When the Dallas Morning News editorial board in today's commentary proclaimed the virtues of the New Jersey Writing Project as a way to improve students' abilities to write, the Board showed its utter ignorance of what really goes on in Texas' public schools.

For over twenty years, almost every English teacher in Texas has followed the New Jersey Writing Project's philosophy of teaching writing! During those twenty years, school districts have paid huge amounts of tax dollars for teachers to be completely brainwashed in NJWP. What do we have to show for it? We have the type of students who cannot write a substantive, well-written, short-answer response on the TAKS tests; nor can students write the type of sophisticated papers that are needed in college and in the workplace. Ironically, this was the subject of Laurie Fox's and Holly Hacker's article to which the editorial board refers.

What the editorial board should have done was to applaud the efforts of the majority of the Texas State Board of Education members who on 5.23.08 dramatically changed the direction of our public schools away from the NJWP's wrong-headed curriculum.

The SBOE set our public schools on a new path toward the direct and systematic teaching of grammar, usage, capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and handwriting as basic skills that form the foundation of good writing. Students cannot apply what they do not know. They cannot write well until they first learn how the English language is constructed.

Starting this fall, all Texas English teachers will begin the transition into the new standards (TEKS); and by next school year, these standards will be implemented with students, K-12.

A new day is coming for our Texas school students, and the DMN editorial board members need to find out what is happening before they commit further embarrassing blunders. –