>   I think the proposal for a "certification" program SEEMs like an
>attempt to derail scope and sequence, 

These are sufficiently separate and sufficiently demanding to warrant two working groups.  




>   I think that there were reasons why the old grammar was called into
>question. 

This I think is fundamentally flawed unless you mean it was called into question by those who didn't know their grammar or who didn't want to review their grammar found it politically expeditious to do so.  Politically expeditious because there are so many who don't know their grammar.  As I have pointed out in earlier posts, one only need to try and list the problems in traditional grammar along with examples to find that what scope and sequence is offering and what used to taught and also what I am talking about are essentially the same.  The only real error that ever existed in grammar teaching was an overenthusiastic importation of abstractions from the world of theoretical linguistics.  

Also the idea that writing and grammar need to be paralleled so much is a red herring.  Grammar does not have to do with your creativity.  It has to do with your logic and rhetoric.  

>A good deal of grammar
>instruction has been inaccurate (descriptively) and somewhat arbitrary
>and dysfunctional (prescriptively), not well connected to meaningful
>writing or a meaningful interaction with text. 

This is largely false.  Though I have seen statements like this many times before they always come without examples.  


>We would be saying, in effect, that there was nothing of
>substance in the movement away from grammar. 

Which would be correct.  See especially David Mulroy' _The War Agaist Grammar_.  



>    The path we were on--a fairly careful rethinking of traditional
>grammar, with attention to how grammar might be integrated into
>reading and writing in a substantive way--I believe has the potential
>to win over converts. 

Well first off, this can't be done as you cannot avoid the teaching of all of traditional grammar once you start.  The reason this group never takes off is because any time any would start a list of what to teach they would very quickly find that all that comprises traditional grammar is closely intertwined and once you decide to teach anything (puncutation, parts of speech, sentence roles, sentence structure) you find that you're compelled to teach the entirety of it or give it up ... or wallow in the dream of a coming day when smaller or simpler grammar may somehow be devised -- which of course would be impossible without a regression of the entire planet to some primitive linguistic state, say pre-Tigres and Euphrates.  


>   Are we too polarized to come up with a consensus? 

I see more of a lack of direction and faulty assumptions as the main problem.  I hope you don't mean that certificaiton and scope and sequence are somehow polarizing.  They are quite complementary and worthy of two separate committees.  



>   The project could continue outside the umbrella of ATEG. Perhaps a
>Certification program could as well. 

You seem to believe that ATEG can have one and only one committee, the scope and sequence committee, which is daft.  Two or even more would be fine.   You might find some solutions in dividing the Scope and Sequence committee into subcommittees.  


Phil  Bralich

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