Third grade retention (required by 22 states) significantly contributes to increases in early grade high-stakes assessment scores as part of comprehensive early literacy policy.
Retention does not appear to drive similar increases in low-stakes assessments.
No direct causal claim is made about the impact of retention since other policy and practices linked to retention may drive the increases.
However, their analysis concludes about grade retention as reading reform :
Similar to the results for states with comprehensive early literacy policies, states whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts. The magnitude of these estimates is similar to that of the “any early literacy policy” estimates described in Section 4.1.1 above, suggesting that states with retention components essentially explain all the average effects of early literacy policies on high-stakes reading scores. By contrast, there is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.
Therefore, one Big Lie about grade retention is that it allows misinformation and false advocacy for the recent “science of reading” reform across most states in the US.
Since grade retention in the early grades removes the lowest scoring students from populations being tested and reintroduces them biologically older when tested, the increased scores may likely be from these population manipulations and not from more effective instruction or increased student learning.
Evidence from the UK, for example, suggests that skills-based reading testing (phonics checks) that count as “reading” assessment strongly correlate with biological age (again suggesting that test scores may be about age and not instruction or learning):
Another Big Lie about grade retention is that reading reform advocates fail to acknowledge decades of evidence that grade retention mostly drives students dropping out of school and numerous negative emotional consequences for those students retained.
Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English strongly oppose legislation mandating that children, in any grade level, who do not meet criteria in reading be retained.
And be it further resolved that NCTE strongly oppose the use of high-stakes test performance in reading as the criterion for student retention.
Grade retention, then, is an effective Big Lie of Education because it allows misinformation based in test-score increases to promote policy and practices that fail to increase test scores in sustained ways (see the dramatic drop in “success” for “high-flying” states such as Mississippi and Florida, both of which taut strong grade 4 reading scores, inflated by grade retention, but do not sustain those mirage gains by grade 8).
Grade retention is a Big Lie of education reform that punishes minoritized and marginalized students, inflates test scores, and fuels politicized education reform.
[1] Consider that states retaining thousands of students each year, such as Mississippi, have not seen those retention numbers drop, suggesting that the “science of reading” reforms are simply not working but the retention continues to inflate scores.
The following data from Mississippi on reading proficiency and grade retention exposes that these claims are misleading or possibly false:
“The available research does not ratify the case for school cellphone bans,” writes Chris Ferguson, professor of psychology at Stetson University, adding, “no matter what you may have heard or seen or been [told].”
What Ferguson then offers is incredibly important, but also, it exposes a serious lack of awareness by Kappan considering their coverage of education:
And the media treatment has played a part in amplifying what can only be described as a moral panic about phones in schools.
News media often cater to panics, neglecting inconvenient science and stoking unreasonable fears. And this is what I see happening with the issue of cellphones in schools.
First, Ferguson’s characterizations of media coverage of education—”News media often cater to panics”—is not only accurate but matches a warning many scholars and educators have been offering for decades, especially during five decades of high-stakes accountability education reform uncritically endorsed by media.
The only story education journalists seem to know how to write is shouting crisis and stoking panic.
Just a couple days ago in The Hechinger Report, this headline, “6 observations from a devastating international math test,” is followed by this lede: “An abysmal showing by U.S. students on a recent international math test flabbergasted typically restrained education researchers. ‘It looks like student achievement just fell off a cliff,’ said Dan Goldhaber, an economist at the American Institutes for Research.”
And for a century, in fact, education journalism has been persistently fostering a “moral panic” about reading proficiency by students.
Here is Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”
Kristof is but one among dozens in the media repeating what constitutes at best an inexcusable mischaracterization and at worst a lie about what exactly NAEP testing data show about reading achievement in the US.
Nearly every media story about reading in the US since Emily Hanford launched in 2018 (and then repackaged as a podcast) the popular mischaracterization/lie has dutifully “amplif[ied] what can only be described as a moral panic” about reading achievement and instruction:
The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.
Ferguson’s warning about the misguided panic over cell phones in schools and the resulting rush to legislate based on that misguided panic is but a microcosm of the much larger and much more dangerous media misinformation about reading and the rise of “science of reading” (SOR) legislation.
We should heed Ferguson’s message not just about cell phones in schools but about the vast majority of media coverage of education and then how the public and political leaders overreact to the constant but baseless moral panics.
Yes, I am glad Kappan included Ferguson’s article, but I wish Kappan‘s The Grade and all education journalists would pause, take a look in the mirror, and recognize that his concern about media coverage of cell phones easily applies to virtually every media story on education.
In fact, I encourage The Grade and other education journalists to implement Ferguson’s “Red Flags” when considering education research, specifically the SOR story being sold:
RED FLAG 1: Claims that all the evidence is on one side of a controversial issue….
RED FLAG 2: Reversed burden of proof. “Can you prove it’s not the smartphones?”…
RED FLAG 3: Failing to inform readers that effect sizes from studies are tiny, or near zero, only mentioning they are “statistically significant.”…
RED FLAG 4: Comparisons to other well-known causal effects.
As I and others have repeatedly shown, the SOR stories fails all of these Red Flags.
There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.
“It’s so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won’t accept it because it’s considered settled science,” Moats said.
And this refrain is at the center of SOR advocacy, media coverage, and the work of education journalists: “Hanford pushed reporters to understand the research on how students learn to read is settled.”
Ultimately, the moral panics around education have far more to do with media begging for readers/viewers, education vendors creating market churn for profit, and politicians grandstanding for votes.
In the wake of education journalists repeatedly choosing to “cater to panics,” students, teachers, and education all, once again, are the losers.
At the end of fall semester of year 41 as an educator, I can admit two things: (1) I may have learned more than my students (taught two new courses and continue to experiment with course grade contracts), and (2) I am excited about spring courses where I can implement what I learned (both about grade contracts and teaching students to write).
Since I entered the classroom in 1984, I am in my fifth decade as a teacher, much of that work dedicated to teaching writing to students but also using writing assignments as teaching and learning, not assessment.
Gradually and then at some point in the 1990s, I successfully eliminated traditional tests and assignment grades in my high school English courses. As a note of clarification, although I do not use tests or grades, I have always been required to assign grading period and course grades.
Thus, I have been seeking ways to better navigate a test/grade culture of traditional schooling (one my students have been conditioned to trust and even embrace) while practicing my critical philosophy that rejects both.
A few semesters ago, as part of that journey, I returned to the course grade contract, something I had tried in some fashion during my high school teaching years.
The problem I continued to have was that students were mostly unable to set aside their test/grade mentality, and thus, the absence of tests and assignment grades often negatively impacted student engagement and learning.
Initially, I envisioned course grade contracts would improve student engagement and lower stress and anxiety, thus improving learning.
Some non-traditional practices worked. I have students prepare for and participate in a class discussion for their midterm, for example. No memorization, no “cover your work,” and no exam stress.
This collaborative approach students both embraced and recognized as not assessment, but as learning experiences themselves.
However, particularly in courses that are not designated as writing courses (I do teach first-year writing and an upper-level writing/research courses), students tend to struggle significantly with the course structure and the use of a major writing assignments as an extended teaching and learning experiences (and not a way to grade them).
The first iteration of the course grade contract, then, focused on requiring students to submit, conference, and revise essays; I structured A and B course grades around minimum standards for the B-range (submit an acceptable essay, conference after receiving my feedback, and submit one acceptable revision that addresses the feedback) and additional revisions after more feedback for the A-range.
Despite the course grade being explicitly linked to minimum expectations for the process, students continue to see my feedback as negative and harsh, but also remain trapped in the possibility of submitting a perfect essay and never having to complete revisions.
In short, they see the essay assignment as a form of assessment and cannot fully engage in the submitting/revising process as individualized teaching and learning experiences.
Oddly, students continue to email me apologizing for their first submissions because they see the revision-oriented feedback, again, as negative or harsh—evaluative—and not a necessary part of essay assignment as teaching and learning.
The semester ending now, in fact, proved to me that using the course grade contract to shift assignments from forms of assessment to teaching/learning experiences (like the midterm exam period as a class discussion) needed another round of revision by me.
The problems I am still encountering include students struggling in content-focused courses (where they expect traditional tests and are not expecting to be challenged as thinkers and writers) because of the absence of tests/grades as well as the course structure that forefronts course content in the first half of the semester and mostly implements workshop the second half.
Here, then I want to share the new versions of those contracts to be implemented in spring. I have more explicitly included language about the purpose of the contract and added the final portfolio expectations in a format that also is more explicit about assignment expectations as well as fulfilling the contracted grade.
The problem will remain, however, that I teach students conditioned for more than 2/3 of their lives in a culture of tests and grades, a culture that has taught them that assignments as by the teacher for evaluation and not for the student as teaching and learning.
I am seeking ways to shift the culture of teaching and learning as well as my students’ expectations for what it means to be a student and a teacher.
These are big asks for those students, but I am convinced they can make those shifts and benefit greatly from doing so.
“Misinformation has received much public and scholarly attention in recent years,” write Ecker et al. in Why Misinformation Must Not Be Ignored, adding, “The fundamental question of how big a concern misinformation should be, however, has become a hotly debated topic.”
They argue and conclude, as noted in the abstract:
Here, we rebut the two main claims, namely that misinformation is not of substantive concern (a) due to its low incidence and (b) because it has no causal influence on notable political or behavioral outcomes. Through a critical review of the current literature, we demonstrate that (a) the prevalence of misinformation is nonnegligible if reasonably inclusive definitions are applied and that (b) misinformation has causal impacts on important beliefs and behaviors. Both scholars and policymakers should therefore continue to take misinformation seriously.
While this compelling examination of misinformation focuses broadly, their focus and conclusion are applicable to the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement that is grounded in misinformation, yet has proved to be highly compelling for the public and then has driven new and revised reading legislation across nearly every state in the US.
The misleading media claim about reading proficiency (because of the confusing categories in NAEP testing) actually changes parental opinion about reading achievement from positive to negative.
Although the SOR story about reading has become “holy text,” the foundational claims of a reading crisis and the causes of that supposed crisis are both false and mischaracterizations.
This influx of misinformation about reading proficiency and reading instruction has created a false story about reading teachers and teacher educators as “bad” teachers and imposed on students a one-size-fits-all and whitewashed set of reading reading
Further, this misinformation campaign about reading proficiency, reading instruction, and reading science is also a serious distraction from the real challenges facing learning and teaching reading.
The US is, as the authors propose, increasingly a misinformation nation, and that dynamic has reignited the corrosive “crisis” and reform cycles in US education, specifically in terms of reading and math.
The US is in a state of perpetual and manufactured crisis/reform in education that serves the interests of the media, political leaders, and the education market place, but harms teachers and students.
Here, then, is a reader that addresses that misinformation by offering a more nuanced and evidence-based examination of the outsized impact of out-of-school factors on student learning, the complicated facts about “reading proficiency” and NAEP testing, and the false stories driving the SOR movement:
Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 [Access HERE until open access at EJ]
Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. TBD
Note
Ecker, U. K. H., Tay, L. Q., Roozenbeek, J., van der Linden, S., Cook, J., Oreskes, N., & Lewandowsky, S. (2024). Why misinformation must not be ignored. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0001448
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
Especially in America.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, centers the story on a few rich characters—Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who have “old” money, as well as Jay Gatsby, representing the nouveau riche.
At the cusp of 2024 and 2025, a century later, one page from the novel seems disturbingly relevant:
In this scene, Fitzgerald uses Buchanan to portray the rise of scientific racism in the US. The scientific racism era in the early 20th century is but one of many examples of how “science” can be used by bad faith actors to promote an ideological agenda.
It isn’t his fault, Buchanan seems to suggest, that he is among the superior white Western civilization: “‘It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.'”
In recent years in the US, navigating science, proof, and science skepticism has reach a level of complexity that defies postmodern thought. Simultaneously, we may be living in the most advanced era of scientific knowledge along side a rising and powerful science-skepticism era.
Vaccination deniers, flat Earthers, and Covid conspiracy theorists have increasingly prominent voices and policy influence due to social media, and the Trump era certainly has eroded how most people understand and what counts as “proven” science.
“Science” as Bad Faith Bullying: Education Edition
Concurrent to the larger political and cultural problems with “science” and science-denial, the education reform movement grounded in the early 1980s accountability movement has adopted “science” as a bad faith bullying approach to reform.
The “science of reading” (SOR) movement [1], essentially driven by conservative ideology, exploded around 2018 under the first Trump administration, and now, SOR has spawned a series of “science of” companion movements—the “science of math,” “the science of learning,” etc.
We may have reached peak “science” as bad faith bullying, however, with a law suit against Heinemann and a few reading programs [2] disproportionately attacked and scapegoated by Emily Hanford and much of mainstream media: “The suit alleges ‘deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services which are undermining a fundamental social good: literacy.'”
If this weren’t yet another personal attack on a few literacy leaders and potentially significant waste of time and money to navigate the nonsense of this legal move, it would be funny since the SOR movement itself is practicing exactly what the suit accuses Heinemann of doing, “fraudulent marketing and sale of products.”
Let’s start with the foundational argument among SOR advocates that teaching practices must be grounded only in practices supported by experimental/quasi-experimental research published in peer review publications, as argued by The Reading League:
While I think these standards are too narrow for real-world practice, this is in fact the basis upon which SOR advocates (and the substance of the law suit) rest sweeping and misleading claims about a range of discounted practices labeled as either whole language or balanced literacy (SOR advocates both interchange and mischaracterize these terms repeatedly along with misrepresenting other terminology such as “three cueing”).
Further, the SOR movement has adopted an old and inaccurate assertion about “science,” echoing Tom’s “‘it’s been proved.'”
Similar to the reading crisis rhetoric from 1961—when Walcutt announces: “We have said that no further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary” (p. 141)—Hanford and Moates proclaimed SOR “settled science” in 2018 (and we must note Moates has a huge market interest in these claims as author of LETRS, see below):
However, the “science” in reading research is not settled, and the SOR movement, as I stated above, is committed to a “deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services”; as I have shown repeatedly, the SOR movement is itself grounded in a plan from 2014 to brand “structure literacy” to “help us sell what we do so well.”
That plan has included exaggerated attacks on some reading programs, some literacy leaders, and some literacy practices while simultaneously endorsing different programs and some practices that are also not supported by SOR’s mandate for a narrow type of “science.”
For example, in a literature review of the current status of SOR from 2022, note that practices either ineffective or lacking scientific support include those rejected by SOR and those embraced by SOR; while this lit review identified “three cueing” as not supported by science as SOR advocates claims, it also lists decodable texts and multisensory approaches (such as Orton-Gillingham), practices and programs aggressively supported by SOR advocates and legislation:
That pattern is standard practice in the SOR movement, including the false attack on teacher education and teacher knowledge being used as “science” as bad faith bullying to sell LETRS.
LETRS falls into the “ineffective and currently unsupported” category as well since only a few studies exist, showing no improvement in student reading.
The SOR movement has also adopted slogans not supported by science (95% of students can be proficient readers) and practices that inflate test scores, target and harm marginalized groups of students, but are not supported by research (grade retention, which seems to be the sole SOR policy impacting test scores).
The “science of” era of education reform is not about improving instruction or student learning. The movement uses “science” as a Trojan horse for de-professionalizing teaching and teachers (selling scripted curriculum) while clearing market space for a new round of “fraudulent marketing and sale of products.”
The law suit is another example showing this “science of” education reform movement is more bad faith bullying than a credible avenue to better supporting teachers and better serving students as readers and learners.
[2] I reject adopting any reading programs and maintain that the reading-program-merry-go-round is the problem, not the solution to reading achievement.
Although a Vanity Fair article has framed Augusta Britt as Cormac McCarthy’s “muse,” Moira Donegan argues in The Guardian that McCarthy, in fact, groomed and took advantage of Britt.
Below, while I discuss positively McCarthy’s work and adaptations of that work, I want to acknowledge the serious concerns being raised about McCarthy as a person. He represents yet another problem with confronting deeply flawed and even abusive people against the context of what many believe are praiseworthy accomplishments.
Larcenet’s Graphic Adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Then in 2009, it was adapted into a major film starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.
Larcenet made a personal appeal to McCarthy to allow him to adapt “The Road.” Praising its atmosphere, Larcenet wrote, “I enjoy drawing the snow, the chilling winds, the dark clouds, the sizzling rain, tangles and snags, rust, and the damp and the humidity. I draw violence and kindness, wild animals, dirty skin, pits and stagnant water.”
McCarthy’s novel is a stark post-apocalyptic narrative that seemed perfect for both film and now a graphic adaptation. It isn’t that McCarthy’s text isn’t enough; it is that the humanity and inhumanity of this cold barren world become even more painful for the viewer and reader through the different visual media.
Roe adds about the connection between text and graphic depiction:
“I have no other ambitions but to draw your words,” Larcenet wrote. “The magical part of being an illustrator is to find a silent line to draw with every word. These lines could support yours without distorting them. At least, that’s the goal if this project should come to fruition.”
Since The Road has already been made into a film, some may wonder why this graphic novel version is needed:
“On top of that, I’ve been racking my brain to avoid any reference to the movie adaptation,” Larcenet wrote to McCarthy. “I usually write my own comics, one of which (‘Blast’) shares common themes with your book. But I didn’t write ‘The Road’; I really wish I had! I sincerely thank you for allowing me to put my pencil down where your pen went.”
Appropriately, then, Larcenet’s adaptation is sparse in wording (many panels and pages are wordless), yet highly detailed in the mostly black-and-white artwork, augmented with subtle washes of coloring. The result is page after page that is mesmerizing and horrifying:
So why do we need yet another version of The Road?
I have read the novel and seen the film, but as a life-long comic book collector, I of course ordered Larcenet’s adaptation. But, frankly, I did so as a collector, thinking I would glance through the book because I do love sequential art.
Then, I found myself reading, lingering on pages and panels. Over a couple sittings, yes, I read the entire adaptation.
I cried. I paused because the story is often overwhelming.
This is the same and a different experience than the novel and the film.
I can’t say we need another version of McCarthy’s novel, but I do say we have been gifted by this beautiful and haunting graphic adaptation.
And since the narrative itself examines the good guys/bad guys dynamic through a child who has had his innocence ripped from him by a calloused world, we too must confront this duality in reality as we try to navigate the flawed artist and the art we love.
Having taught now an on-going 41 years—about half that time as a high school English teacher and now a college professor—if there is one thing I know very well, it is the student.
While I love teaching and my students, there is also one thing I have worked diligently to discourage, young people in classrooms performing like students.
Most student behavior is artificial (hand raising to speak, sitting in neat rows, walking in single-file lines) and often dehumanizing (asking permission to go to the bathroom). And since the core of my work as a teacher has focused on teaching writing, few aspects of being a student are worse than writing like a student.
Much of my writing instruction focuses on moving students away from writing like students and toward writing like scholars (or, ideally, like writers).
While I cringe a bit focusing with the negative, let’s consider what writing like a student looks like (and what young writers should avoid):
Starting essays with and punctuating the discussion throughout with Big Claims that are often inaccurate or mostly empty and then nearly never proven or cited.
One of the best examples of this rhetorical patterns is from The Onion: “For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation.”
Many students are drawn to the “throughout history” claims or framing a topic as “people have always debated,” “many people today debate,” or this topic is “controversial.” Scholars and writers avoid the Big Claims and especially the “throughout history,” “debate,” or “controversy” framing of a topic.
Student writing is often too big and overstated while scholars tend to work in very small and nuanced spaces around a topic; students seek to draw definitive and black-and-white conclusions while scholars deal in questions to be considered and reach tentative conclusions that are qualified.
Writing about doing the writing or research assignment.
Student papers are often filled with references to being a student writing an essay: “The sources I analyzed show,” “In the essay, I am going to,” “The research that I found explains,” “Most of the sources used,” “Many articles and papers done on these topics,” etc.
While there may be some charm to this accidental postmodernist approach to writing (alas, most students are not Kurt Vonnegut intruding on his own fiction narrative), for students, these meta-writing rhetorical moves do not accomplish anything substantive for the purpose of the essay or the content; these phrases simply add to the word count as empty calories.
For example consider the following and the revision (by removing the meta-writing, the word counts drops, and the writing is more direct and clear):
Student writing: Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).
Revised: While some correlation exists between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).
[Note that students can and should use “I” in writing when first person is appropriate and drives the content and purpose of the essay. Typically, students are apt to use “I” in empty and performative ways instead of powerfully and appropriately.]
In cited writing assignments, producing a very narrow form of the “research paper.”
I now include on essay assignments “Do not write a research paper on …” as part of the assignment. The artificial “research paper” that many students have acquired from K-12 schooling is a mechanical and prompted essay form that results in students writing about their sources instead of writing a purposeful essay with a clear audience: “One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.”
Also, as another example: “John Dewey (1953) wrote a book about progressive education. In his book, Dewey (1953) states, ‘The educator is responsible for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that will enable activity ties to be selected which lend themselves to social organization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control’ (pp. 23-24).”
Many students simply walk the reader through their “sources” one-by-one, essentially writing about their sources and not their topic. This includes text that increases word count and nothing else, empty calories: “Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”
Consider a more direct and powerful version: “Oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”
Excessive or inappropriate quoting.
You may be noticing a trend here since a great deal of what makes something “student writing” increases word count without contributing to the content of the writing.
Excessive and inappropriate quoting is a hallmark of student writing grounded in learning to cite and provide evidence in their writing primarily in their high school English classes where they are using MLA and often doing textual analysis (literary analysis).
Students have learned in the context of literary analysis for English courses that the (only) way to prove a point is by quoting. This is essentially true when writing textual analysis, but students turn that into a universal technique whereby they quote excessively from sources in all types of writing.
And thus, students (as noted above) simply write about their sources, quoting excessively from each and providing little of their own thoughts and almost no synthesis of information. One of the most ineffective but common examples is the floating quote in which the student as writer never exists: “’A democratic and inclusive sexuality education balances risk and resiliency and recognizes that they are on a continuum and are influenced by social and cultural factors in the environment’ (Elia & Eliason, p. 25).”
Scholars, when writing in forms and purposes other than textual analysis, tend to quote rarely or not at all; when quoting in scholarly writing that isn’t textual analysis, the guideline is something like quote when the “how” of the passage is as powerful as the “what.”
We may be justified in quoting James Baldwin while not so much when using information from a peer-reviewed journal articles on social mobility or racism in policing.
Mechanical essay form and thesis sentences (declarative and conclusive statements).
If you have been wondering, the 5-paragraph essay is alive and well. Students overwhelmingly believe an introduction is one paragraph that ends with a declarative thesis statement, that essay bodies have three paragraphs or sections to correlate with the three points in that thesis, and that the conclusion is one paragraph that, yes, restates the thesis.
At no point of a student’s development is a 5-paragraph essay justifiable; it is the paint-by-numbers of composition. It is not just bad writing, it is also bad thinking.
Scholars write all sorts of essay forms and construct them around much broader concepts of openings, bodies, and closing with the thesis focus often in the form of questions to be considered and not definitive assertions made at the beginning and then proven.
As with many of the examples so far, the 5-paragraph essay template is a distraction for the student-as-writer, focusing their writing on filling in the template and not addressing and developing their writing purpose for a clear audience. [As a note, I still have students occasionally label their thesis sentence in their essays.]
Essay purpose/form and audience directed at either at no audience or the teacher/professor.
Related to the 5-paragraph essay template is that students are trapped in the context of writing an essay is a form of assessment that is being assigned and graded by the teacher. As a consequence, the purpose is just doing the assignment, and the audience is either no one in particular or simply for the teacher/professor.
While the essay form for scholarly and academic writing is narrower than the entire array of what we call essays, students must be introduced to the broader essay form that involves them as writers making decisions about how to organize, to engage the readers, and to develop the purpose of the essay.
Some of the elements I introduce is the multiple-paragraph opening and closing, subheadings, the thesis as question(s), and abandoning the closing as a restating of the introduction.
Paragraphing that is very long or lacking purpose.
One thing students as writers simply cannot do is paragraphing. They have lived in a world of prescribed number-of-sentences mandates for paragraphing, and those prescriptions have been, to say the least, really bad guidelines.
Students have learned that longer is better.
While academic and scholarly writing suffer from the long-paragraph syndrome, here I do push students toward how non-academic writers use paragraphing.
Broadly speaking, readers prefer shorter paragraphs (or at least balk at long ones). And fields such as journalism use very short paragraphing.
Since a foundational part of teaching writing for me is students learning to be purposeful instead of following templates and rules, I focus on purposeful and varied paragraphing. We read and examine many effective essays that use one-sentence paragraphs and explore how paragraphing impacts the reader/audience of the text.
Word choice and tone contradicting the content and tone of the essay topic and purpose.
Students as writers are, of course, developing and expanding their vocabulary. But the diction problem that most characterizes student writing is a lack of awareness of tone—using words that have a contradictory tone to the level of seriousness of their topic.
Lots of “thing,” “good,” “bad,” and 8-color crayon box of words when they are exploring complicated and serious issues: “Sex education in the United States is all over the place, and for some students, their sex ed is almost exactly like the students in Mean Girls” or “This article was also pretty on par with the tone of the research papers” or “Because each employee’s salaries are not posted on the front desk for everyone to read, many women don’t even realize they are being gipped until someone blabs during their break at the water cooler or they hear the specifics of their associate’s raise.”
So here we are after a pretty extensive list of what student writing tends to entail. This, by the way, is no criticism of students.
Student writing is a reflection of how students have been taught, assigned, and graded. Students often learn what they are taught despite the hand wringing to the contrary.
I have two thoughts now.
First, students deserve better writing instruction and expectations throughout K-16. That instruction needs to come from teachers who are writers, not just “English teachers,” and more educators need better experiences with being writers themselves (that is the foundation of the National Writing Project).
Next, students are capable of making this transition, although the unlearning is often not fun for them or the instructor.
And thus the paradox remains: I love students but work daily to deprogram them from behaving like students.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 
