The October issue of The Atlantic ran some feature articles on “what’s working” in American schools. One, “The Writing Revolution,” is about a school-wide writing program that was developed at a small private school in White Plains, New York, and implemented at a failing school in Staten Island, with great results. It raises some important questions. When did “literacy” come to mean, strictly, “the ability to read”? And when did we start confining writing instruction to Language Arts? The Hochman Program sounds like a writing teacher’s dream: “Every instructional hour except for math class is dedicated to teaching essay writing along with a particular subject.”