B2 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 , 2020
education
or friend with writing experience
to edit something your child or
student has written. I do this for
strangers who send me op-eds
that they are trying to improve. I
suspect people you know will be
happy to give it a try. If you
yourself have editing experience,
go for it. This can’t be rewriting a
school assignment, which would
be cheating, but showing
students how to improve pieces
they have written on their own.
At my college paper, I had a
great editor; she was kind but
demanding. I married her on
graduation day. She occasionally
edits me, if I ask nicely. Give it a
try. Taking charge of the
educational process is what many
of us are doing this year. By
introducing editing, we are going
somewhere schools have rarely
gone before.
[email protected]learning to write an argument:
“Introduce precise claim(s),
distinguish the claim(s) from
alternate or opposing claims, and
create an organization that
establishes clear relationships
among claim(s), counterclaims,
reasons, and evidence.”
That’s not very appealing. Like
good teaching, good editing is
specific. Students should do 300
to 2,000 words on topics they like.
Describe something they want
done and why. They can be
personal. They can even be funny.
Teachers often correct papers.
That is not the same as editing.
Few have the time. Almost no
high school students are required
to do long research papers, except
those enrolled in private schools,
the International Baccalaureate
program or the Advanced
Placement Research course.
Perhaps you can ask a relativeteacher while they watched. That
would total about three hours of
personal editing by the end of the
semester, much more than the
zero hours usually allotted.
Only a few teachers have told
me they have done something like
that. But the current chaos might
create opportunities for a
distance-learning version.
The Learning Agency Lab
report said persuasive writing is
critical for success in college.
Such pieces could be sent online
to volunteers to be edited with
explanations and sent back. The
student could rewrite the piece
and ask for another edit, as
happens in the real world.
A personal, lively touch is
important. Here is a bad example
of what students get now. This
stiff guidance comes from the
Common Core State Standards
for ninth- and 10th-gradersrarely do: edit pieces students
have written.
I am not a teacher. But I have
written for pay since 1966. I know
how I learned. In college, a ragged
collection of older
undergraduates began tearing
apart the stories I tried to write
for the student paper. Good
editing showed me what was
wrong and how to fix it. I began to
wonder why that never happened
to me in class, not even at the big
university we were attending.
I still wonder. Eight years ago, I
suggested a different way to teach
writing in high school: require
students take at least one
semester of reading and writing
instead of their regular English
class. A paper would be due each
Monday. In class, students would
read what they liked or work on
next week’s essay. They would
take turns being edited by thenonprofit Education Trust found
that about 78 percent of them
required less than a single
paragraph of writing.
That will not improve in this
fear-ridden year. But I know a
way innovative parents and
teachers might give writing a
boost, with the help of certain
older Americans who, like me,
often sit at their kitchen tables
not doing much.
This is for families schooling
on their own this year, or maybe a
few daring teachers. Districts
generally don’t welcome
uncertified volunteer instructors.
I am suggesting you tap into the
retired or semiretired
wordsmiths in your communities.
There are journalists,
speechwriters, English teachers,
lawyers, novelists and others
willing to help.
They can do what schoolsOnce again, the
inadequacy of
American writing
instruction has
been exposed, this
time by the
Learning Agency
Lab, a nonprofit
organization in
Tempe, Ariz. Its new report is:
“Are Schools Making Writing a
Priority?”
The answer is no. The report
said only about a quarter of
middle and high school students
write at least 30 minutes a day,
what experts consider a
minimum. Persuasive writing is
particularly feeble, with only
15 percent of eighth-graders and
13 percent of 12th-graders doing
it at least once a week.
A 2015 study of 1,876 literacy
assignments collected from six
urban middle schools by the
To give writing lessons a boost, t ap retired wordsmiths to edit students’ pieces
Jay
Mathews
BY ERIK GLEIBERMANNAs the country grapples with
issues raised by the emerging
racial justice movement, the in-
fluential College Board is launch-
ing an ambitious national curric-
ulum on race with an Advanced
Placement program on the Afri-
can diaspora.
Given AP’s importance on high
school transcripts and in college
admissions, the program has the
potential to make Black studies a
popular college-prep offering in
coming years.
Its release follows a three-year
pilot program in 11 public schools
with widely varying racial demo-
graphics — urban schools enroll-
ing mostly students of color in
New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta
and Miami, as well as predomi-
nantly White schools in smaller-
sized communities such as Nor-
man, Okla., and Huntsville, Ala.
Each school partners with a men-
toring university.
The College Board collaborat-
ed on the project with the non-
profit African Diaspora Consor-
tium and Columbia University’s
Teachers College.
This effort could not be more
timely, according to Ernest Mor-
rell, a professor of Africana stud-
ies at the University of Notre
Dame who co-chairs the AP com-
mittee that oversees the curricu-
lum.
“I think there is going to be a
convergence between the work
we are doing and the larger uni-
verse demanding some form of
racial justice,” he said.
The curriculum, which covers
people of African descent who
were dispersed globally through
the slave trade and other historic
movements, aims to help answer
two key questions about educa-
tional equity and diversity: Can a
widely available college-level cur-
riculum on the Black experience
boost Black students to greater
academic success in AP pro-
grams, where they are historically
underrepresented? And can oth-
er students, whether White, Lati-
no or Asian, deepen their person-
al racial awareness by studying
an Africana curriculum?
The focus extends geographi-
cally and conceptually beyond a
traditional introductory African
American studies course, instead
featuring a global and cross-disci-
plinary orientation. For example,
a student might trace the diverse
roots of the actors in the ground-
breaking movie “Black Panther”
— whose heritage links to Ugan-
da, Zimbabwe, Kenya and other
countries — or conduct inde-
pendent research comparing the
variations in a visual art motif
seen in Ghana, Haiti and Louisi-
ana.
Rather than create a separate
AP subject course, the College
Board has linked the diaspora
curriculum to its skills-based
Capstone program.
Capstone, which was intro-
duced in 2014, allows students to
gain AP credit through independ-
ent research projects, extended
essays and oral and visual presen-
tations on contemporary issues.
They also take a year-end stan-
dardized skills-based exam. More
than 300 colleges and univer-
sities now grant course credit for
students who earn passing Cap-
stone scores.
As the new program grows,
Morrell hopes those institutions
will begin to offer credit specifi-
cally for Africana studies. He al-
ready is discussing that possibili-
ty at Notre Dame.
High school teachers can ap-
proach the curriculum in varied
ways because it serves as more of
a framework than a syllabus.“There’s personal freedom to
take it in different directions,”
said Norman High School teacher
Michael Grubb, whose class is
mostly White.
Grubb has opened his class
these last three years by defining
the general phenomenon of
diaspora and how it manifests in
different regions of the world. By
contrast, Andrew Geathers of
Brooklyn’s Bedford Academy has
developed Socratic seminars that
analyze African conceptions of
time. He asks every class what it
means to be Black, a discussion
that resonates deeply in a school
composed almost entirely of Af-
ro-Caribbean, African American
and African students.
The students respond in kind.
At nearby Medgar Evers College
Prep, Kayla Sergeant examined
the school-to-prison pipeline in
the United States after seeing a
documentary about the case of
the Central Park Five teenagers
who were falsely accused of rape.
She looked at disparities in sen-
tencing for Black and White de-
fendants convicted of the same
crime. But she also identified
international parallels.
“I was looking at injustices
people of African descent faced,
not just in America but around
the world,” said Sergeant, now a
freshman at Howard University
who plans to become a criminal
justice lawyer.
High school classmate Rome-
line Marceau studied the sharply
higher childbirth mortality rates
for Black women globally.
“I wouldn’t have known about
this if I weren’t prompted to do so
by the class,” she said. She starts
her college career at the Univer-
sity at Buffalo this month and
intends to become an obstetri-
cian-gynecologist.
The two teenagers’ personal
connection to the new diaspora
curriculum illustrates how it can
empower Black students to see
themselves as part of a greater
narrative.
“My understanding of ‘African’
wasn’t what it is now,” said Ser-
geant, who is second-generation
Grenadian American. “I wouldn’t
have wanted to be identified as
African. At the beginning of the
course, I would have just said I
was African American. And I
can’t put down both African
American and Afro-Caribbean on
the census. At the end of the day, I
say I am of African descent. I
know I’m proud of where I come
from.”
Morrell said such personal ex-
periences can also strengthen
academic success. “The research
demonstrates it,” he said, with
data from the three-year pilot
indicating the program will prob-
ably attract Black students who
have never taken AP courses as
well as encourage them to take
additional ones. B lack students’
scores on AP tests in recent years
have remained significantly low-
er than those of other groups.
This fall, some classes will ex-
plore the anti-racism protests
that have rocked numerous coun-
tries in 2020. More than 100
teachers took part in a recent
training on the diaspora curricu-
lum, and Rhonesha Blaché, a
doctoral candidate at Columbia
University who is overseeing its
implementation, said the group
had plenty of examples to consid-
er during the discussion.
“We covered such things as
how art or even fashion are used
to protest — songs versus poetry
versus fine arts,” she said. “We
looked across populations in the
diaspora at what is happening in
the U.S., the U.K., in Colombia,
across Asia, you name it.”
[email protected]College Board launches
African diaspora course
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