A Study of the Implications for College-Level Literacy Instruction and Assessment of the P-16 Education Policy Reform Movement

*Note: Please scroll down the page to see the full report as well as the original research proposal*

J. S. Dunn, jr., and Michael M. Williamson
Department of English, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Indiana, PA 15705

OVERVIEW
During the weekend of 26 February 2005, the National Governors Association held its annual Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C. The main event of this year’s gathering was a “National Education Summit on High Schools,” which featured, among other speakers, Microsoft Corporation President Bill Gates and former White House advisor David Gergen. While officially the focus of attention was education at the secondary level, the participants by and large approached the matter through the assumptions of a recent trend in education policy that has come to be known as “P-16 reform.” This movement assumes an interconnectedness between systems at all levels of the nation’s public education “pipeline,” from preschool (“P”) through college graduation (grade “16”). Indeed, during the speeches and roundtable discussions, excerpts of which were aired throughout the country during the subsequent week on the C-SPAN cable network, the P-16 reform agenda of America’s governors addressed issues that have likewise caused concern and debate within the field of Composition Studies. Among these included the role of education, and especially higher education, in affecting the nation’s economic and political power abroad as well as in altering the economic and social standing of students within our culture; the looming need for more students than ever before to attend and complete college; the present high-school curricula in content areas such as the language arts; the proportion of young Americans of different backgrounds who do and do not attend college; the impact of state-mandated testing of literacy and writing as well as potential uses for the data gathered through such assessments; the number of students currently enrolled in so-called “remedial” coursework in college and the costs of funding such instruction; the percentages of students entering college who remain after their first year, who complete portions of bachelors degrees, and who eventually graduate as well as the amount of time and resources these processes entail; and, finally, the transitions of high-school and college students from school to the workforce as well as the views of employers about the preparation of these recently educated workers.

This brief list of issues and topics suggests that the concerns of the P-16 reform movement overlap substantially with our own in the field of Composition Studies. However, while many members of our field anticipate the upcoming Conference on College Composition and Communication each year, far fewer, we suspect, follow – let alone are aware of – events such as meetings of the National Governors Association or other forums in which P-16 reform and education policy in general are discussed. This situation is hardly unique to Composition Studies, as education reform scholar David T. Conley has argued for almost a decade (see “Where’s Waldo? The Conspicuous Absence of Higher Education from School Reform and One State’s Response.” Phi Delta Kappan, 78.4 [December 1996]: 309-14). Not surprisingly, then, during his remarks at the National Governors Association meeting, current NGA chairperson and Governor of Virginia Mark Warner announced that among his top priorities in the coming year would be “getting our flagship institutions [by which he meant four-year campuses and research-oriented universities] to be much more involved in this debate” over P-16 reform. Since members of the National Governors Association and other organizations aligned with the P-16 movement (for example, the Education Commission of the States [ECS] and the State Higher Education Executive Officers [SHEEO], among others) exert considerable influence over budgeting and resource allocation in higher education, if not curriculum and pedagogy directly, it is vital to our own interests that the field of Composition Studies better understand P-16 reform and its implications.

With this context in mind, our project attempts to define the P-16 movement and its assumptions about literacy and learning, explain the movement’s origins and current influences on college-level literacy education, analyze its potential impact on the field of Composition Studies, and recommend strategies by which post-secondary literacy educators can deal constructively with this phenomenon.

METHODOLOGY TO DATE
In response to these issues, we have undertaken the following research tasks thus far.

• Corpus of P-16 Policy Reports: To help identify the basic ideas and assumptions of the discourse communities from which P-16 policy proposals originate, we have collected documents authored or commissioned by various education advocacy groups who associate themselves with the term “P-16.” Using a continually updated list of keywords, our searches of education-related databases and the internet have uncovered some twenty P-16 policy reports that concern issues of literacy and higher education as well as miscellaneous policy briefs and promotional materials, most published during the past five years. While citing academic research, these reports are intended for nonacademic audiences such as legislators, government officials, members of the business community, and the public at large.
• Bibliography of P-16 Scholarship: To complement our understanding of the policy proposals and reports, we have developed a bibliography of journal articles and scholarly books that explain the theories and research behind P-16 reform to academic audiences. Database searches using our keyword list as well as citations found in the reports themselves generated the entries on this bibliography.
• Bibliography of Scholarship on Education Reform and Public Policy: To provide background on the academic study of policy materials, we have gathered selected resources analyzing the processes of education reform and public policy decision-making, primarily from fields such as educational leadership, political science, sociology, and policy studies, with special attention to recent work in the latter discipline that applies principles from the study of rhetoric to understanding the discourses of policy making. Database searches and consultation with colleagues generated the entries on this bibliography.
• Bibliography of Scholarship on Rhetoric and the Analysis of Argumentation: Finally, to provide techniques for analyzing the argument structures and persuasive appeals in the reports, we have compiled a bibliography of studies drawing on approaches associated the New Rhetoric and the work of Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman. Database searches and our own knowledge of current work in the fields of English, speech communication, Composition Studies, and technical writing generated the entries on this bibliography.

UPCOMING STAGES OF RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION
Based on our data collection and literature reviews so far, we anticipate the following activities in the coming months.

• By mid-summer, Dunn hopes to complete a draft journal article suitable for College English or College Composition and Communication that will introduce the issue of P-16 reform, provide rhetorical analyses of selected policy reports, and suggest the relevance of trends in education policy to concerns in the field of Composition Studies.
• During the remainder of the current semester, Dunn and Williamson, with the assistance of the project’s outside consultant, will develop a short list of states whose approaches to P-16 reform appear most compatible with assumptions about literacy and learning accepted in the field of Composition Studies.
• Throughout the upcoming summer, Dunn and Williamson will gather and analyze P-16-related documents from the selected states.
• During the fall semester, Dunn and Williamson will draft a journal article suitable for College Composition and Communication or Writing Program Administration that describes the context of each state, the model of P-16 reform undertaken, and the implications of each model for issues of writing assessment and instruction such as composition placement testing, exit examinations, and writing across the curriculum.
• Also during the fall semester, Dunn and Williamson will compare the policy positions regarding literacy assessment and instruction suggested by the reports in the P-16 corpus with relevant Position Statements endorsed by NCTE/CCCC.
• Early in 2006, Dunn and Williamson will draft a journal article suitable for College Composition and Communication or Rhetoric Review that analyses the language of policy statements on comparable issues from the discourse communities of P-16 reform and Composition Studies, with the goals of understanding the role of policy statements in education practice and the formation of disciplinary identity as well as suggesting opportunities for collaboration between the two fields.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS
Our research on P-16 reform thus far has focused primarily on issues of identification, definition, and explanation of origins, the initial levels of classical rhetoric’s stasis theory of questioning. However, colleagues hearing of this project have already pushed us to consider the remaining stases of value and policy. “So is P-16 reform good or bad for Composition Studies?” they ask, and “what should we be doing about it?” While the evidence to support our arguments must await further data analysis, we offer the following observations as tentative findings of our research to date. 

• We in Composition Studies can ignore P-16 reform efforts only at our own peril: As mentioned earlier, the organizations and groups associated with P-16 reform boast a membership of individuals who hold some of the most influential positions in higher education administration and state government. The fact alone that they believe P-16 matters means at the very least we as a discipline should become better informed about this trend. More importantly, however, P-16 reform can best be understood as an attempt to deal with powerful economic, political, and demographic forces that have been transforming not just education but many other facets of American society in recent decades. It’s unlike that these large-scale societal changes will end in the near future; thus, the issues raised by P-16 reform will remain pressing and demand our ongoing attention.
• The P-16 movement needs our expertise in literacy, learning, and teaching: Unlike education reforms more familiar in the field of Composition Studies, the P-16 movement is not based on specific pedagogical, curricular, or even content-oriented proposals. Rather, its main proponents are administrators and political leaders who approach education from an institutional or systems perspective. As Ohio Governor Bob Taft pointedly commented at the recent NGA meeting, right now he and his colleagues need to know better “what is expected of students in college” in order to develop their P-16 initiatives. At present, a tremendous opportunity exists for our field to share the expertise we have accumulated with proponents of P-16 reform, if we so choose. Involving ourselves with the P-16 movement can help ensure the approaches to pedagogy, curriculum, and content that we take most seriously are respected and potentially acted upon as the reform process moves forward.
• The P-16 movement may provide additional support for reforms already advocated by the field of Composition Studies: During most of our history as a discipline, the political struggles associated with Composition Studies have been fought in the contexts of English departments or individual college campuses. To take just three examples, members of our field have argued, with varying degrees of success, for conceiving of introductory composition courses as something other than skills-based training or a repetition of high school work; likewise, for adequate support of writing across the curriculum; and finally, for the training of all composition teachers in the theory and practice of writing instruction. The P-16 movement brings a systemwide perspective to such issues, and in doing so offers additional support for the positions of composition specialists. In the examples just mentioned, P-16 advocates are concerned with transitions between levels of education and likewise avoiding unnecessary repetition of instruction, so they would view adequately defining the nature of introductory composition courses as an important priority. The attention in P-16 policy to graduation rates provides a rationale for writing instruction that extends throughout students’ years in college.  Finally, several P-16 advocacy groups have taken stands against what the National Governors Association refers to as “out of field teaching,” the practice of instructors, most notably in high-school-level math and science, teaching subjects in which they do not have adequate formal training or certification. Applying this principle to instructors who teach composition at the college level keeps with the P-16 assumption that the various levels of education should be approached as a single, unified system. On these and other issues, placing the positions our field has long advocated in the context of P-16 reform may lend additional support to them.
• Adequately addressing the P-16 reform movement will require an officially orchestrated response from the CCCC: Perhaps most striking to us thus far in our research has been Composition Studies’ lack of official presence and visibility as a field of inquiry, a discipline, or any other sort of professional entity within the discourse communities of P-16 reform. While individual Composition teachers and scholars have been actively involved with the P-16 movement during the past decade, whether as instructors, researchers, or consultants, the P-16 materials we have reviewed indicate little awareness that the study of writing at the college level constitutes a distinctive, legitimate area of knowledge generation and application. Over the last 50 or more years, the CCCC has made great advances in defining and developing the identity of Composition Studies, especially within the context of English departments. The challenges and opportunities of the P-16 movement now require that we shift attention to our field’s presence in other, more distant discourse communities where the debates will have far-reaching implications for who we will eventually become as a field. At the very least, we recommend that CCCC create a national committee that will monitor P-16 developments and send official delegates to professional meetings and other forums of education policymaking concerning literacy. Doing so will help convey to members of our field and colleagues in other disciplines that our work in higher education and its relation to the experiences of students throughout their schooling can’t simply be relegated to an issue for English education specialists to ponder but must be a vital concern for us all.

LEARNING MORE ABOUT THIS PROJECT OR THE TOPIC IN GENERAL
Readers wishing to learn more about our project or the topic P-16 education policy in general may contact us at the following addresses:

J. S. Dunn, jr.
Department of English
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
110 Leonard Hall
Indiana, PA 15705

Michael M. Williamson
Department of English
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
110 Leonard Hall
Indiana, PA 15705