Bleak assessment of students' writing skills

Connecticut, you get a C.

The rest of you states, stay after class.

That's what national writing test scores seem to indicate, and the problem is getting worse instead of better at some levels.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is a program that administers tests to students in all 50 states. It is administered through the National Center for Education Statistics, an arm of the Education Department.

According to the center's Web site, the writing test is fairly complicated. Students are asked to:

Write for three main purposes: narrative, informative and persuasive.

Write in a variety of forms and for many different audiences.

Write from a variety of stimulus materials, including photographs, cartoons, letters and poems.

Asked to generate, draft, revise and edit ideas and forms of expression in their writing.

The 2002 writing test was administered to 139,000 fourth-graders, 119,000 eighth-graders and 19,000 12th-graders. The scores for 2002 recently were released and compared to 1998 to see where students have been heading over a five-year span.

Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders nationwide were proficient in writing, up from 23 percent five years ago. Thirty-one percent of eighth-graders were proficient, up from 27 percent five years ago. And those gains covered all races and ethnicities, which shows minorities, who traditionally fare poorer on standardized tests, are also doing better.

However, the gain in seniors at or above the proficient level gained only two percentage points -- from 22 to 24 percent --which the site calls statistically insignificant. And 12th-graders at or above the basic level dropped from 78 percent to 74 percent.

As for state-by-state results, 49 percent of Connecticut fourth-graders are at or above the proficient level, and 45 percent of the state's eighth-graders.

Missouri ranks 28th on that list in proficiency for fourth-graders -- 22 percent -- and 23rd for eighth-graders -- 27 percent. The state-by-state comparison wasn't readily available on the site for seniors.

The trouble is that older students are heading for college and jobs.

It is vital that parents and teachers stress writing as an absolute necessity to be a successful student in higher education and, in the process, a successful working career.