The Forgotten R

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Mar 23, 2025

I can just imagine the late afternoon sun slanting through the enormous windows of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. It’s been a minute since I’ve been to a conference. Outside, a biting wind is whipping off the harbor, sending pedestrians hurrying along Summer Street with hunched shoulders and faces buried in scarves.

"What if we've been asking the wrong questions all along?" The speaker, a veteran English teacher from Arizona, proffered. According to the website, three hundred educators leaned forward slightly in their seats. "We keep asking how to prevent AI use, how to detect it, how to police it—but perhaps the real question is: why are our students turning to these tools in the first place?"

I can picture it. Nods must have rippled through the audience like a gentle wave. A teacher in the front rows scribbled in her notebook. Another quietly opened ChatGPT on her phone, pasting in this very question.

Imagining the scene from the 2024 conference stirred memories of another NCTE convention nearly three decades earlier. In 1996, I stood at an NCTE podium in Chicago, the winter wind howling outside the hotel, as I accepted one of two Promising Researcher awards for my dissertation work on portfolio assessment.

Back then, our concerns were different—how to teach writing to see themselves as writers, how to build authentic communities in classrooms for student writers. The most advanced technology in most classrooms was an overhead projector.

The 2024 conference program—"Reclaiming Purpose: Writing in an Age of Distraction"—reveals how much has changed and how much remains the same. Sessions on AI were reportedly wall-to-wall, yet the fundamental questions about why we write and how we teach writing persist, even as they take new forms in this transformed landscape.

Looking Back: The 2003 Clarion Call

To understand how we arrived at this moment, we need to look back to a pivotal document—the 2003 report from the National Commission on Writing, "The Neglected 'R': The Need for a Writing Revolution." This landmark publication delivered a wake-up call to American education about the state of writing instruction.

The report opened with an unequivocal declaration: "American education will never realize its potential as an engine of opportunity and economic growth until a writing revolution puts language and communication in their proper place in the classroom" (National Commission on Writing, 2003, p. 3). From my perspective, we have waited in vain for this revolution to happen.

The report painted a sobering picture of writing's status in American classrooms. It described writing as "a prisoner of time" (p. 20), noting that most elementary students spent less than three hours weekly on writing assignments. Nearly 40% of high school seniors reported being assigned papers of three or more pages "never" or "hardly ever" (p. 20). The traditional research paper was disappearing from the curriculum, an odd complaint that has resurfaced in the AI age, squeezed out back then by competing priorities and time constraints.

Beyond the statistics lay a deeper concern about how writing was conceptualized in education. The commission argued that writing isn’t a technical skill, but a mode of learning, echoing the title of Janet Emig’s classic paper from the early 1970s: "Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge" (p. 14). This reframing positioned writing as a cognitive process essential to learning across all subjects, not just a communication skill taught in English class.

The historical and political context of the report is crucial for understanding its impact. Published just two years after the No Child Left Behind Act, the report emerged during a period of intense focus on standardized assessment. Reading and mathematics dominated the educational agenda, with writing often marginalized in both instruction and assessment. The commission, composed of educational leaders from across the political spectrum, attempted to elevate writing within this accountability landscape.

Their recommendations were predictably bold and specific as these reports are: double the time students spend writing, develop comprehensive writing policies, require writing in every subject, provide teachers with professional development, and leverage technology to support writing. The report called for nothing less than "a cultural sea change" (p. 16) in how writing was valued and taught in American schools.

Most poignantly, the commission described writing as "liberating, satisfying, even joyful" (p. 13)—a characterization that recognized writing's power not just for academic achievement but for human fulfillment. They closed with Lincoln's description of writing as "the great invention of the world" (p. 36), suggesting that writing's power transcended mere utility to touch something essentially human.

Looking Around: The National Council of Teachers of English 2024 Conference

Reports from the 2024 NCTE conference reveal how the writing crisis has evolved since 2003. The packed session halls featured presentations on "AI and Agency" and "Reclaiming Student Purpose in Writing," suggesting another revolution in the making. When I saw this title I thought of Goswami’s book “Reclaiming the Classroom” from the 1990s.

The conference materials point to a troubling shift: "Teachers report a growing dissatisfaction or apathy among young people regarding global issues, which affects their engagement with schoolwork.”

“Students struggle to see the connection between their assignments and real-world problems. Teachers need tools to help bridge this gap, making assignments feel more relevant and impactful."

The crisis is no longer about the neglected R. It’s about the forgotten R. It centers on student apathy toward writing itself. The problem has moved from external structures to internal motivation, a far more challenging issue to address, one that might have been mediated if the national accountability movement had not made it clear the “nobody gives a fig about what students think or what they feel.”

In one session, presenters Sonia Koshy, Chrish Mah, Molly Montgomery, and Hillary Walker shared data showing that "32% of teens say they haven't really heard anything about ChatGPT, according to the Pew Research Center survey of US teens in 2023." The room reportedly filled with murmurs of surprise. Did they believe the number was too high? too low? I’m still struck by the lack of credible data about student use.

Another session by Anne McConnell and Tamara Empson from Louisiana State University Laboratory School suggested reframing how educators think about students' use of AI. "The first step is asking: Why are students seeking AI in the first place? Is there something they don't understand? Do they lack confidence?"

Their approach saw AI use not as cheating but as a symptom of underlying needs that educators should address. Reports also indicated that many teachers in the audience nodded with recognition, seeing their students in this diagnostic framework.

Across the convention, many sessions emphasized the need to move away from fear of AI and attempts to prevent its use and to learn how to use it effectively and teach students appropriate applications. It would be interesting to know the feeling tone of this moment. Such a shift acknowledges the futility of prohibition but says nothing about whether that’s a good thing.

Beneath the technological focus lay a deeper concern: the struggle to make writing meaningful to students who question whether their words matter. One presenter described what she called "purpose deficit disorder" among student writers—a difficulty in finding reasons to invest in the writing process when immediate, visible impact seems elusive.

Conference goers attended sessions on student motivation and authentic writing tasks, seeking ways to answer the question that one presenter framed starkly: "Why should students write at all in an age when AI can do it for them?"

The language of "reclaiming purpose" in the conference theme suggests a loss—that something essential about writing has been taken away or surrendered and must now be actively recovered. Whether purpose was stolen by the Common Core, by AI, or by both is unclear. This framing positions educators not just as teachers of a skill but as protectors of writing's core value in human experience.

A Path Forward: Graham's Model and Human Capacity

Reflecting on both the 2003 report and the 2024 conference themes, I encourage you to explore Graham's (2018) "Writers-in-Community" model as a framework that might bridge these two eras of writing education. This model situates writing within concentric circles of influence—from the writer's immediate cognitive processes and collaborators to the broader social, cultural, and political contexts that shape writing practices.

What makes Graham's model valuable in the AI era is its emphasis on the writer's goals and agency at the center of the process. As Beck and Levine (2024) note in their application of this model to AI writing tools, "Agency should be included along with tools, goals, and actions in the innermost sphere of a complete model of writing" (p. 9). This centering of human intention and purpose provides a crucial counter to the "hollowing out" of student motivation.

Graham's model also recognizes writing as fundamentally social—embedded in communities with particular purposes and histories. This perspective offers a powerful response to student apathy by connecting writing to authentic audiences and meaningful contexts.

Kennedy and Shiel (2022) provide a compelling example in their study of a cross-generational writing project where elementary students corresponded with senior citizens. They describe how this authentic purpose transformed writing "from drudgery" into "a paramount activity" (p. 15) for young writers.

Perhaps most importantly, Graham's model—and the human writers at its center—reminds us of our capacity to "see beyond the next word." This phrase takes on special significance in the age of generative AI, which, as AI researcher Yann LeCun notes, can only predict the next word based on patterns in historical data (Beck & Levine, 2024). It cannot truly set goals, imagine new possibilities, or write toward a purpose it itself has defined.

This limitation of AI reveals what is distinctly human about writing: our ability to envision purposes, set goals, and work toward them through language. Unlike AI, which can only look backward to generate its next word, human writers can look forward, imagining futures and working to create them through writing. This capacity for purposeful, goal-directed writing represents the essential human contribution that no AI can replicate.

The evolution from the Chicago conference in 1996 where I was honored for my work on portfolios during a time of optimism for writing instruction, through the 2003 report when the writing world felt dark, to the Boston gathering and its anxiety and fear in 2024 brings into sharp focus what's at stake in writing education today. The challenge is no longer simply to teach writing better—the focus of the 2003 report—but to help students discover why writing matters at all, especially in a world where AI can simulate competence.

The answer lies not in fear or prohibition of new technologies, but in a renewed emphasis on what makes writing human: the capacity to set goals, to write with purpose, to connect with others, and to imagine futures not contained in the data of the past. By centering these essentially human dimensions of writing, educators can help students reclaim their agency as writers and thinkers in an increasingly complex world.

As Octavia Butler reminds us, through a quote highlighted by Beck and Levine (2024): "Any Change may bear seeds of benefit. Seek them out. Any Change may bear seeds of harm. Beware" (p. 1). The technological and social changes reshaping writing education indeed carry both benefits and harms. Our task is to help students navigate this landscape with critical awareness and purposeful intention—to see beyond the next word to the futures they might create through writing.

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