For many of us born in the twentieth century, “English class” evokes memories of tattered copies of The Great Gatsby or Macbeth, chapter-a-night reading assignments, and that all-too-familiar sinking feeling when the next day’s pop quiz appeared. But popular anecdotes—and my own experience as a high school English language arts (ELA) teacher—suggest that shorter texts and excerpts have increasingly displaced the full-length novels, plays, and memoirs once at the center of ELA classrooms. Earlier this month, RAND released a new study that puts numbers to these claims.
Weighted to be nationally representative, the 2025 survey of 1,596 middle and high school ELA teachers offers findings that are neither devastating nor encouraging. In short, 91 percent of teachers are assigning at least one whole book a year, but many aren’t assigning much more than that.
Of course, there’s no objective way to determine how many full-length books students “should” read. But having taught all high school grade levels across varied socioeconomic contexts, I’ll go out on a limb and propose three books as the absolute minimum per year. Honestly, I’d prefer more, but three seems reasonable: one for each of three quarters, with another quarter allotted for poetry or short stories.
So, with that bar in mind: Among all middle and high school ELA teachers, 41 percent do not plan to teach at least three books. Nine percent don’t plan to assign any at all. And the numbers are even more discouraging for disadvantaged subgroups. In schools with a majority of students of color, 48 percent are assigned fewer than three, compared with 34 percent for majority-white schools. Similarly, in schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, 50 percent are assigned fewer than three, compared with 32 percent in low-poverty neighborhoods.
We know it’s valuable for students to read full-length books, so why is it that two-fifths of all middle and high schoolers—and about half of those who are disadvantaged—aren’t assigned enough?
As Karen Vaites has noted, the RAND study suggests that curricula may play a role. Teachers who use publisher-developed curricula for the majority of their instructional time assign fewer than three books on average, whereas their peers assign an average 3.6–3.9 annually. This tracks. It’s more expensive to include whole books in a curriculum, and as Robert Pondiscio has observed, curriculum publishers are responding rationally to the need to prepare students for reading assessments centered on short passages.
Still, curricula aren’t the whole story. While an alarming 66 percent of the teachers who spend the most time using publisher-developed curricula assign fewer than three books, 35 percent of teachers who spend no time using publisher-developed curricula still assign fewer than three books.
So what other forces might be at play?
A big one is homework. From my parents’ Vietnam-era high school days to the mid-2010s classroom where I taught ninth graders, the English class formula essentially didn’t change: Read a chapter a night, discuss it the next day. To be sure, at no point in history did all students complete the reading. CliffsNotes have existed in paperback form since the 1950s and online since the early aughts. Nonetheless, it was valuable to set the expectation that students should be reading actual books, and students were aware that their grades were at risk if they weren’t familiar with the assigned content.
But just a decade later, many students don’t have the same incentives to read the chapter or even a ChatGPT summary. Many of the guardrails that gave urgency to reading assignments—quizzes, graded discussions, firm deadlines—have fallen out of favor with changes to grading practices. If you’re going to earn 50 percent credit on a reading quiz no matter what, whether you leave it blank or you tried but didn’t understand half the reading… then really, why try?
Today’s students also aren’t getting assigned the same at-home reading workload. Compared with just two years ago, they’re receiving less homework generally. To be sure, there are valid equity concerns when it comes to homework. Students may have caregiving responsibilities, for example, or an afterschool job to make ends meet. Teachers in multiple states have also told me that they don’t assign much out-of-school reading because they don’t feel that their students are capable, between poor literacy levels and what many perceive as diminished attention spans.
Throwing in the towel is not a productive approach, and there are ways to support homework and extended reading while navigating these concerns. The current reality, however, is that many kids aren’t expected to do a large portion of reading outside of class, which means that many won’t do much reading at all. Short texts and excerpts can be more quickly consumed during class.
More broadly, I suspect the ongoing culture wars play a role. In September 2021, a parent visited my classroom after school to ask what we’d be reading in her son’s class. Fair question. I explained that we were following the district curriculum and listed off the major texts. She repeated the only title authored by a person of color: “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?” Yes, I confirmed. After an extended silence, she proceeded, “Well, we read that even when I was in school, so…I guess that’s OK.”
In retrospect, it doesn’t sound like a major event. Douglass’s Narrative had been selected by the district, so I knew administration would have my back. I wasn’t a brand-new teacher, so I’d had challenging exchanges with parents before. And I was confident that the text had both literary and historical value for young people. But in a politically contentious state with family-school tensions uncomfortably in the spotlight, the encounter had my heart racing.
If you’re assigning a whole book, that is a commitment. Your class must spend a certain number of weeks reading, discussing, and writing about that text. If you have a shorter text, however, you can easily pivot in response to parent or community concerns. Even the New York Times has noted that assigning excerpts allows teachers to skip over contentious passages within longer works. No, culture wars aren’t a primary driver of the gradual excerpt creep, but the tensions likely furthered the sidelining of full-length novels, plays, and memoirs.
If education leaders really want to see teachers assigning entire books again, they’ll have to do more than swap out a curriculum. They’ll need to reckon with the major shifts of the past several years, from grading policy changes to heightened concerns about sensitive topics. And I hope they do. It’d make a difference for all students, especially those already facing disadvantage.
