Opinion: Is MCPS putting literature as a subject of study on the shelf?

Lowering English language arts curriculum standards in school disadvantages all students

December 6, 2023 4:00 p.m.

I knew I had to get more involved with goings on in our local school system when my son revealed that his tenth grade English class would not be reading Homer’s Odyssey, as students in his year had long been expected to do. Instead, they watched an eight-minute video summarizing the poem, performed a skit and then moved on to a contemporary novella about Penelope.

There would be no Homer for my son and his classmates. No wine-dark sea, no journey to the underworld, no return to Ithaca.

This seemed par for the course. In his eighth-grade year, he was supposed to have read Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, but his class never cracked open the book. Over the years, he’d read The House on Mango Street twice for school and several young adult novels, but little else of note in the way of fiction, poetry or drama.

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When I compare his high school experience to my own (my sophomore English class memorably toured the history of British literature, from Beowulf to The Mayor of Casterbridge), I can only conclude that literature as a subject of study has been all but abandoned in our public schools.

My understanding of this phenomenon has been informed by my work as a writing professor over the past 15 years, a period during which I’ve seen my students’ knowledge and skills deteriorate.

It has also been informed by my window into the curriculum at Montgomery County Public Schools, where my son is a junior and my daughter an eighth grader, and where I now serve on the county’s PTA curriculum committee. As my children have grown up in what is reputedly one of the nation’s best school systems, I’ve been alarmed by the incoherence of the English language arts curriculum.  

The first thing one notices when perusing the county’s current high school English curriculum guides is that the recommended literature is overwhelmingly American and contemporary. Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf appear now and then in the lists of possible core texts. Now the majority of the recommended works are by contemporary or twentieth-century U.S. authors. Even the list for the twelfth grade, ostensibly devoted to the ‘global experience,’ has been colonized by contemporary Americans such as Dave Eggers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Tim O’Brien.

The bias in favor of the contemporary is especially pronounced when one considers all that has been left out. You will find among the core texts no works from the medieval, neoclassical or romantic eras. No Russian or European writing from the nineteenth century, almost no African, Asian and South American literature, and, with the exception of three titles, no American writing published before 1900.

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The second thing you notice is that the curriculum is ahistorical in its organization. The designers have made no effort to place the literature of, say, American literature of the decades preceding the Civil War into a coherent unit, so that students might gain an appreciation for the context in which the likes of Stowe and Whitman were writing. Rather, students are presented with a scattershot of relatively recent texts, several of which are below grade level in complexity.

Perhaps curriculum designers today favor newer, easier and more relatable reading because they want to make English class more inclusive and equitable. In truth, lowering standards in school disadvantages all students, especially those who most need our support.

In a recent report called “The Opportunity Myth,” the New Teaching Project found that even though most students are succeeding in high school classes, they are largely unable to meet grade-level standards. Why? To answer that question, the researchers sampled nearly 1,000 lessons and 5,000 assignments across five school districts, and found that students are often being taught below grade-level. Thus, many students graduate from high school unprepared for college-level work.

“[W]e found classroom after classroom filled with A and B students whose big goals for their lives were slipping further away each day, unbeknownst to them and their families—not because they couldn’t learn what they needed to reach them, but because they were rarely given a real chance to try,” the report reads.

What’s more, by ignoring so much of the literature that precedes the likes of Cristina Henríquez and Jumpha Lahiri, MCPS is blinkering our students to the intellectual and aesthetic movements that have shaped our modern world. To appreciate the value of reading canonical work, one need look no further than the experiences of Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr., who, as Cornel West observed in his defense of teaching the classics at Howard University, benefited greatly from studying the ancient Greeks.

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Let’s acknowledge, too, that canons are elastic. The American canon has not always included the work of major Black authors, but it does now. By paying scant attention to our past, we risk silencing their voices as well. Indeed, among the writers excluded from Montgomery County’s high school core-text reading lists is Frederick Douglass.

We must have diversity in the teaching of literature, but that imperative should not require us to abandon our literary heritage. If schools truly care about equality, they will ensure that all students have access to a consistently rigorous and historically informed English Language Arts curriculum. To provide anything less is to handicap an entire generation of students.

Paul Jaskunas teaches at the Maryland Institute College and serves on the Curriculum Committee of the Montgomery County Council of PTAs.

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