Nice comments from all so far on this topic.

As to process writing, there may be more true process composition being
taught at the college level, where people have a whole semester or a
quarter to focus only on writing, and it might well be that most schools
now use the process approach, spending classroom time on things like
brainstorming, preparing to write, peer editing, more than one draft,
etc. I'm sure there's tremendous variation from place to place, but I"m
also sure there is some real process implementation going on. Here at
Cal Poly, for example, one of our profs is the director of the entire
freshman comp program, and supervises all the lecturers, grad students,
and the occasional profs who teach it. The process approach _and_
rhetorical structures are explicitly taught (though with varying degrees
of consistency and success, I know).

Wouldn't it be nice to have college writing teachers and K-12 writing
teachers interact more?? I've thought of trying to get, for example,
group 'norming' sessions (everyone grades the same papers and compares
notes) going here in my area, or of having English grad students go into
schools as volunteer aides to learn and teach with schoolteachers.  Does
anyone on the list have such stuff going, and does it work?

Another comment on the increasing importance of 'proper grammar' in
modern written communications ... we need to incorporate into our
teaching that 'proper grammar' is always changing. My students and I did
a survey recently (a la the famous Hairston study). I included sentences
with 'errors' reflecting changes currently underway in the standard
dialect (such as the disappearance of 'whom', and the increasingly
common use of subject pronouns in object positions in compound phrases).
Less than half of my sample (208 folks, comprising businesspeople,
schoolteachers, and college teachers) realized that there was an 'error'
in these cases (whereas around 90% caught 'errors' due to dialect
difference, such as double negatives or 'hisself'). (The full story of
the project is on my website under 'Usage Matters'). I think it would be
a good idea to teach that different 'errors' come from different
sources, and that some evoke more condemnation than others.

My two cents. Cheers to all.
Johanna