Reclaiming the Lost Art of Teaching Writing: How Recent Educational Reform Derailed Decades of Progress and Assisted AI

What if I told you that the solution to today's AI panic in education was discovered, developed, and then abandoned nearly three decades ago?

The writing prompt—that ubiquitous classroom tool asking students to "compare and contrast" or "describe a time when"—represents both a breakthrough and a compromise in writing instruction. At its best, a well-crafted prompt creates a cognitive framework that guides students through the writing process, helping them navigate the complex terrain between thought and expression. But the story of how these prompts came to dominate writing education reveals a fascinating and troubling pattern of educational reform and retreat with real implications for our AI crisis.

In the early 1980s, writing instruction underwent a revolution. Researchers and teachers began shifting away from focusing solely on grammatical correctness and final products toward understanding writing as a process of discovery. This shift created the perfect conditions for innovative assessment approaches that valued student thinking over standardized metrics. For a brief, promising moment, American education stood at the threshold of transforming how we teach and evaluate writing.

What happened to that promise? Why, when educators today fret about AI's impact on student writing, do we seem to be reinventing solutions that were carefully developed decades ago? The answers lie in a forgotten chapter of educational history—one that reveals how close we came to getting writing instruction right, and how policy shifts in the late 1990s and early 2000s derailed decades of progress.

This isn't merely academic history. It's a story about lost opportunities that directly impacts how students learn to write today, and how prepared we are to face the challenges of teaching writing in an age of artificial intelligence. To understand our current predicament, we need to revisit the revolutionary changes in writing instruction that began in the 1980s, trace their development and ultimate sidelining, and consider what we might reclaim from this lost legacy.

Research in the 1980s: Writing Prompts Transform Composition Classrooms

Ever wonder where those structured writing prompts that dominate writing tasks came from? You know them—"Describe a time when..." or "Compare and contrast..." followed by detailed instructions about what your response should include and how it should function. Following Vygotsky, these packets of specifications are often referred to as ‘scaffolds.’

Beyond benefiting students by articulating the linguistic behaviors the teacher values, writing prompts offer writing instructors a powerful pedagogical framework. Defining the same task concretely for every student creates an efficient pathway for whole-group instruction—teachers can address common challenges and demonstrate techniques applicable to everyone simultaneously.

This standardization naturally pairs with evaluation rubrics, which clarify expectations and streamline assessment. Rather than navigating wildly different student compositions, instructors can evaluate work against consistent criteria, making grading more transparent and defensible. Prompts also revolutionized peer review; when everyone tackles the same challenge, students can meaningfully evaluate each other's approaches, strengthening their critical analysis skills while building community. Perhaps most significantly, prompts democratize the writing process. By synchronizing task requirements and quality criteria for all, everyone theoretically has identical opportunity to succeed—shifting responsibility for performance squarely onto the student.

This structured approach rests on four key assumptions about novice writers: First, without explicit guidance, inexperienced writers struggle to define topics and develop controlling ideas. Second, they need help identifying their audience beyond "the teacher." Third, they require introduction to recognizable rhetorical structures for organizing their thoughts. And they must be given a clear purpose for writing beyond simply generating work for a grade. These scaffolds, following Vygotsky's educational theory, provide the supportive framework students need while developing independence as writers.

Inexperienced writers can’t ethically be left to their own devices when working on a composition when their work is being graded. Without a written notification, they wouldn’t know a) to focus on a defined topic and b) to develop a controlling idea for their reader expressing a perspective or position. They would have no idea of who their reader might be; they might as well be writing in a vacuum. They can’t be expected to use all on their own recognized rhetorical structures to organize their ideas. And what purpose could they possibly have for writing an essay besides getting a grade?

Surprisingly, given all of the benefits for students and for teachers, these carefully engineered prompts weren't always a fixture in writing education. In fact, they're relatively recent innovations that emerged during an innovative period in composition pedagogy.

Product vs. Process: The Great Pedagogical Shift

Before the 1980s, writing instruction followed what composition theorists call the "current-traditional" approach. Students were given topics to write about, but the focus remained squarely on the finished product—grammar, spelling, organization—rather than how students developed their ideas.

The term "current-traditional" contains a contradiction. It refers to the dominant approach to writing instruction that prevailed from the late 19th century until it was challenged by the process movement in the 1970s and 1980s. The phrase itself is intriguing—it was "current" (in use) yet "traditional" (established practice), highlighting how the approach represented conventional wisdom that had calcified into orthodoxy. The label wasn't coined by its practitioners but rather by its critics in the 1980s who needed to name what they were pushing against. It's a retrospective term that composition scholars created to describe what had become the status quo.

Current-traditional writing instruction focused predominantly on:

• Product over process: Writing was evaluated primarily on its finished form.

• Modes of discourse: Students were taught discrete patterns like narration, description, exposition, and argumentation.

• Correctness and form: Heavy emphasis on grammar, punctuation, spelling, and adherence to prescribed structures.

• Prescriptive rules: Writing was taught through formulas and strict conventions.

• Five-paragraph themes: The iconic structure with introduction, three body paragraphs, and conclusion.

• Decontextualized assignments: Writing tasks often lacked authentic purpose or audience beyond the teacher.

This all changed in theory during the late 1960s and 1970s when composition scholars began challenging the status quo. The process theory of composition, which emerged in the late 1960s, became the gold standard of teaching writing through the 1980s and into the 1990s. This approach shifted attention from the final product to the writer's journey—for a short time.

The Birth of the Modern Writing Prompt

Donald Murray's landmark article "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product" was first published in The Leaflet, the journal of the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE), in November 1972. Murray presented this work initially as a "Luncheon address" at NEATE's annual fall conference in Kennebunkport, Maine, on October 28, 1972. This article has been widely reprinted in various composition textbooks and journals, becoming one of the most influential works in writing

This new understanding of writing as discovery changed how educators approached writing instruction:

1. Demystified the writing process: Murray argued that teachers should concentrate on the process rather than the product, suggesting that the final text would naturally improve if students mastered the underlying processes.

2. Introduced recursive stages: Rather than presenting writing as a linear activity, Murray broke down writing into three primary phases: "prevision, vision, and revision,” challenging the idea that writing proceeds in a straight line from beginning to end.

3. Emphasized exploration: Murray argued that writing is fundamentally exploratory, allowing writers to discover meaning rather than simply transcribing pre-formed thoughts.pedagogy.

Ironically, Murray's process approach created the philosophical foundation for structured writing prompts. Once writing was understood as discovery rather than transcription, teachers needed tools to guide this discovery process. Murray himself advocated an approach where students "discover where they want the paper to go before the teacher begins to correct or edit any writing." He emphasized the importance of giving students agency while still providing structure.

Writing prompts evolved to serve as scaffolding for this discovery, offering multiple entry points into the writing process while honoring Murray's vision that writing should be exploratory. Well-crafted prompts became a way to balance structure with discovery, guiding students through the process while still allowing for the "writing to learn" that Murray championed.

The formalized writing prompt—with its scaffolded structure and intentional design—emerged from this process movement. A significant milestone came in 1980, when a national conference on writing assessment directly addressed developing structured prompts and rubrics. In June 1980, the Northwest Regional Education Laboratory hosted a one-day event on writing assessment in Boulder, Colorado. This conference explicitly aimed to "bring educators up to date on newly developed assessment methods" and included training sessions where participants received "a practical set of hands-on experiences" in developing writing prompts and evaluation techniques. This conference marked the beginning of the field’s actively reconceptualizing how writing should be taught and evaluated.

The Rise and Fall of Portfolio Assessment: 1980s-1996

By the late 1980s, portfolio assessment began replacing timed essay tests, representing a significant shift in writing evaluation philosophy which was at odds with prompt pedagogy but more aligned with Donald Murray. This movement away from prompted assessment methods reflected deeper changes in how researches viewed writing instruction and evaluation. As a classroom teacher during this period, teaching freshman composition in community colleges, transitioning to teaching fourth grade in a self-contained classroom, then teaching middle school English, I found my dissertation topic in this portfolio movement.

Portfolio assessment represented a departure from any other form of writing assessment up to that time in several ways. By focusing on multiple samples of student writing produced over time, process was elevated above product. Including works-in-progress and final drafts to demonstrate growth opened the aperture on assessment such that teachers could work with writers as individuals rather than a collection of individuals all working in the same way. Incorporating student reflection on their writing process introduced the value of self-assessment and went a long way toward developing students’ sense of agency. Valuing ‘authentic’ writing tasks over writing prompts was a sticking point for portfolio advocates; the issue of including standardized test scores and one-shot, on-demand pieces of work alongside self-selected work in a portfolio was never fully resolved,.

The New Standards Project: Grand Ambitions

The portfolio assessment movement reached its most ambitious expression through the New Standards Project, launched in 1990 by Marc Tucker and Lauren Resnick with substantial foundation funding. In late 1990, Tucker and Resnick secured $2.5 million from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to begin their work on a 10-year project to develop "a new student-performance system." Their vision was to create assessment systems that combined performance-based curriculum-embedded assessments with classroom portfolio work.

The New Standards Project was inspired by international models. Resnick had been part of a panel that studied the education systems of other nations, finding three common elements: standards for student performance, curriculum frameworks, and examination systems assessing whether students met those standards. They sought to replicate this model in the United States.

The Literacy Unit of the New Standards Project was housed at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, with Miles Myers and P. David Pearson serving as key leaders. Their ambitious goal was to develop "an alternative system of English Language Arts performance assessment for K-12 schools" that would overcome the limitations of machine-scored tests.

Despite its ambitious vision and substantial funding, the New Standards Project ended prematurely in 1996. Several factors contributed to its demise. As Lauren Resnick acknowledged, "We don't see in place everything that we set out to do." The project began to face implementation challenges with states reporting that New Standards started missing deadlines, leaving states that relied on its documents in difficult positions.

According to Miles Myers, the educational discourse of the time was dominated by "simple dichotomies" in areas like reading instruction (phonics vs. whole language) and writing instruction (product vs. process). The New Standards Project refused to accept these simplistic binaries, instead advocating for more nuanced approaches that combined elements of different perspectives. American education arguably has never handled nuance with aplomb.

Made to order as an example of what Miles was talking about, the project encountered challenges when states began requesting an "item bank" of performance questions they could integrate into their own systems. This created a philosophical and technical incompatibility with the project's own development of comprehensive assessments. Myers also noted that while some critics, like Richard Klein in The New York Times, advocated for highly prescriptive standards that would "prescribe every detail of the curriculum... down to the last lyric poem," the NCTE/IRA approach focused instead on broader literacy needs for the 21st century.

Though the New Standards Project ended in 1996, it left a lasting impact. Its publications on English/Language arts, mathematics, science, and applied learning became important resources for states developing their own standards. The project's emphasis on performance assessment influenced state testing programs, even if the grand vision of a unified national portfolio assessment system never materialized.

The story of portfolio assessment and the New Standards Project reveals how innovations in writing assessment that emerged from the process movement of the 1980s encountered practical and political hurdles in implementation. While portfolios continue to be used in many classrooms, their uses are idiosyncratic and largely unmoored from evidence-based research, categorically different from the comprehensive system envisioned by the New Standards Project. In the main, the NSP gave way to the standardized approaches to assessment that dominate education today.

The timeline of writing prompts parallels this larger story of standards-based reform, both emerging from the process movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s, both becoming formalized through ambitious projects in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and both ultimately—after some weird cosmic jolt in 1996 that produced a revived phonics movement, NCLB, and in time the Common Core State Standards—being incorporated piecemeal into educational practice, diluting any transformative influence they might have had.

Why This Matters

The collapse of the New Standards Project in 1996 represents one of education's great lost opportunities. Here was a genuine attempt to create systemic change that would have transformed not only how we assess writing but how we teach it. The timing was tragically perfect—just as the movement was gaining momentum, the standardization pendulum swung violently in the opposite direction.

The field was on the verge of student-centered assessment, including self-assessment. David Pearson published an article years ago describing progress in literacy assessment as a matter of one step forward, two steps back. One has to have lived a long time with their eyes wide open to see this strange slow, destructive policy dance. In my mind, NCLB and the Common Core were the two steps backwards.

By 2001, when No Child Left Behind became law, the decades of research and classroom experimentation that informed process pedagogy and portfolio assessment were effectively sidelined in favor of standardized metrics that could be easily quantified, compared, and used for accountability purposes. What we lost wasn't so much an assessment approach, but an entire philosophy of teaching writing that centered student thinking and development. When I hear teachers speak today about "grading the process, not the product" as a response to safeguard learning from AI, I have to bite my tongue.

Portfolio assessment required reflection—both from students and teachers. It necessitated conversations about growth over time rather than isolated performance. It pushed students to become metacognitive about their writing processes and pushed teachers to become more thoughtful about their instructional practices. The emphasis on standardized measurement that followed NCLB effectively closed off these possibilities, reducing assessment to numerical scores that could be aggregated and analyzed but told us little about the actual quality of student thinking.

Today's AI panic reveals our historical amnesia. The solution to the challenges posed by ChatGPT and other text generators isn't to invent new assessment methods—it's to reclaim what we already knew but abandoned. Process-based assessment isn't vulnerable to AI shortcuts precisely because it values the journey, not the destination. Portfolio assessment that captures student thinking over time, that requires reflection and revision, that documents false starts and breakthroughs—these approaches never went away; they were simply pushed to the margins by policies that privileged standardization and efficiency over depth and authenticity.

Perhaps the most tragic aspect of this story is the generational knowledge gap it created. A whole generation of teachers has entered the profession knowing only the post-NCLB world. Those who can’t take the dehumanization of their learners keep to themselves as much as possible, counting on their classroom as safe haven for their children for whom there is precious little psychological safety to be had in the institution. It’s enough for these teachers to attend to their own students and not worry about others, avoiding policy battles, keeping to themselves. Many of the newest teachers been trained to teach to teach knowledge and skills, to teach to standards and tests, not to foster the messy, recursive process that genuine writing requires.

The institutional memory of what the New Standards Project tried to accomplish, what the process movement understood about writing development, and what portfolio assessment revealed about student thinking is fading. Concerns about AI are expressed as concerns about authentic writing, loss of human sensibilities, and the corrosive effects of bots on cognition—but the real concern reverberating across the country is with cheating and grading. The irony is this: If students were invested and engaged in their learning, one of the primary goals of portfolio practices, they would have no reason to cheat.

But perhaps this moment of AI disruption offers us a second chance. The very technology that has created panic in educational circles might force us to reconsider what matters in writing instruction. If AI can produce flawless five-paragraph essays, perhaps we'll finally acknowledge that such formulaic writing was never the point. If algorithms can generate grammatically perfect responses to prompts, perhaps we'll return to valuing the uniquely human aspects of composition—the messy exploration, the false starts, the unexpected connections, the voice that emerges through revision.

The path forward isn't about creating AI-proof assignments but about rediscovering what we once knew: that writing is thinking made visible, that assessment should honor process alongside product, and that student agency is the cornerstone of authentic learning. The portfolio assessment movement wasn't just ahead of its time—it was precisely what we need in this moment of technological disruption. The question now is whether we have the collective wisdom to reclaim this legacy or if we'll continue the cycle of forgetting, forever taking one step forward and two steps back.