Last week the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) released a study on the nation’s high school English curriculum. Sandra Stotsky is the the study’s principal author and contributor of today’s post.
Why have the reading skills of American high school students shown little or no improvement in several decades despite substantial increases in funds for elementary and secondary education by federal and state governments? A study strongly suggests two school-based factors–a fragmented English curriculum and a neglect of close reading.
Entitled Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, And 11: A National Survey, the ALSCW report presents an analysis of the responses of more than four hundred representative public school teachers who were asked what works of literature they assign in standard and honors courses, and what approaches they use for teaching students how to understand imaginative literature and literary non-fiction. The study excluded elective courses, basic and remedial courses, as well as Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, and other advanced courses because we were interested in the broad middle third of our students. The complete, 36-page report (and its appendices) may be read at, and downloaded from, the ALSCW’s website.
Among the study’s major findings:
(1) The content of the literature and reading curriculum for students in standard or honors courses is no longer traditional or uniform in any consistent way. As shown in Table 1 below, the most frequently mentioned titles are assigned in only a small percentage of courses, and the low frequencies for almost all the other titles English teachers assign point to an idiosyncratic literature curriculum for most students. These low frequencies suggest how little is left of a coherent and progressive literature curriculum with respect to two of its major functions—to acquaint students with the literary and civic heritage of English-speaking people, and to develop an understanding and use of the language needed for college coursework.
English teachers do seem to assign for the vast middle of our high school population a large variety of other works, many of which are also mature literary or non-literary works (and they are all listed in an appendix). But it is not clear how easily a coherent curriculum can be worked out on the basis of an idiosyncratic set of texts in each English class at each grade level, chosen by the teacher or, in some cases, by students, or by both.
(2) The works teachers assign generally do not increase in difficulty from grade 9 to grade 11. The titles that tend to be read in grade 11 are, overall, no more difficult than those read in grade 9.
(3) Teachers do not favor close, analytical readings of assigned works. Perhaps more damaging than the absence of a coherent and progressively challenging literature and reading curriculum are the pedagogical approaches English teachers tend to use. It is bad enough that they must use precious instructional time to address the content-empty and culture-free skills dominating state standards and tests, over which they have little control. But they also tend to use approaches to literary study that divert student attention from the assigned text and consume much of the time they can allot for literary study. As shown in Tables 2 and 3 below, they prefer such non-analytical approaches as a personal response or a focus on a work’s historical or biographical context (for instance, class discussions of To Kill a Mockingbird that emphasize the Scottsboro Trials or Jim Crow laws in the South, rather than the novel’s plot, characters, style, and moral meaning).
Teachers of standard and honors courses do draw on a variety of approaches for literary study, including close reading, but they are more likely to use a non-analytical approach to interpret both imaginative works as well as literary non-fiction (e.g., a personal response or a focus on a work’s historical, cultural, or biographical context) than to undertake careful analysis of the work itself. While biographical or other materials may supplement a close reading of a text by, for example, introducing the seminal ideas of the author’s time, a stress on personal response or on contextual materials does not replace the need to teach students how to read the text itself.
We do not know why English teachers favor non-analytical approaches. Today, most students enter and leave high school with little historical and cultural knowledge, as NAEP tests in history and civics inform us. If high school English teachers do supply their students with background materials for a work they are studying, the content of these contextual materials is apt to be as new to them as the work is, which means that the teacher’s use of them in the classroom is more likely didactic than analytic. An under-use of analytical reading to understand non-fiction and a stress on personal experience or historical context to understand either an imaginative or a non-fiction text may be contributing to the high remediation rates in post-secondary English and reading courses.
Table 2: Approach to Teaching Imaginative Literature
Table 3: Approach to Teaching Literary Non-Fiction
These findings suggest that the way reading and writing are taught today by many high-school English teachers may be impeding for many public high school students the development of skills needed for authentic college-level coursework. They may also be impeding the development of analytical skills that are vital to an informed, capable citizenry–close attention to the artifacts and designs of language that were once developed through literary analysis.
College courses not just in English but in many disciplines routinely assign difficult texts and expect students to understand, analyze, and write coherently about them. According to ACT, a major reason why college students end up in remedial courses or drop out of college is their inability to comprehend and analyze complex texts. An incoherent high-school curriculum that rarely advances beyond 9th-grade-level texts and that expects little more than impressionistic responses to them is a prescription for educational underperformance or outright failure at the college level.
Sandra Stotsky is Professor of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas and a former member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Post-Bulletin, Rochester MN