K-5 writing

Promising advances such as writer’s workshop have changed the face of writing instruction, but national measures still tell us that two-thirds of our graduates can’t write. How do we solve that paradox?

Why do America’s children write so poorly? Writing instruction has seen a lot of innovation since I was a kid. Like many of my peers, I struggled with writing under the old system of the 3 A’s – assign, assume, and assess. My teachers assigned a topic, assumed we could write about it, and assessed our finished pieces.

Today’s kids have it better. Yet there’s still a disconnect. Despite the advances in instruction since I was a child, most teachers still don’t teach writing well. On the last national writing assessment (the NAEP), less than a third of 12^th graders, and less than a quarter of elementary students, could write proficiently.