Writing Revolution?

The Atlantic is sponsoring a battle of educational essayists at Why American Students Can't Write - The Atlantic, starting with Peg Tyre's tale of The Writing Revolution at New Dorp:

faced with closure, the school’s principal went all-in on a very specific curriculum reform, placing an overwhelming focus on teaching the basics of analytic writing, every day, in virtually every class. What followed was an extraordinary blossoming of student potential, across nearly every subject—one that has made New Dorp a model for educational reform.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect is that their success seems to have been an imitation of someone else, i.e. there is an explicit method which can be copied. The someone else in this case (one Judith Hochman) did want to clarify Tyre's report, in that her focus on Academic Writing Isn't a Throwback to the 1950s. Fair enough, but it is apparently, to some degree, a replicable framework, something about which one can actually say that 'I'll Have What They're Having!': The Challenge of Replicating One School's Success

Teaching students how to use words like "although" not only improves their writing and their reading; it improves their thinking. The linguistic structures that Hochman and the faculty at New Dorp are teaching their students are also heuristics, cognitive moves that help students to think about the world -- the poems they read, the molecules they study, and yes, their personal experiences -- in new and more powerful ways. If you're going to pick one thing and stick with it, this form of writing instruction is not a bad place to start.

Of course, it would be a terrible place to stop; any single place would be. In branching out, I liked John Maguire's The Secret to Good Writing: It's About Objects, Not Ideas

Tyre points out how small some of the important skills are, and how conscious instruction in them can make a difference. When New Dorp discovered that students didn't know how to use such words as "although" or "despite," the school consciously set out to teach them...
Like the teachers at New Dorp, I believe in conscious skill instruction and over the years have made my own list of missing skills. One is the skill of giving specific concrete examples in an essay...
start the course with physical objects, training students to write with those in mind, and to understand that every abstract idea summarizes a set of physical facts. I do, in fact, take that approach. "If you are writing about markets, recognize that market is an abstract idea, and find a bunch of objects that relate to it," I say. "Give me concrete nouns. Show me a wooden roadside stand with corn and green peppers on it, if you want. Show me a supermarket displaying six kinds of oranges under halogen lights. Show me a stock exchange floor where bids are shouted and answered."
"What is a concrete noun?" a student might ask.
"It's something you can drop on your foot," I always answer. "It's that simple."
"So if I am writing about markets, productivity and wealth, I am going to...."
"Yes indeed -- you are going to write about things you can drop on your foot, and people, too. Green peppers, ears of corn, windshield wipers, or a grimy mechanic changing your car's oil. No matter how abstract your topic, how intangible, your first step is to find things you can drop on your foot."

I like that, it reminds me of Feynman more than Maguire's own examples, but again it's just an item in a class of items on a list of classes of items...it's another branch. It would be nice to think that scalable online evaluations (i.e., evaluation by programs or peers or possibly parents, but not so much by teachers) can identify problems faced by a given student (can't use "although" correctly, literally doesn't know what concrete thing would be an example of his verbal fuzz, whatever) thus identify which small unit should next be experienced by that student.
Or then again, maybe not.