I want to tell you about a high school writer. I will call her Ruby.
She is an 11th grader at West High School (a pseudonym), where I have spent the better part of a decade as professor-in-residence. Not as a researcher who parachutes in with a clipboard and leaves, but as someone who is there—in the building, in the hallways, during preparation for the school’s annual Black history program—in the work alongside educators and young people. I have known Ruby through her Language and Literature class since she was in 9th grade. She is thoughtful and participates in extracurricular activities. I have also worked with her on two Black history programs, where she has volunteered in key roles, including a lead role in a play.
This year for Black History Month, West’s students were invited to enter a schoolwide writing contest we called “Keep It 100: Our Truth, Our Stories, Our Futures.” The school’s literacy team and I welcomed students to submit any form of text where they grappled with one or all of the following questions: What truths have Black people told over the last 100 years? What truths are being told today? What does it mean to keep it 100 in YOUR life, community, and creative work?
Ruby chose to write an essay about Black history. She opened by reminding her reader what the phrase means—to keep it 100 is to “keep it real, to tell the full truth”—and then she kept it real and told her truth. She wrote about the 1921 massacre at Black Wall Street in Tulsa and the destruction of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. She drew a parallel between the endurance of Black Americans and the Israelites in Exodus. She argued that what a textbook leaves out teaches a lesson of its own. Ruby’s writing demonstrated what happens when extended thinking meets language. What I observed in Ruby’s writing was that she used deep thinking to question and critique the teaching of American history, to connect ideas across content and context, and to name that leaving Black people out of the story isn’t an oversight: it’s how the record was kept. She wrote:
In school, we often learn a simplified version of the past. Slavery is mentioned briefly. Reconstruction is rushed. The Civil Rights Movement is reduced to a few peaceful protests and speeches. But what about the Black towns that were destroyed? What about the economic success that was violently taken away? . . . When history leaves these stories out, it sends a message. It makes it seem like Black people only existed as victims of slavery or as followers in someone else’s story.
Ruby declared that Black Americans are not just “a part of American History—we are foundational to it.”
The foundation of writing works the same way. What we call “good writing”—the standardized, edited, “academic” English we treat as the floor every student has to reach before their ideas count—leaves particular writers out by the same design. It tells linguistically diverse young people their language is a problem to fix before they’re allowed to say anything worth hearing (or write anything worth reading). But here is where I follow Ruby all the way. She didn’t just name the omission; she reclaimed the ground. The same is true of the young linguistically diverse writers that many teachers of writing keep trying to correct. They are not a deviation from the foundation of writing. They are the foundation. Their languages are where English keeps growing—where new words, new forms, and new meanings are created, the reason our writing moves forward at all. So why send them back to that standardized foundation that was never built to hold them?
The Foundation Is Flawed
We are told that students’ writing skills cratered during the pandemic and have been slow to recover, and that our job is to rebuild the foundation. I understand the worry. However, I want to pose the questions: Whose foundation are we rebuilding? And what is it made of?
For many teachers, “the foundation” means grammar drills, the five-paragraph template, and the unspoken rule that real writing sounds like edited, standardized, white mainstream English. We treat that variety as neutral, as what writers must aspire to in order to say something legit. However, as Baker-Bell (2020) shows in Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, framing one community’s language as the standard and everyone else’s as deficit can cause shame and self-doubt within linguistically diverse communities, and lands hardest on many Black students whose home language is rich, rule-governed, rhetorically powerful, and the language they think with.
The young linguistically diverse writers that many teachers keep trying to correct are not a deviation from the foundation of writing. They are the foundation.
When we lead with grammar, templates, and a focus on standardized white mainstream English, here is what actually happens to a writer like Ruby: she opens her mouth on the page, and before she has finished a thought, a red pen finds a “was/were,” a sentence that breaks a rule. The message she receives is: you are wrong before you have even begun. Flores and Rosa (2015) call this a raciolinguistic ideology—the problem is rarely the student’s home language; it is the listening ear that has been trained to hear difference as deficit. Enough of those corrections, and a young person learns the safest move is to say nothing, or to say only a small, “correct” thing. We call the result a confidence problem. It is closer to a silencing problem, and we—well, not me—built it.
The Rigor Is in the Writing Pedagogy
We have accepted the narrative of learning loss as part of a larger and continued push to return to the elusive foundation that was supposedly performing teaching miracles for students back in the day. I taught writing to middle and high school students in the early 2000s, and for all intents and purposes, those students had trouble with writing, too. But I knew that my job was to teach them to think deeply with ideas that made up our secondary language arts curriculum and to make sense of those ideas using the language they think with.
Here is what we miss when we panic about “the foundation”: the actual intellectual work of writing is not whether the sentences come out correct. It lives in the moves a writer makes with an idea. Burke and Gilmore (2015) call these academic moves (I call them thinking moves): analyze, argue, interpret, evaluate, and support, to name a few. They are exactly what they sound like: actions of the mind, not the correctness of the sentence. A writer can make each of these moves in the language she thinks with. The move is the intellectual work.
So when I go back to Ruby’s essay, I witness her thinking. She analyzes—she takes an omission, what the textbook leaves out, and shows you what the silence itself teaches. She supports—Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923, names and dates she found because the curriculum wouldn’t hand them to her. She argues—a real claim, defended: that the nation’s story protects itself by staying incomplete. She evaluates—she weighs what gets to count as history and asks who decided. That is not a student reaching for the foundation. That is a student already standing on one. Ruby even named this thinking on her own. She wrote:
As an 11th grade IB student, I am taught to think critically and question sources. That skill has made me realize that history is not just about what is included, but also about what is excluded. When certain events are left out of textbooks, it shapes how we understand ourselves and our country. If students only see images of struggle without seeing images of success and power, it can affect how they view their potential. Education should empower, not limit.
Ruby is doing the thinking and naming the analysis in the same breath, in her own voice, on her own terms. This is the part the red pen might miss, because the red pen is busy with the subject-verb agreement or sentence fragments. The rigor was never in the correctness. It was in the thinking—and the thinking shows up on the page.
So What Do We Do on Monday?
If the thinking is what matters, then our teaching of writing has to lead with it. Four moves have carried me the furthest.
- Start with real questions, not a template. Notice what the Keep It 100 contest did not do. It did not hand students a five-paragraph frame and a topic. It asked real questions, and it welcomed any form of text. Ruby wrote the way she did because she was asked something worth answering. As a teacher, instead of handing out a template, pose questions to students that you don’t already know the answers to. Let the form follow the thinking instead of standing in front of it.
- Recognize the full repertoire a writer brings, and ask rather than correct when you don’t understand it. Every writer carries their full linguistic repertoire, and skilled writers pull from different parts of it at different moments, for different readers and different reasons. This is not a deficit to be managed; it is what range looks like. A fierce, rigorous argument built from linguistically diverse language is a fierce, rigorous argument. Grade the move, not the surface.
- Invite students to practice the thinking moves during discussion and in writing. Name the thinking move, teach it, model it, and then let students practice it in the language they actually think with. Have students discuss the ideas that come from the practice of thinking. Invite them to write. You are teaching something that transfers, and that prepares young people to make sense of what they learn in and beyond school.
- Revise for thinking first; edit toward your reader last. When a draft comes back, resist starting with grammar and mechanics. Start with the ideas: Is your claim sharp? Is this evidence doing the work you need it to do? What are you really trying to say? Editing matters, and I teach it—but I don’t teach students to edit toward “correct.” I teach them to edit toward their reader: who are you trying to reach, what do you want to land, and what language will get you there? Sometimes that calls for the conventions schools uphold; sometimes it calls for something conventions can’t do. The writer decides, because the writer knows the reader. Reaching people is the skill. Correctness is just one tool for it.
None of this lowers the bar. It moves the bar to where the actual work is.
Editing matters, and I teach it—but I don’t teach students to edit toward “correct.” I teach them to edit toward their reader.
A Word About the Shortcut
This issue of Educational Leadership worries, rightly, about students letting AI draft an essay in seconds and turning in work with no one behind it. Here is the thing: an AI-generated essay is the foundation myth perfected. It is fluent, correct, standardized prose with no thinker inside it and no self behind it. It is exactly what we say we want—until we get it and realize we have been asking for the wrong thing all along. If all we ever require is clean correctness, we should not be surprised that a machine now produces it faster than we can. The answer is not more policing. It is the work I have been describing. When a writer who has been taught to think, and told her voice belongs on the page, uses AI, she will use it as a tool to support her thinking, not to replace it. You cannot outsource what only you can say. Teach a student that she has something only she can say, and the shortcut loses most of its pull.
The Writing Will Come
Teach for extended thinking, and you don’t get less. You get more. You get writing that is rigorous and unmistakable—the student’s own work that makes thinking moves while keeping the cadence, the conviction, and the knowledge the writer walked in with. In my own work, I call this Blackademic discourse: the refusal to choose between being intellectually serious and being fully, culturally, oneself on the page (Johnson, 2026). Ruby did not choose. She gave us both. And she goes further, naming the stakes of the omission she has been tracing all along. She writes:
So why isn’t this taught more deeply? I believe there is a deeper reason. If people fully understood that Black Americans come from strength, intelligence, and resilience, it would challenge many stereotypes. It would challenge the idea that success is rare in our community. It would force the nation to acknowledge that America’s wealth and power were built not only on freedom, but also on exploitation. Keeping the full story hidden protects a certain narrative. It is easier to celebrate small victories than to confront uncomfortable truths about injustice and stolen opportunity.
Remember her word—foundational. Ruby wrote that Black people are “not just part of American history—we are foundational to it,” and in doing so, she reclaimed that word more truly than the education profession does. The foundation worth building on was never a stack of conventions that a child has to earn her way past. It was the thinking she already does, and the truth she is already carrying. Our job is to invite that thinking (in connection to the content we teach) onto the page and not flinch when it arrives in the language she thinks with.
That is what it means to cultivate a confident writer. Not a student corrected into silence, but one who can look at the record, think with content, make sense of what is there and what is missing, and write herself into this world in her own language.
The writing will come. Ruby showed us. We just have to be the kind of teachers who see what’s already there. We better recognize.
