Page 161 - Composition in Convergence The Impact of the New Media on Writing Assessment

128 CHAPTER 5

time leads to depression" scare that grabbed Philadelphia's media in
1999). Likewise, assessment faces the same fate. Most local or re-
gional papers run education beat stories on how their schools did in
statewide assessment exams, which begets parental sighs of relief or
shouts of anger for "more computers, lessX" or "more X, fewer com-
puters" depending on the results of their school district's assessment.
The national news media also pick up on these stories and elevate
them. For instance, in January 1999, Time ran a cover feature on the
connection between children doing too much homework to assess-
ment results. The conclusion: Kids do too much homework, and
school-wide assessment is ranked higher than the students' daily
achievements.
Although the K-l2 schools face the brunt of most of these reports,
colleges and their administrators are not immune to them. Yearly
the "students can't write well" phenomenon trickles into the univer-
sity system through the national media's punditry and sets up
compositionists for a fall. In January 2003, the Chronicle of Higher
Education took aim on this topic. Students who have suffered years
of educational neglect in their literacy skills because of the "teaching
to the test method" are expected to have those problems erased
within 15 weeks of entering a college or university in addition to
learning current techniques in computer and information literacy.
Those students who cannot erase their deficiencies in writing while
grasping computer usage, and there are substantial numbers who
do not master both areas in their first semester, are unfairly tagged
in the media by reporters or columnists bearing a strong political
agenda. These students are then frequently used at many institu-
tions as the reasons for suppressing the potential for changing cur-
riculum, especially when money is involved. The bad press
surrounding this situation pushes local institutions' administrators
to check up on their writing faculty to see how their university mea-
sures up compared with what George Will, John Leo, Sven Birkerts,
Lynne Cheyney, or some other columnist wrote.
Arguably, this practice is not fair to the students nor is it fair to
the instructors. But knowing that the law of suppressed radical po-
tential is at work in these situations helps to explain why writing
program administrators and their faculties receive mandates and
charges that run counter to each other as well as orders that other
academic programs do not. As Brian Winston (1998) eloquently ar-
gued, social, economic, and political forces are three "supervening