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Originally Posted by alum
Completely anecdotal but I always found the kids who went to independent prep schools and selective parochial schools were almost always excellent writers. I don't know if that was because the student-teacher ration was much smaller and the prep teachers really focus on students writing well vs just trying to prep the class for the state NCLB, the SAT, or the AP exams. My daughter went to a decent public high school and always took AP and Honors for every subject possible. However she usually had 25-30 classmates, even in AP. When she went to the Page School as a junior, her smallest class had 6 students, her largest had 16. Despite the condensed schedule of the Page School (they had shortened classes when Congress was in session), the teachers were much more demanding and seemed to expect more. Her writing vastly improved.
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I don't know about class size or student to teacher ratios, but I do think that I have
an answer regarding better writers.
I went to Catholic school from K-12. My high school was a College Prep school. You needed to pass a test to get in. Anyway, we had 4 levels - "college prep", Honors 1 and Honors 2, and AP (seniors only). I was in Honors 1 and 2 classes. In terms of students' writing skills - the honors students were required to do much more writing than the "college prep" kids. We even took a special Study Skills class the first quarter (which helped immensely, and I think that everyone should have benefitted from it).
Anyway, in our English class alone, we had to read and write a paper on one required book a week. We also had mini-term papers every three weeks, a half-term paper, and and a full-term paper. All our tests were written tests, and sometimes we wrote for entire class periods. We also had to write papers every quarter in our science, history, religion, etc., classes.
It was really just practicing. You do it enough, a lot of things become habit (esp. spelling and grammar). Parents can encourage kids to do this at home if the schools aren't requiring it.