This ain’t write
Top HS kids pen too few essays: survey
ELITE PUBLIC high school students should be preparing for college by writing long essays once a week, like their peers at private schools.
But roughly half the kids at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and LaGuardia reported in a citywide student survey that they wrote fewer than five research essays all year.
Experts, parents and teachers say the problem is huge classes that saddle teachers with a second full-time job — grading all those papers.
Even the late author and Stuyvesant teacher Frank McCourt copped to skimping on essays.
“I had 180 kids. I was afraid to assign them anything,” the late author of “Angela’s Ashes” told a sympathetic crowd of city teachers in 2006.
McCourt confessed to fabricating a mugging to justify tossing a batch of ungraded papers.
“I encouraged (my students) to imagine what the mugger was doing — how disappointed he or she was . . . reading over 300 scrawled essays,” McCourt said.
Teachers at city public high schools are generally responsible for up to 170 kids in five classes.
“If the city wants more attention paid to writing — which I think is a legitimate interest — then the city needs to think about supporting that in some way,” said Bronx Science English teacher Stephen O’Grady, who recently compared notes with parochial and private school teachers.
Teachers at elite prep schools generally have around 72 students in no more
than four classes. That means kids are expected to write much more often — often weekly assignments.
“It’s one of the great inequities between the two systems,” said Brooklyn College Prof. Peter Taubman.
LaGuardia mom Shino Tanikawa, whose daughter Cai, 17, will be a senior this fall, said the major problem was not the number of assignments but how little feedback the students receive at a school where the average English-class size is 32.
“You’re talking about grading 200 papers,” she said. “I don’t blame the teachers or the administration. It’s nearly impossible.”
The city Education Department is working to improve writing instruction as part of the new Common Core reforms, said Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky.
“I don’t think there has been enough of this rigorous, authentic type of work happening in our schools,” Polakow-Suransky said.