Sandra Stotsky is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and holds the Twenty-First Century Chair in Teacher Quality. She served as editor of Research in the Teaching of English in the 1990s and has taught at the elementary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate level.
The Death and Resurrection of a Coherent Literature Curriculum is a
timely and measured study of a problem that only seems to get
worse. Reading scores for high school students are flat since the
early 1970s and down since the early 1990s. Writing scores are also
down in recent years. Remediation classes in college are packed.
Stotsky explains why. It's not because of budget cuts, or a rising
multi-ethnic student population, or too much text-based
accountability. It's because of certain ideas and attitudes that
came forward in the 1960s and prevailed in the highest centers of
professional power and influence in education—in English
departments in our colleges and universities and in English
education and reading departments in schools of education. Using
abundant historical material, Stotsky recounts a troubling tale of
the abandonment of our national literary heritage, the substitution
of sentimental aims for academic aims, and the intimidation of
people who raised doubts about those changes as they happened. She
also finds some hope in the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
Her final chapters chart a path toward restoration of a coherent
and demanding literature curriculum in our public schools, and
support for those secondary English teachers who are confident of
its content and eager to produce more knowledgeable and skilled
graduates. This study should be on the syllabus of every English
education course in the country.
*Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital
Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future*
This book does more than trace the demise of the coherent and
demanding literature curriculum I was fortunate enough to have had
when I was in high school. It also shows secondary English teachers
how to reconstruct a curriculum for literary study that will enable
a very different generation of students to understand the rhetoric
of the most active civic culture in the world. During the 12
years I served in the Massachusetts Senate, seven of which as
Senate President, and as a co-author of the Education Reform Act of
1993, most of my constituents could not have known how much I
benefited from three years of graduate studies in English Language
and Literature at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. But I know
the difference it made to my political and legal career. After
decades of national tests emphasizing content-free skills,
processes, strategies, or competencies (and with possibly many more
such tests to come), English teachers know that attention must be
paid to the content of the literature curriculum and they need
support. Sandra Stotsky's book should be on the desks of all K-12
education policy makers and education school deans.
*Thomas F. Birmingham, Senior Counsel, Edwards Wildman Palmer,
LLP*
The ability to read closely, and indeed the capacity to become
immersed for an hour in a work of literature, is no longer to be
taken for granted in students entering colleges and
universities. Challenging high-school curricula, with
progressively more demanding works assigned to each grade level,
are the exception. As a result, those who teach college
writing face the challenge of working with students starved of the
nourishment that would best prepare them to achieve academic
literacy. In my thirty-two years of reading placement
examinations by University of California freshmen, I have seen the
consequences of that diet of gruel and sweets: especially a decline
in middle-level students’ abilities to thrive in higher
education’s reading-rich, literacy-demanding courses of study.
Sandra Stotsky’s book is a bracing, practical guide to recovering
the promise of American public education, particularly its
commitment to teaching and expecting genuine literacy. Here the
challenge is named with urgent clarity, along with the facts,
principles and strategies to address it.
*John C. Briggs, Professor of English, Director of the University
Writing Program, University of California, Riverside*
This powerful little book is a 'must read' for English teachers,
high school principals, and college instructors now confronting the
deplorable conditions of illiteracy in this country. It examines
how, since World War I, American educators have embraced one
literacy strategy after another and failed, ultimately, to present
a high-quality, sufficiently challenging literature program to all
middle and high school students. Rather than demanding that all
students read a carefully designed sequence of classic and
contemporary literary works, English teachers have abandoned the
close analysis of texts—by word, by line, and by genre—as a
fundamental aim of English. The result? An incoherent, overly
politicized literature program that is neither developmentally
rigorous nor informed by reading and writing experiences that build
on and expand our common heritage as Americans.
Few people can speak as authoritatively as Sandra Stotsky on the
causes—historical, political and pedagogical—underlying the
breakdown we see in the preparedness of high school graduates to
enter college able to read analytically while drawing on essential
works of imaginative literature, poetry, and non-fiction. As former
editor of Research in the Teaching of English, Deputy Commissioner
for the Massachusetts Department of Education, and author of
numerous books and articles on reading and language, Professor
Stotsky is possibly best known for her work on the Massachusetts
curriculum frameworks for English Language Arts and Reading,
Mathematics, and History. These three frameworks are arguably
one of the principal reasons why Massachusetts has, since 2005,
consistently led the country on measures of achievement on the 4th
and 8th examinations for mathematics and reading on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The rigor of
Massachusetts’s frameworks and the standards they hold for all
students—most notably10th graders who must earn passing scores on
the MCAS in order to receive a diploma—are as much a part of the
'Massachusetts miracle' as the Education Reform Act of 1993
itself.
Dr. Stotsky clearly knows her subject, and, as her record in
Massachusetts shows, she has carried her ideas and recommendations
into classrooms with impressive results. This thoughtful study is a
no-nonsense appeal for reasonable, authentic, overdue changes in
the ways we teach students to read, write, reason, and, ultimately,
know the power of a good book.
*Mark K. McQuillan, Dean, School of Education,Southern New
Hampshire University*
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