job. The governing expectation is that when teachers ask students to write an
essay in a week or two, they will see fewer errors and greater clarity. Yet when
they collect those essays for grading, they find that the papers are riddled with
errors of all kinds: subject–verb agreement problems, faulty and even haphaz-
ard punctuation, incorrect word use, and the like. In other words, assessment of
student performance indicates that the outcomes have not been achieved.
We can understand the problem easily if we consider that grammar instruc-
tion, especially the drill and exercise kind, does not involve writing essays. Any
valid assessment of what we are teaching via grammar drills and exercises must
assess students’ performance on grammar drills and exercises. The educational
principle here is fundamental: We assess what we teach. We obviously are not
teaching writing when we teach grammar: Our grammar instruction is about
identifying form and function—parts of speech, sentence types, and so forth.
Writing instruction is about audience, intention, revision, argument, support,
documentation, and so on. The substance of grammar instruction is so different
from the substance of writing instruction that only centuries of confusion, as
summarized in the previous chapter, could blind us to the point that we mistake
one for the other. Many of us also blithely ignore the violation of a fundamental
educational principle when we assess grammar instruction on the basis of stu-
dent essays. We are engaged in invalid assessment each time we use students’
writing to measure how well they have mastered grammar. We just aren’t
assessing what we teach.
Our public school culture leads teachers to react to students’ writing errors in
predictable ways. Rather than question the underlying assumption, they gener-
ally conclude that they did not present the grammar lessons effectively and will
repeat them. They may conclude that their students were careless or perhaps re-
sistant and will lecture their students on the need for error-free writing and
greater attention to mechanics. Or they may conclude that their students are
dull and did not understand the lessons, although they seemed to be able to
complete the assigned exercises without too much difficulty, and will repeat
them. In other words, more grammar instruction inevitably follows, as well as
another essay in a couple of weeks. And when teachers grade these new papers,
they find the same errors, again.
What should be most surprising is that this cycle will continue without any-
one ever reaching the conclusion that the governing assumption is false and that
the entire enterprise is misguided. The outcomes are explained and rationalized
so that the failure to improve student writing performance is blamed on the stu-
dents or the teacher, where it does not belong. Only the most reflective teachers
begin to suspect that their instruction does not match learning outcomes.
26 CHAPTER 2