The plan boiled down to the following: Make students write more all through the core, and improvement will follow. It really wasn’t a bad premise. But reading samples of student papers semester after semester, I wasn’t sure it quite delivered. Why not? I have four reasons to propose here that are relevant to the rest of us.

1. The best writers read a

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Deep down, this is a question about what we value, in what we read, what we write, and unfortunately, we have attached a set of values to student writing that are disconnected from anything we actually value about what we read, and what we write.

Along with many others, I’ve been shouting about these problems for years, often into what felt like a... See more

That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nation’s uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as “whole language” instruction,... See more