Sandra Stotsky, Christian Goering, David Jolliffe
University of Arkansas
Spring 2010
This paper wants to know what high school students are reading today and whether it’s any good. To find out, the authors interviewed 400 Arkansas public high school teachers of ninth-, tenth-, and eleventh-grade English to find out what they assign; then, they did follow-up focus groups with a subset to hear more about teaching conditions and accountability requirements that might impact reading syllabi. They focused on the “middle third” of students—average students in regular or honors classes, as opposed to students in AP, IB, basic, or remedial ones. What they found is troubling. First, Arkansas high school literature curricula are generally unchallenging. Assigned texts are mostly at the middle school level, and they don’t get harder as students get older, either. The few remaining challenging texts that are commonly assigned—such as Julius Caesar or The Scarlet Letter—appear to be leftovers of curricula of an earlier era. Second, when teaching these texts, teachers shun analytic approaches in favor of tackling the text from a cultural, historical, and/or biographical standpoint, even when this approach is incongruent with culture-free skills required by state standards. Only about 30 percent of teachers approach literature instruction from a “close reading” or “new criticism” perspective, and almost solely in pre-AP or AP courses. Their recommendations for solving this dismal state of affairs are numerous, but boil down to two: The literature “classics” are classics for a reason, and students need to be taught at all levels how to read them with an analytic eye. Hear, hear. You can read it here.
