How much one can trust the public media to accurately and exhaustively report on the nature and depth of educational problems is questionable. Certainly the media have hyped the problem so that the public perceives a crisis, and a number of popular and even scholarly authors have ridden the crisis bandwagon. But the extent of the problem has never been definitively documented, and both the public and educators have had to respond to their own perceptions in their own limited context. Such has been the case with teachers and researchers in the English language arts, specifically reading and writing. Graduates at various levels must learn to convey what they have learned. Educators have responded to the suggestion of crisis in several ways which we shall examine in this paper.