There is an abundant body of research on the value of literacy and writing in particular. Frankly, it’s just common sense that students who do more nonfiction writing, along with editing and rewriting, will improve thinking and reasoning skills, and that will improve their abilities in science, social studies, mathematics, and everything else that they do in life. But if people need to see published resources, I would recommend the following:

• Reeves, D.B., “Standards are not enough: Essential transformations for successful schools,” National Association of Secondary School Principals Bulletin, December 2000.
• Darling-Hammond, L., The Right to Learn, Jossey Bass, 1997
• Reeves, D.B., The Leader’s Guide to Standards, Jossey Bass, 2002.
• Calkins, L., The Art of Teaching Writing, Heinneman.

Here are some ideas to compromise with teachers on the issue of maintaining their creativity while simultaneously maintaining a commitment to excellence:

1. Allow teachers to choose the prompt so that the writing assignments fit into their subject. Everyone uses the same scoring rubric, of course, in order to maintain consistency of expectations. But the subject matter of the prompt can be selected by the teachers.
2. Allow teachers outside of language arts to use an abbreviated scoring rubric, focusing primarily on organization and conventions. Some of the complexities of the traditional rubrics can be overwhelming for people outside of language arts.
3. Allow team scoring, so that the same assignment receives credit in both science and language arts, for example, and teachers score them together.
4. Give up time in faculty meetings for collaborative scoring so that teachers know that the administration is willing to give up its meeting so that teachers will have more time. The same can be done with perhaps half of the building and district professional development hours.

These are all reasonable compromises that show your good faith. The essential question that every teacher must address is this: Is what we have been doing in the past working? Are our students writing well enough to have opportunities beyond high school? Ask some local community college and university and technical school faculty to talk with you about this issue. They will uniformly report that even students with good work ethic and decent test scores are writing abysmally, and that this is hurting the career and academic opportunities for these students. The remedy for this is more writing, more editing, more feedback – and all of those things in more subjects. Do you have more 9th graders than 12th graders? In virtually every high school in the land, the answer is yes, and that is because students do not succeed in 9th and 10th grades, and then drop out. These students are not stupid, but they lack essential skills for success in school and in life, and our failure to intervene to give them those skills results in a lifetime of adverse consequences for them.

One final note: The thesis of the “we can’t be creative” argument is that because of the demands of standards, you just can’t be creative but only must teach to the test all day. If that thesis were true, then the evidence should indicate that teachers who do mindless test drills all day long have higher test scores than teachers whose classrooms are marked by creativity, thinking, engagement, analysis, rigor, communication, and, of course, writing. After all, their reasoning goes, you just don’t have time for all those good things if you are doing test drills, and the test drills are the only way to have high scores. In fact, the evidence is the opposite of that hypothesis. I’m advocating FOR creativity, and writing, thinking, engagement, and analysis are all parts of a creative classroom.

I'm an advocate of VERY short (10-12 items) assessments done very frequently. In my classes I would do weekly assessment, but many schools are doing bi-weekly assessment successfully. Certainly formative assessments must be no less frequent than quarterly.

The key is not, however, simply "doing" the assessment -- the key is how teachers use the results to make immediate improvements in teaching and learning. The longer the interval between the assessments, the less likely it is that we can make meaningful alterations in teaching strategies and curriculum.

With regard to the "not enough time for instruction" argument, I can only quote what I heard another Virginia educator say when confronted with the same challenge. "These assessment [they did them biweekly] SAVE us time -- it's the only way we know what to teach and who needs special assistance."

There is not a shred of evidence that covering the curriculum and checking off items on pacing charts is equivalent to student learning. In areas where students succeed -- from electronic games to music to athletics - they receive very frequent feedback. Marzano is just one of many researchers who has established that of all the things that we do as teachers, feedback is the single greatest influence on student achievement, provided that the feedback is timely, accurate, and specific. End of semester finals do not meet any of those criteria.

I am very sympathetic to teachers who feel overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of standards and curriculum elements. The best response to that challenge, however, is not a failure to assess students, but rather a narrowing of the scope of the assessments. It is not necessary to address every element of the standards. We can save a great deal of time if we first identify "Power Standards" (see the book by Larry Ainsworth of that title), and then focus our assessment efforts on the most important assessments.

I can see two sides of this. My very strong inclination is to agree with you, because I have seen some terrific writing assessments in music and art, and I would hate to have those efforts diluted. On the other hand, in many school systems the student:teacher ratio for music, art, and PE is MUCH higher than for other classes, and the use of common assessments can place an excessive burden on those teachers compared to their colleagues. Therefore, some team assessment might make sense -- study the Firebird Suite and artistic representations of it in music AND art, and submit written reflection for credit in both classes, with grading duties split between two teachers.

At the end of the day, we need to honor your desire to focus on your discipline and use your expertise to help students link literacy skills to your class, without drowning you in paperwork. There must be a reasonable compromise here somewhere -- perhaps one quarter doing discipline-specific assessments and the next quarter doing cross-disciplinary assessments.

First, I reject the premise that there is a formula for grading based on the use of the average. We make 5th graders learn that the arithmetic mean is not always the best representation of a data set; surely teachers and school leaders can learn the same lesson.

Second, I applaud the notion of making formative assessments "count" - but neither these assessments nor ANY single project, paper, assessment, or test should be allowed to so profoundly influence a student's grade. Each time we have the "killer project" we administer the academic death penalty, telling students that resilience doesn't matter, finishing strong doesn't count, and a single bad week or month can ruin an entire year. Rather than teaching resilience, we teach defeatism.

Therefore, let me offer some practical ways out of this dilemma.

I would concur with making the assessments "count" - but only as part of a menu of student projects, assignments, and assessments. If the blow the assessment, the consequence is not a failure, but rather the consequence is that students select something else from the menu. The same if they miss an assignment, blow a test, or fail to turn in a project (or, just as commonly, complete the project, but leave it at the bottom of a locker that resembles a toxic waste dump). Our responses should be neither sympathy nor judgment, but simply the rational, logical, encouraging, and firm response that students are responsible for their work, and when they miss important work, they don't fail, but rather they select something else form the menu and GET THE WORK DONE. This results in more work of higher quality, better grades, fewer failures, and appropriate respect for formative assessments without making formative assessments "make or break" tests.