You will hear a conversation between Miss Green, an educational journalist, and Professor Wilson, an expert in educational studi

M: Professor Wilson, recently, I read a report, saying that writing in schools is found to be both dismal and neglected, because students and teachers have to spend a lot of time preparing for external assessments given by the State. You have been a strong advocator for teacher and student rights. You wrote about the politics of education in "Testing is not teaching" in 2002. How have things changed since you first wrote about writing in the 1970s?
W: In my report to the Ford Foundation in 1976, I documented how the government founded no research in the teaching of writing. It was a polling how little opportunity there was to research writing. I actually got the first grant from the government in 1978 for my study in Atkinson, New Hampshire. There was also a cover story by News Week with a title "Why Johnny can’t" that was around 1977, as I recalled. So there was a burst of advantage for writing in the early 80s. The national writing project expanded dramatically and there was more research money for studying and writing. Even Ronald Reagon allowed funds to go to writing and its improvement, I was on his panel for excellence. I’ve learned that American educators and the government can maintain focus on the subject area for only so long. In the early 90s and continuing to the present, testing and accountability have become a major focus. They have become almost like curriculum in their own rights. They steal the focus from learning and, more particularly from writing.
M: What impact have federal decisions had on our schools? What has this meant for the teaching and writing?
W: Testing and the emphasis on reading have stolen large blocks of time from writing. Writing requires human power and time to evaluate whatever is admitted. Reading on the other hand is much cheaper to assess. The No Child Left Behind Act is all about reading. The authors of the bill didn’t realize just how much writing creates a different reader. Writ-
ing is the making of reading. People who construct things know far better how to take those things apart. The federal decisions want us to believe that it is much more important to find out if children are good receivers of information rather than good senders of information. In short, we don’t want their ideas but we do want to know if we can get the right answers about the information they should understand. In sum, for our political stand point, we don’t really want to know if they can write with a voice that has ideas and facts just to support those ideas.
M: What can teachers do when they find they have less time for writing?
W: Teacher should band together asking lots of questions both orally and in a writing. They need to ask questions such as " How important is writing in relation to reading?", " Do you think writing is a medium for learning to think? Why or why not?" To show how important the medium of writing is, we should put our questions in writing, then call for an appointment to have good dialogue with administrators and policy makers. Of course we need to have dialogue among ourselves about these matters first.