In last week's article about struggling writers, I wrote about Sheila, a composite of many struggling writers with whom I've worked. I emphasized that before the evaluation, you should request that it answer your questions.

This could markedly influence the nature of the evaluation and improve the odds of helping you and your child's school develop a writing program that directly eliminates or lessens external barriers, like a steady diet of frustrating work that actively blocks her progress. She has no direct control of these barriers, but the school does. To help you achieve this, I offered many critical questions and their underlying justifications.

Though last week's article and this one share the same aim, their content differs markedly. This article discusses why typical writing evaluations are often inadequate. Knowing this may help you convince school or private evaluators that your child needs a different kind of writing evaluation, one that might use but doesn't depend on standardized tests to compare her to other children. Instead, outside of standardized testing, it directly examines what she can and can't do well and tries to identify external barriers to progress. Second, it discusses several important written requests you may need to send the school. Finally, if you're faced with resistance, it suggests possible actions to lessen or eliminate it.

A Typical But Inadequate Evaluation Process

To evaluate writing difficulties, many evaluators administer one or two standardized tests or batteries of tests; conduct a short, unstructured classroom observation, report their scores in long, impressive-looking columns of statistics with intimidating titles; and make a few innocuous comments about their observation. Their reports typically offer little of value; they basically verify what was known: The child has writing problems. They rarely offer well-justified recommendations to identify, minimize or eliminate barriers.

Though standardized testing has value for comparing students to one another on important bodies of knowledge and skills, it cannot answer many practical, instructionally important questions critical to developing an effective writing program. For most children, these include:

• What, if any instructional barriers, like methods, materials, and curriculum, are sustaining or intensifying the child's difficulties?
• What, if any structural factors, like grouping and scheduling, are sustaining or intensifying her difficulties?
• How well-focused, organized, and systematic is her writing instruction?
• How frequently is the school monitoring and reporting her progress and how trustworthy are its measures?
• What in-class support is she getting, like instructional feedback and encouraging reinforcement, and is it frequent and intense enough to accelerate her progress?
• Does her writing program adequately address her self-efficacy (a refined form of confidence), motivational, and self-regulatory needs, such as goal-setting, self-monitoring, and self-instruction talk?

Evaluating your child's writing problems by administering standardized tests in a private office ignores the need for an evaluator to observe her in-class abilities on different reading and writing tasks of various difficulty. Without two or more such observations, the evaluator will not fully learn what she does well, what she struggles with, and why. Neither will the evaluator develop a full understanding of her motivation and how her instructional environment influences it.

Without observing your child produce the writing samples, they will not tell the examiner if she rushed carelessly through the tasks or struggled mightily to succeed until tears filled her eyes. As Marjorie Lipson and Karen Wixson asserted:

"It is extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to evaluate students’ control of the writing process by considering only final products. Evaluation of student control … requires that students be observed, over time, in a classroom that values process writing and encourages author development."

The ending of Lipson and Wixson's comment makes two things clear. Standardized testing alone or the addition of writing samples collected by teachers will not give examiners firsthand information about a major factor influencing your child's writing achievement and motivation for writing: The nature of the writing instruction and support she experiences in class.

Important Requests

If your child struggles with writing, meet with her IEP (Individualized Education Program) Team, Section 504 Team, or other appropriate personnel to discuss her writing problems. Beforehand, send the appropriate person a written request for specifics, including recent samples of your child's writing, with written explanations or a checklist specifying the strengths and weaknesses of each sample and the attention, focus and effort she invested.

If needed, at the end of the meeting or afterwards, request a comprehensive writing evaluation that addresses each area identified in Part I's questions; their important areas of evaluation that require the evaluator to observe your child writing in a variety of situations for a variety of purposes, such as writing a shopping list, a note to a friend or an essay like the Common Core State Standards require.

Always make sure to follow your oral requests with written ones. If you suspect that your child has difficulties understanding what people say or difficulties expressing herself, request a speech and language evaluation that includes language samples exemplifying her language abilities.

Once the evaluations are completed and you’ve met with your child's evaluator, teacher(s) and other school personnel to discuss the results and to design a program in all areas of need — such as your child's self-efficacy, motivation, and ability to plan and self-monitor her writing — request information on the specific research supporting the proposed interventions.

Many interventions, though popular, lack a strong body of direct or related research supporting their effectiveness with struggling writers. In education, interventions with strong, direct research support, but little publicity, are often ignored. One, like Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD), has been a boon to many struggling writers,

In line with your request for research is a basic but often ignored requirement of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA), the major federal law governing special education. It requires IEPs to contain:

"A statement of the special education and related services and supplementary aids and services, based on peer-reviewed research to the extent practicable …. to advance appropriately toward attaining the annual goals." (CFR § 300.320)

The word "practicable" should not be a deterrent, as it's hard to grasp why well-supported, peer-reviewed methods and strategies are not "practicable." SRSD, for example, is a free teaching strategy, strongly supported by peer-reviewed research in highly respected journals, and after a few hours of professional education, training, and coaching, is relatively easy for motivated teachers to use in general and special education classes. Moreover, SRSD can benefit the majority of students.

But whatever the intervention, formally request, in writing, a written plan for monitoring your child's progress. Why? Even interventions supported by peer-reviewed research may not match the teacher or struggling writer's needs. Consequently, it may fail. Thus the need for frequent, trustworthy progress monitoring.

One way to monitor progress is to formally request twice-monthly samples of your child's completed writing assignments. Request that teachers date and annotate each one so you can understand the degree to which they show progress, stagnation, or regression.

Rubrics, which many states require, are lists of writing components and standards that many teachers and schools use to evaluate writing. They can make evaluations easier, more precise, and systematic for teachers, more instructional for students, and relatively easy for parents to understand. In general, rubrics compare each writing product, such as an essay, to writing characteristics the teacher or school believes vital to quality writing.

Another way to monitor progress is to request weekly Curriculum-based Measurement (CBM) probes. If properly used, each week your child would take a few minutes to complete a CBM writing probe that school staff, such as trained teacher assistants, would easily, quickly, and objectively mark. They would then record and graph her progress.

Every three or four weeks, this would allow teachers to quickly and objectively know if your child is progressing, stagnating, or regressing. If progress stagnates or regresses, the school would hold a meeting to plan how to identify the barriers actively blocking her progress, or if they're known, plan how to modify her program to eliminate or minimize them.

Peer-refereed research shows that CBM is usually a trustworthy, easy-to-use approach to progress monitoring that can greatly benefit children and teachers, and thus schools. Moreover, with readily available software that tracks, summarizes, and graphs data, school secretaries can quickly print data summaries and graphs that teachers can use to judge progress — within minutes.

Progress monitoring is critical for your child's teachers, school, and you so that all involved adults know if she's regressing, stagnating, or making substantial progress. Once known, her program can be adjusted to accelerate progress. But if progress is unknown or reliant on the fallibility of anecdotes, needed changes are unlikely. If so, odds are high that the problem will persist, intensify, compound, and harm your child as she remains in a program that's ineffective for her. Some people would call this inexcusable malpractice.

Suggested Actions

Despite what some parents think, most schools will do what they can to help your child. But some will flatly refuse to do the work needed to identify external factors possibly blocking her progress. So, what can you do?

You can fold, pout, and brood, or you can initiate several options that require considerable work, time, knowledge, skill, patience, tenacity, impartiality, open-mindedness and a strong belief that to help your child, you're doing what needs doing. None of these actions guarantee success, but if carefully and correctly employed, and if your case has considerable merit, they greatly increase your chances of success.

• Get and organize all relevant data, including reports, about your child's difficulties and progress. Remember that "Records and state codes are your oxygen. No oxygen, no strength" (see Negotiating Your Child's IEP).
• Seek the advice of highly-degreed professionals who specialize in evaluating and helping struggling writers. If possible, contact university faculty who teach graduate courses in diagnosing and remediating writing problems. This excludes many reading, special education, and general education faculty.
• ·Seek advice from your state's federally-funded Protection and Advocacy agency and its Parent Training and Information Center.
• Read a few current articles that summarize, critique, and discuss the peer-reviewed research on evaluating and remediating the problems of struggling writers. Local and college librarians can find these for you. Share one or two with interested IEP Team members.
• Organize a local advocacy group with parents whose children struggle in your district's schools. If possible, get expert advice. Then, as a group, meet with officials with the power to improve the situation. Explicitly state the problems, provide brief examples, and make explicit requests that they take specific actions. Clearly phrase your requests: "We request that you …." Before leaving, schedule a follow-up meeting to discuss their progress.
• Address your Board of Education and encourage other members of the advocacy group to do the same. The more members who address the Board, the stronger your impression. As a group, return as frequently as needed.
• Create a local blog and arrange for stories in your local newspaper, but do what you can to protect children's identities. Remember, stories are more powerful than statistics.
• If you haven't achieved adequate success, continue your actions. But also consider these:
  • Problem-solve the barriers you're facing and possible solutions.
  • Study, study, and again study the relevant portions of your state's special education code.
  • Hire a special education advocate with a well-deserved reputation for success.
  • Request the Independent Educational Evaluations your child needs. Be prepared, however, for the school to quickly challenge your request by filing for an impartial due process hearing to demonstrate the adequacy of its evaluations.
  • File a complaint with your state's department of education. Before sending it, have knowledge people review it.
  • Request state mediation.
  • Hire a special education attorney with a strong track record. Before doing this, interview two or more.
  • Request a state-level hearing after you've done the necessary pre-hearing preparation. This includes organizing and annotating copies of all your information.

Throughout the entire process, maintain your dignity, keep calm, treat everyone with respect, and punctuate your requests with supporting facts, such as research and stories. Remember your goal: To help your child.

A Practical, Philosophical Perspective

Parenting is a tough job. It's also an opportunity to give your child an enduring gift: Your behavior. She'll learn from this.

So, if and when you feel the heavy stresses and insecurities of advocating for her needs, remember that no one is "master of the universe," no one succeeds without stumbling, and like all people, to influence others you need to learn what to do, develop strong alliances and necessary abilities, and persevere in doing what's both ethical and necessary to prevail.

If your efforts fall short of your hopes, relax, support yourself, be kind to yourself, and when ready, identify the land mines and problem solve your next steps. By doing all of this, you may well achieve your goals.