For years, teachers have bemoaned the state of student writing — and have struggled to manage students’ complex, largely negative feelings about it, according to a Denver Post article that appeared in The Hechinger Report.
Across all grades, educators say children struggle with writing basic sentences, and with proper spelling and punctuation. In upper elementary grades, when students should be writing paragraphs and short essays, teachers find many students still lack fundamental skills and struggle to write at length.
Concerned by low writing scores on state exams, some districts are rethinking how to teach writing. In the 61,000-student Douglas County (CO) district, administrators have added more professional development for teachers in evidence-based writing approaches and prioritize explicitly teaching writing to students. Similar efforts are underway in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, California and Rhode Island.
Many school leaders say they’re seeing promising results.
“Writing is the last bastion of education,” says Randy Barth, CEO of SRSD Online, which trains teachers in the “science of writing” using research on effective writing instruction. “Writing, I would say, is the last thing that the education system is putting money towards.”
For years America focused on math and reading — and in recent years the science of reading — but writing has largely been ignored.
National data on writing proficiency for elementary-age students is sparse. Nationwide, there’s no good way to know how elementary students are doing when it comes to writing, says Vicki McQuitty, a professor in Towson University’s elementary education program and director of the Maryland Writing Project. “But the word on the street is that kids can’t write.”
Recent state test results seem to confirm this.
- In 2025, more than half of Texas’ 360,000 third graders received no credit for their responses on an essay prompt in the state’s annual English language arts test that asked them to compare and contrast two texts.
- In California the same year, only 17 percent of third graders met the standard for well-organized writing on an essay asking them to demonstrate research skills when responding to a prompt.
- In Florida, students on average scored 6 out of 12 possible points on the state’s writing test.
Results aren’t much better in higher grades. For years, employers, college professors and high school teachers have complained that students struggle to write coherent, multi-paragraph essays in the classroom or applying for jobs.
Elementary teachers, responsible for most early writing instruction, face a host of challenges. Writing is a demanding task, requiring background knowledge to understand the material, fine motor skills and vocabulary, among other skills.
“I think writing is the hardest thing to teach,” says Chrissy Everett, a fourth-grade teacher at Prairie Crossing Elementary in the Douglas County district, because it involves executive function skills and knowing “how to piece it all together and what steps to do next.”
Experts generally agree on “science of writing” practices that are key to teaching students how to write.
1) Students should be given time each day to write and taught different genres and purposes of writing.
2) Educators should also explicitly instruct students in individual components of writing, starting with handwriting, spelling and vocabulary.
3) Students need to learn that a complete sentence includes a subject and a verb, not just a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end, says Adrea Truckenmiller, an associate professor at Michigan State University’s college of education, whose research has focused on writing.
4) Later, they must be taught how to connect ideas by expanding and combining sentences.
5) Finally, they can tackle essays, using worksheets and charts to plan their writing.
But many teacher preparation programs lack standalone writing instruction courses. “Even teacher educators do not always feel comfortable teaching preservice teachers about writing,” says McQuitty, from Towson. “It’s always pushed to the back.”
In the classroom, teachers are pressured to prepare students for standardized tests that emphasize reading and math, experts say, often to the detriment of other subjects.
“I just assumed writing instruction was happening, but every time I walk into a classroom my assumption is proven wrong,” says Truckenmiller.
Adding to the challenge: after spending their early years scrolling iPads and pecking at keyboards, some kids struggle to even hold a pencil, says Christina Bretz, an occupational therapist with Learning Without Tears, a company that sells early reading and writing curriculum and materials.
“As we’re seeing more children use devices, we start to see less of them manipulating objects with their hands,” says Bretz.
In 2023, district leaders in Douglas County noticed scores on the elementary writing portions of state tests were far lower than on the reading portions. “We found that teachers didn’t know how to teach writing,” says Janet Merrill, literacy coordinator for the school system.
Writing instruction varied greatly from class to class, and teachers often felt like they were starting each year from square one, Merrill says. Teachers largely focused on creative writing, asking students to write about a favorite vacation or birthday, she says.
Merrill researched science-backed ways to teach writing and learned about an approach that disability advocates in the district were championing, called Self-Regulated Strategy Development. SRSD is prescriptive, encouraging students to respond to texts using evidence and giving them specific strategies for planning and organizing writing.
Helped by a group, Releasing Writers, the district launched a new approach to writing with 100 instructional coaches and teachers across more than 70 elementary schools. Three years later, every elementary teacher in the district follows the same process: reading and analyzing examples of writing with their class; using a routine for analyzing and responding to a prompt; and relying largely on writing responses to texts, rather than creative writing.
Teachers model strategies with easy-to-remember acronyms, like “TIDE,” which stands for “topic, important details, and ending.” Students at every grade level repeat the same process, with slight variations for younger students.
The approach teaches students to be resilient as they write. They start their drafting process by writing a positive phrase to themselves, which they can read when they’re feeling frustrated or stuck.
After students in Kristin Allen’s kindergarten class finished reading a story about a group of animals who made a gift for a turtle, she worked with small groups of students to help them retell that story in writing. Before four students sitting with her got started, Allen asked them what they should write at the top of their papers.
The children thought for a moment and started scribbling down affirmations on their pages. Allen asked them to share.
“I can do this,” said one child.
“I am smart,” said another.
Then Allen asked them to write a topic sentence about the story, followed by three details from it.
“The anumls make a gift for turtle,” one girl wrote.
Allen quickly corrected spelling and punctuation. She paid close attention to how students held their pencils. She encouraged leaving spaces between words.
When Allen first started teaching, “I did not see anything like this,” she says, motioning to papers covered with her students’ writing; in some cases, the writing included full paragraphs. “Some people have the attitude that ‘Oh, they’re kindergarten, they’re five and six, they can’t’.’ They can.”
Allen was eager to learn the SRSD method. But Merrill says some veteran teachers were reluctant, worrying that kids wouldn’t love writing with such a prescribed process. She’s not sure students enjoyed the old process as much as teachers believed.
“They saw this blank page and they just were like, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’” Merrill says. “Now, students love writing because they have the skill to actually write.”
Seeing near-immediate effects from early adopters who piloted the approach helped convince teachers. After the first year, educators in higher grades noticed kids who had been taught via SRSD were entering middle school with better writing skills. They asked colleagues what had changed in elementary classrooms.
Federal research has found the SRSD approach improved writing quality across different genres, grades and assignments, and can be an effective intervention for students with learning disabilities. But despite the evidence behind SRSD and similar science of writing methods, they haven’t entered mainstream curricula and classrooms partly because there’s still not widespread awareness of them among educators, experts say.
The knowledge base is concentrated in a small number of people that hasn’t been scaled yet. Plus, schools have competing priorities, often thinking they need to get reading instruction right first before focusing on writing.
But in Douglas County, officials say focusing on writing is key to improving reading. And test scores have improved. After a year of rolling out the strategy in a handful of schools, the district saw state writing scores increase by three percentage points. Math scores increased too, which district officials attribute to students having the skills to better analyze questions and problems. This summer, at the request of educators in the district, Merrill and her colleagues will begin training all their middle school teachers in SRSD.
Students have noticed the difference as well.
Last year, “you just had to sit down and write,” says Connor Miles, a fourth grader in Everett’s class at Prairie Crossing Elementary. How did that make him feel? “Completely lost,” he says.
One of Connor’s classmates, 10-year-old Arya Melancon, says this year, teachers are better able to explain the process of writing. They are providing her and her peers with strategies and systems, and she likes sorting through evidence from texts and “building” paragraphs and responses.
“We’ve definitely improved this year. We have a better understanding,” she says. The difference was apparent when her and her classmates sat down for their end of grade state test in the spring.
“Last year we were all scared of writing prompts,” Arya says. “This year, we felt like we were ready.”
The Hechinger Report
