“Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore.” Tamar Lewin

—Writing in Schools is Found Both Dismal and NeglectedNY Times)

One more for the “That Explains a Lot” file.