Who's Afraid of Nell Scharff?
Now, if you've read The Atlantic's piece on the "writing revolution" (I'll review this in another post) you may have picked up on the name Nell Scharff, but you may also have just paid her no attention. She is introduced in the piece and identified in this way.
Her [New Dorp principal] decision in 2008 to focus on how teachers supported writing inside each classroom was not popular. “Most teachers,” said Nell Scharff, an instructional expert DeAngelis hired, “entered into the process with a strongly negative attitude.” They were doing their job, they told her hotly. New Dorp students were simply not smart enough to write at the high-school level. You just had to listen to the way the students talked, one teacher pointed out—they rarely communicated in full sentences, much less expressed complex thoughts. “It was my view that these kids didn’t want to engage their brains,” Fran Simmons, who teaches freshman English, told me. “They were lazy.”
Scharff, a lecturer at Baruch College, a part of the City University of New York, kept pushing,
