Whatever happened to term papers and academic demands for writing?

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times by Erika Hayasaki provided all the evidence anyone needs to understand why so many educators wring their hands about the status of the communication process in America.

Titled “The Term Paper Becomes a Rarity in U.S. High Schools,” the Hayasaki piece cited a report released recently by the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges. The panel of academics assembled by the College Board found that 75 percent of high school seniors never receive writing assignments in history or social studies. The study also found that a major research and writing project required in the senior year of high school “has become an educational curiosity, something rarely assigned.” The report also said that by the first year of college more than 50 percent of freshmen are unable to analyze or synthesize information or produce papers free of language errors.

C. Peter Magrath, the commission chairman, blames societal changes. “We don’t write letters anymore, because we use telephones and e-mail and watch television,” he said.

All high schools need to refocus on writing and learning how to do it better, says Gary Orfield, a professor of education at Harvard University. He blames teachers for not pushing students, and themselves, harder.

“We’re in such an idiotic period in education that we’ve simplified it into filling in this bubble,” Orfield told Hayasaki. “If we send students to college without being able to think, synthesize or write in a coherent way, students are going to be crippled, no matter what their test scores are.”

Teachers are not without blame, to be sure. Some high school pupils and college professors say the decline is a result of the unwillingness of a growing number of teachers to spend nights and weekends grading papers.

“Some wonderful teachers stay up until midnight grading,” according to Chester E. Finn Jr., a senior fellow with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a former assistant U.S. secretary of education. “But many more are told that the school day ends at 2:50 and that’s when they are done,” he adds.

Kathleen Lyons, a spokeswoman for the National Education Assn. teachers union, said the average teacher works 48 hours a week even though their contracts often require far less time. The decline of the term paper can be traced to swelling class sizes, she says. “If a teacher has 30 students in each class and five periods in a day, that’s 150 papers that have to be graded. That’s a monumental amount of reading.”

Yet somehow the really good teachers were able to do that in past years and continue to do it today.

The Hayasaki story is troubling and unsettling. Where does the answer lie? First on the list should be greater funding for more and better teachers, so that old-line approaches to such vital subjects as reading and writing can be restored.

Yet the bottom-line continues to be money, as it so often is for crises such as this. With educational funding short and growing shorter these days almost everywhere, there is little hope that the issue will be resolved soon.