harass men. This figure comprises 1/20th of the National total dedicated to the sad rurals. I pay $1200/yr. in property taxes toward the support of an Educational Service District, which is another rural outreach program to help educate the throwbacks. It's a known boondoggle, and is completely irrelevant. I pay less to support the public school system there, which is really pretty good. The County has a total of about 7100 people. But we still only watch shadows in the caves, so the programs don't work. I got a State tax credit of $5,000/yr x about 10 years for working in a medically "underserved" area 55 miles outside of Boise, Idaho. Right. That was before I became "poor" myself.]

One of my daughter's friends is in Medical School, and the hits just keep on coming. Two examples: first they sent her to Peru, I suppose to indicate that medicine necessarily involves saving the world's unwashed [and inferior] masses, as a part of the white man's burden. Then they have her making house calls in really dangerous local areas by herself so as to increase her enlightenment in regard to the "poor". "My God", she thinks, "this is exactly where I came from myself!" She did, but must be enlightened as to her new missions to serve those who can't figure out how to get to E.R.'s and public health clinics, and don't have any "support" from their allegedly multitudinous fellows. She also suffered loan-wise from having very good grades, which made it again paradoxically harder for her to get into Medical School since she needed loans, and the schools also used some other descriminatory criteria which worked against her involving the fact that her parents are no longer "poor", but rich enough, I suppose, because they pay any tax at all.

The people running these educational programs are functionally looney. My daughter listened in disbelief as one of her teachers sang "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" in class and read Dr. Suess in Spanish. Then, at the age of 23 she was forced to take "leadership" classes. She was really quite irritated from being treated like a child.

Also, the teachers seemed to threaten by injecting anti-Bush statements in class, while the programs could not even get their own scheduling straight. My daughter was also forced to go into high crime areas alone. A policeman told her she didn't want to be there. She considered arming herself. She was also pregnant at the time, by "mistake", which resulted in me now having to be called "Grandpa", and it didn't help her loan problem because it was too late to help.

Now she works in a State Public Health Clinic where it's ok to get a secret abortion for a 13 year old, but not ok to give anyone under 16 an immunization if they don't have parental consent. Parents coming to the clinic with their child to get birth control are not invited into the secret parlors. The child is not even asked privately if she wants her parent there. This produces problems if the birth control measure produces side effects. Information will not be released to the concerned parent who cannot even make an appointment for the child to be reseen.

So the child might not have the birth control the parent took her there for. This actually happened to my one 15 year old daughter who does not live with me. It was solved by me and my daughter who works in this exact area talking to my 15 year old. But who else has this kind of access to help? The system did not work virtually for one of its main stated purposes.

Then you wonder why children can't read? With a system operating on this model of "help", why would anyone learn how to read?

The administrators of the Health Clinic are occupied with such things as making rules about when it's ok to cry at work. [Only when it's not "personal", whatever that could mean], not allowing the Hispanic employees to talk to each other in Spanish, not allowing "disruptions" at meetings which involve "looking uncomfortable", and on and on. But the clinics don't even have a policy for, or practice for, when someone faints or has a cardiac arrest. They don't even have defibrillators. It's going to happen. Then we'll need more money to solve this "crisis", more "specialists" giving "programs", and so on.

My daughter, who weighs 105lb., recently found herself alone with a 250 lb. patient who was fainting in a chair. Then the patient [I'm sorry, "client"] began to have seizure activity. Fortuneately, my daughter was mostly irritated that the system did not have a conscious mechanism to handle this situation, though the thought that the person might die did cross her mind. So she did the best she could alone and the client recovered, since it was only a faint. [But, it's still not good to have a person stuck in a sitting position, even if it's only a faint. I told my daughter that next time she might have to get a running start and blast the client out of the chair if it happened again.]

That's how it came to light that the Public Health system had no concept of cardiac arrest, either.

I think our public education system shows the same problems which would occur with a National Health Care system, as is now eventuating in Canada. Recently 1400 cases of a potentially very serious intestinal infection occurred over only a 3 month period from a Quebec hospital. This relates to a lack of average hygeine in hospitals. There could be an analagous "crisis" to the failure of students being able to read, if anyone cares to see it there. The Canadian system is already showing problems from having too few health care providers. It thinks it is going to solve it by "programs" and billions, but this is not the problem. People simply do not want to work within this system, due to its socialistic nature, which penalizes functionality and rewards inattention. Who would?

Maybe we can send our bloated bureaucrats and education providers here to Canada to stem its crisis. This would probably help ours.

All I can see as a help to our education system is to start to defund it by lower taxes, freeing up capital which can be used for non-governmental solutions, which are apparently failing. But since we know tax cuts only benefit the [necessariy] rich, since they pay most of the taxes, certainly we must not reward the very capitalistic mechanisms which set the tables for the education system itself, should we? Right.

[One of the Left2Right academic elites claimed that at a certain level of income, the money just keeps automatically "piling up", so that it shouldn't be missed if taxed. Well, I guess she means she is not working very much to get it, so that the rest of us never did either, another characteristic of non-rational socialists - extreme myopia and generalizing from the particular, and guilt. I think many of these enlightened experts are earning the latter. But why should we pay for it too?]

J Peden...could you plse comment more on what is going on in nursing school? I've read stuff about total postmodernist PC craziness in some of the nursing programs in the UK, but had been led to believe this wasn't happening in the US.

What's next? Foucault for air traffic controllers?

Teaching grammar as the foundation for writing? Evidence?

Grammar is the natural birthright of every speaker. How does attaching a Latinate definition to a part of speech or diagramming or parsing strengthen writing or even make it more grammatically correct?

"Without solid grounding in grammar, a student is never really going to learn to write well. Even more to the point, without a solid grounding in grammar, that student's teachers are not only not going to be able to teach that student to write well, they aren't even going to know when a student cannot write."

Erin, I think you're absolutely correct here; this is truly the most saddening part of the situation to my mind.

Though relatively young, I've seen a fair amount of what you describe above in the NYC public school system. I work in the education department of a NY theatre company, and the core of our program involves in-class visits by teaching artists (professional actors, directors, playwrights, etc.) in which students are encouraged--through various exercises--to write either about a play they are preparing to see at our theatres or to write their own plays using our productions as a writing prompt of sorts. In addition, I help to coordinate an after-school playwriting program for high school students.

In both areas of my job, I see practically no understanding of grammar in the students' work. In most of the play scripts these students developed for professional actors to perform, the sentences were so garbled, so discombobulated, and so consistently misspelled that it would have been impossible for someone who had not followed the scripts' development to decipher them after the fact--let alone perform them onstage.

The thing that I see the most in the students' work and thoughts--almost by way of this poor grammar--is a true lack of understanding regarding what words and many stock phrases actually mean. It's as if the students simply heard the given word or phrase somewhere and copied it into their own work without taking a moment to even consider digesting the significance of their diction. There are so many times, when really directly asked, that the students can't actually explain to you what they've written. And this isn't the mod/post-mod notion of language as a semiotic system of emptiness...

The more startling thing is that a handful of these students' teachers have a similar disregard and/or lack of comprehension of grammar. We're not even asking the teachers to write plays; the jumbled mess of words pops up in three-line, standard evaluation form responses.

Now I'm pretty sure that my co-workers think I've gone mad over this grammar issue. However, I wholeheartedly agree with what's been said here that without the foundation that grammar and a true comprehension of vocabulary provide, students will not only write poorly, but they will also fail to see their mediocrity and thus never significantly improve.

THIS IS A JOKE, RIGHT?

The NY City schools have been a disaster for more than a generation.

Step one is to abolish the Board of Education and fumigate the building.

Without solid grounding in grammar, a student is never really going to learn to write well. Even more to the point, without a solid grounding in grammar, that student's teachers are not only not going to be able to teach that student to write well, they aren't even going to know when a student cannot write.

That depends on what you mean by "solid grounding in grammar. If you mean a strong familiarity with proper English sentence structure, without necessarily being able to name and describe "the rules," I agree; if you mean being able to diagram sentences and name the parts of speech and identify case at fifty paces, then I don't. Good writing comes from reading good writers, writing a lot, and taking criticism. The same applies to being able to teach it.

"Step one is to abolish the Board of Education and fumigate the building."

In agreement!

I have to agree with Michael. I did have excellent training in grammar, and by the time I reached high school, there wasn't a sentence I couldn't diagram. But nothing I learned in grammar class in 1st through 8th grades informed my essay writing skills. Those were honed through: (a) AP classes, with their tiresome but useful repetition of the 5-paragraph thesis-driven essay model; (b) reading great nonfiction in one Lit course in high school; (c) most importantly, my own outside reading.

Grammar is useful -- especially when it comes time to learn foreign languages -- but rhet-comp skills are more important. In 1st through 8th, we had English, or grammar, class as well as reading, or literature, class. But in high school, English became strictly about SAT vocab and reading random "classics." Why not split high school English into two different courses? Why not have a real rhetoric and composition class, which could also cover grammar and vocab, along with a real literature class, the job of which would be to rigorously teaching the interpretation of creative language?

To return to Erin's question, I remember two moments in my writing history: the first helped me learn to write, and the second to teach writing. I was a high school junior in honors English, and our assignment was to write some sort of personal reflection. I wrote about...well, it doesn't matter. Mr. Crotty, God bless him always, read the first half of my paper aloud to the class and said, "That is good writing." He then handed me the paper, and said, "I wish the second half was as good." He tore the paper apart with red, not purple, ink, compared the two parts in detail, and I began to see what good writing was. Cut the unnecessary words, he said, and desribe things simply.
The event that helped me teach writing was picking up Richard Lanham's Revising Prose for the first time. I've not yet found a method better than his paramedic one for getting students to cut the fluff from their writing.

Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. You can find examples of this in newspaper articles any day of the week. Of course learning the structure of language is important, if people are to hone their thinking skills.

"Without solid grounding in grammar, a student is never really going to learn to write well". Not so. Do you think Herodotos or Shakespeare could name the parts of speech? I suspect they couldn't. Get students to read and you'll get much better writers, but for that you need first to smash their TV sets and game consoles.

I was home-schooled from grade 2 to grade 12. During that time, our family followed a pattern of reading together in the evenings, rather than watching television.

Part of my education involved me learning how to write well. Admittedly, my favorite part of the education involved me reading things about science and technology. However, my Mother made sure that I knew how to write a book report, an expository essay, and a research paper.

Along the way, grammatical and spelling errors became the bane of my existence.

I began attending college several years ago. While pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering, I was surprised to learn that most Engineering students hated writing essays. I was also surprised to learn that the Humanities instructors had a list of "banned errors" on essays.

This list of "banned errors" included sentence fragments, comma splices, punctuation errors, and lack of paragraph thesis.

Even more surprising was that the school I attended was a private University, serving a population dominated by graduates from private high schools. Some of these students could write well, but too many couldn't.

The coup de grace came when I began writing short fiction for the Writer's Guild at the school. I was told that my entries were remarkably free from spelling and grammar errors. My response was laughter.

What made me such a good writer? I think it was the combination of personal attention, high expectations, large amount of reading, and low amount of televised input.

Good teachers have taught and still teach grammar.

I attended public school in a working class town near San Francisco (I graduated from high school in 1971). Many of my teachers stressed grammar and writing. Even the worst had serious grammar lessons.

My older children attended public school in San Diego. Many of their English teachers were weak on grammar, but they had elementary teachers who were strong and a great junior and senior English teacher who stressed grammar and writing. In addition, they wrote for the school paper and had a hippy dippy advisor who stressed traditional newspaper format and grammar.

My younger son attends public school in Rhode Island. His middle school experience was not good, but his English teachers did stress writing and grammar. His 8th grade English (now called Language Arts) teacher spent the first 10 minutes each day on editing and then stressed structured essays.

These teachers may be the exception, but I and my children have been lucky enough to have had some great teachers who really stressed good, grammatical writing.

David Foster here are some of my and my daughter's experience and interpretations which might be over-critical, but:

The first bad sign in Nursing schools here that I was aware of occurred when a push came to try to make Nurses coequal with doctors by increasing their training to a new academic level involving going to four year programs which conferred staus and pay via alphabet degrees. We were all supposed to be equal members of a "team". Right. Were we going to take a vote? [When Nurses published articles it became bewildering the sequences which would follow their names. The genetic code seemed simple in comparison. I think they were confusing extra degrees with competence.]

But what suffered in these advanced degree quests themselves was training in nursing function as actually occurs, which is what is needed, in contrast to Nurses with advanced or other degrees.

I could compare the nurse of a local standard two year program with that of the four, and there was no contest as to which program actually produced a functional nurse. It was the two year program which taught nurses how to function as nurses, rather than the four year which apparently envisioned nurses as needing to figure out what antibiotic to give or how much insulin to use, for example.

Nurses in the E.R., for example, get very good in figuring out what to do right off in getting a patient well on the way to diagnosis and treatment, and in treating certain kinds of cases before the M.D. can even get there. They really can't learn this in classes, especially over academicized ones.

In one particular span of about a month, LPN's ran the E.R. I worked in and no one knew the difference, because they were quite experienced. Even what we called E.R. techs came to be able to function nearly as R.N.'s, except that they were forbidden to do certain things. What I'm trying to say is that the drive to "academize" nursing is counterproductive to real nursing, in my opinion, if it ignores the teaching of practical things.

The homage to political correctness further disables these programs.

My daughter went to a "prestegious" Nursing School, ranked 6th in the Country by "U.S. News and World Report". She found a similar lack of training in practical skills - such as how to start i.v.'s or insert nasogastric tubes, or how to set up i.v. tubing. She never inserted a nasogastic tube in school except into a dummy once. She started i.v.'s maybe a couple of times. She naturally felt underequipped when she had to go out on her own, and blamed the school, though she has learned very fast in the real world. Maybe she is too worried about these things, but I not unsurprisingly see her point.

She found that the teaching nurses were pretty much divorced from the actual practice of nursing. In several instances political statements were inserted by the teachers into the classroom. The students were also told they should call themselves "learners" and that the teachers should be called by their first names, so as to break down the allegedly oppressive relationship between teachers and students. Students were actually required to waste time on such important issues as whether patients should be called "clients" and whether a C-Section should be called a "C-Birth" under the strange idea that women feel inferior if they do not have a vaginal birth. My daughter found these topics bizarre, irrelevant, and therefore a waste of time and her money.

She noticed that one particular teacher she had to follow around was especially concerned with the necessity to schmooze with the others of her rank, to develop "relationships"in contrast to treating patients as the primary goal. At the same time this same Nurse would not acknowledge my daughter's stated wish that the Nurse not treat my daughter as disabled merely because she was pregnant, and not give her hugs and pat her belly. What would this Nurse do when confronted by a patient? I supose the patient would simply have to be the model patient, who does not exist.

Maybe I'm over-blowing it, but I see a pattern of competing interests entering into the teaching of nursing which detract from realistic teaching of what nurses need to know to deliver health care. My daughter was also disparaged because she wanted to live and work in a "rural" area. Of course the teacher did not see she was doing this.

One classic example of hypocrisy involving the need to appear functional for the status of the school occurred when the students were given questions in advance which they might be asked when the school accrediting agency inspected it. At the very same time it had occurred that one previous class had copied a pharmacology test and had given it to the current students of the class under the logic that "this is the only way you can pass the course". They were upset with the teacher, apparently for good reasons as reported by my daughter. But this case of having questions which should have been "old" in advance of a test was considered a breach of ethics, and the students had to waste time considering this allegedly serious issue, in the face of what actually was an unethical practice by the University.

Maybe all these things are picayune, but not in my opinion

In 1991 I returned to college to complete the (minimum) required courses for teaching certification in Florida. Thirty credit hours, one year, and a couple thousand dollars later, I knew I’d been had. A small sampling: “Measurement", where we spent 1/3 of our total in-class time learning how to calculate standard deviations, by hand; “Special Education", which should really be called “Paperwork and Avoiding Lawsuits”; and my personal favorite, “PCs in Education”, which covered I don’t know what since I walked out during the first lecture titled “The Keyboard.” As far as I’m concerned, none of my education classes contributed anything at all to my teaching skills, which, of course, makes me wonder why, as a consumer & a taxpayer, I’m paying for this stuff. A few years ago, Georgia offered permanent licenses to subject-area degreed persons interested in teaching who completed a six (ca) week training session – I wonder how those teachers fared?

I taught Latin and English grammar for seven years. Because my Latin students were my grammar students too, it was easy and, I think, helpful to integrate the two subjects as far as grammar was concerned. I also taught History, and, since I assigned numerous writing projects, I had the opportunity to work on grammar outside of English class. Usage and grammar ‘counted’ in my grading scheme – I returned papers to students for corrections, and lowered the final grade accordingly. Other than expecting a lot of writing, and discussing & correcting errors in all written product, whether in English class or elsewhere, I’m not sure how one deals with poor writing skills, especially in high school students. The question is, do colleges of education have some plan to address this problem, and, if not, why not?

The major point to actually learning good grammar and good writing from my point of view as someone who worked in the IT field for over 40 years is that in the real world you have to pass on the instructions for doing something as well as a sort of "journal" of what you did or how the project developed so that those who follow and take over the project later will know the reasoning behind certain functions working the way they do. You also need to write up for the public the instructions for the use of the project you have created. If you cannot write this material up in a way that the people reading it understand what you are saying without having to know all the jargon, then the project or the function or the machine will not be used properly and you will waste a lot of time re-inventing the wheel.

This is why I hate the idea of "ebonics" or any other sort of "-onics". When I took over a project during my working life, I would first read up on the history and the list of changes that had been implemented over the life cycle of the project. You would be amazed (or maybe not) with the number of times that I gave up trying to understand what the writer intended to say and just went into the coding to see what had been done. The material written up was just too discombobulated to be understood. The instructions made absolutely no sense or were completely wrong. The information was presented in a manner that was completely out of order from what needed to be done so that you ended up going back over and over again to get the right information.

I know that a lot of the people here are involved in the humanities but for those of us involved in technical matters, the humanities form the way we communicate and anything that gets in the way of this communication is totally non-productive. We do need to know the way to write even if everything we do is involved with science. We do need to communicate. Forget the politics and teach the basics. The rest should come from real life experience. As it is the failures of the humanities have given rise to a new job title, that of technical writer. If the people had been taught how to read and write then they would have been able to write well enough that we would not need technical writers.

I was surprised by some of the tirades on this page, particularly J. Peden's. How ironic that a treatsie on clarity should be so incomprehensible. Near as I can tell, it was a series of annecdotes, chained together with hatred of some massive imagined PC conspiracy.
While I have great sympathy for those who are obliged to put up with post modernist nonsense, the answer isn't to tear apart the school system. Why not? Because then our kids would get NO education. And that would be worse.

Really? A post-modern "education" that fills the mind with patently non-sensical, anti-intellectual garbage, that insulates the mind from external challenge, that subverts reason and logic to ego and exalts PC leftism is better than no education? Hogwash.

The problem isn't that the kids would get no education....the problem is that the kids wouldn't get any babysitting - and then their parents would have to actually DO something with their children - like teach them something, or spend some time with them, or instill some discipline. Oh, the horror.

I've been struck by these comments on the Columbia Journalism School website:

"Upon arrival you will be given The Elements of Style. We also suggest you review a grammar handbook and bring it with you. Poor grammar and usage are unacceptable. So is poor spelling. We have noticed a decline in skill in these areas during the past several years and we urge you to work hard this summer to improve your mastery of the language."

Found at http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/admissions/programs/courses/fall2001/summerletter.asp

Let that sink in: an Ivy League university, able to attract the most gifted verbally-oriented students into a program that trains people in the most verbal of the arts, is detecting a "decline in skill" in grammar, spelling and usage. Given that one can safely say there are a fair number of independent school graduates at Columbia, this Summer Letter from 2001 indicates that there may be a problem with literacy.

The royal road to clear writing is, in my view, not the a priori mastery of grammar -- naming the parts of speech in a sentence, for example, but iteration. Write, revise, evaluate, revise again, evaluate by somebody else (an editor) revise a third time...finally publish.

I agree that the formal teaching of grammar has been shorted, by I maintain that it begins with weak reading and comprehension skills -- the second through fourth grade curriculum. When reading is laborious, not enough reading gets done. If you don't read enough, you do not have templates in your head for what constitutes clear writing.

I went to a private high school (The Athenian School in Danville, CA, still in existence and still an excellent school) in the late 1960s. In English and History, we wrote and revised short papers, one a week if memory serves. It is this sort of repetition that prepares the student for longer, more sustained essays.

Ellie, there are programs that address this problem. Literacy was previously thought to be an non-issue in secondary schools, but the stats show this is patently untrue. In response, active educators all over the country are popping up in ed programs coming up with curriculum that strengthens poor secondary readers. I'm in one such program right now, a program that stresses the importance of daily reading, writing and revision exercises. In addition, we are urged to explore teaching literary criticism in secondary schools, a method that greatly strengthens comprehension, although it was previously thought that secondary students couldn't handle the theory.

Steps are being made. Don't give up on us pre-service teachers before we get out there.