grammar epidemic

I'm watching an NBC news story about businesses sending their employees to remedial business writing classes to correct horrible and embarrassing written English. One of the instructors they interviewed in the story blames electronic communication, such as the use of Blackberries and informal email correspondence. As a writing tutor, I disagree. Students who speak no language other than English are arriving at my writing lab with pages and pages of words that make absolutely no sense. There are sentences with no verb or with no subject. This happens a lot but still it ceases to amaze me. It's pretty obvious that students are getting through high school without the writing skills they need to get through college or hold a job that involves written communication. If Americans want to be competitive in this so called global market, they'll have to get back to basics and at least ensure their youngsters can write in their native language by the time they finish high school. Many of the ESL students I work with have better grammar and sentence construction than the American students and, for lack of better words, it totally floors me.