Report from Louisiana: ELA Teachers told to Remove Novels from Classrooms

By: Pat Austin

SHREVE­PORT — One of the unin­tended con­se­quences of Com­mon Core (or what­ever your state’s iter­a­tion of Com­mon Core is) has been an attack on the class­room library and inde­pen­dent reading.

In the move to imple­ment a “Tier 1 cur­ricu­lum,” the first thing to go is any­thing that does not align with that cur­ricu­lum. In Louisiana, a Tier 1 cur­ricu­lum “exem­pli­fies qual­ity.” As defined on the Louisiana Believes web­site, it “meets all non-​negotiable cri­te­ria and scored the best pos­si­ble on all indi­ca­tors of supe­rior quality.”

Louisiana’s ver­sion of Com­mon Core is called Louisiana Believes and in ELA our Tier 1 cur­ricu­lum is Guide­books 2.0 which was “made by teach­ers for teach­ers” and “ensures all stu­dents can read, under­stand, and express their under­stand­ing of com­plex, grade-​level texts.” It began in 2013 when the frame­work was devel­oped and now in 2018 most parishes are well into imple­men­ta­tion of the cur­ricu­lum. In my parish we are in year two.

In at least two parishes there have been reports of ELA teach­ers being asked to remove nov­els, or any­thing that is not Tier 1 mate­r­ial, from their rooms: one report was from south Louisiana and the other report came to me from north­west Louisiana. To pro­tect these teach­ers I will keep their names and parishes pri­vate. In one parish the teacher was able to strike a com­pro­mise with her admin­is­tra­tion after she pro­vided research and doc­u­men­ta­tion on the ben­e­fits of inde­pen­dent reading.

As Don­a­lyn Miller so often makes the case, the research on inde­pen­dent read­ing “is ubiq­ui­tous” and not hard to find.

In defense of these school dis­tricts, I think that part of the prob­lem is that we are so new to the imple­men­ta­tion of this rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent, scripted cur­ricu­lum that some­times admin­is­tra­tors and super­vi­sors may not all be on the same page with regard to what is accept­able and what is not. I can think of no other rea­son to jus­tify why an admin­is­tra­tor might tell a teacher that “inde­pen­dent read­ing has got to go!” or to remove nov­els from the class­room. Some­times these direc­tives vary within a sin­gle dis­trict from school to school.

It is just dif­fi­cult for an ELA teacher to hear that a stu­dent can’t read a book; it’s hard to jus­tify that. And frankly, I don’t know how any­one who calls him­self an edu­ca­tor would tell a teacher that stu­dents can’t read books. One of these teach­ers was told she “is resis­tant” to the new cur­ricu­lum; if that doesn’t sound right out of Ray Brad­bury I don’t know what does.

In fact, the Louisiana Believes web­site even states that the vision for stu­dents is that “Every day, stu­dents in Louisiana should build their knowl­edge of the world, read mean­ing­ful text, express their unique ideas through writ­ing and speak­ing, and attempt com­plex problems.”

Given that, I don’t believe that the Louisiana Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion is truly against stu­dents read­ing books and so I can’t con­ceive of why they would want them removed from class­rooms, yet I have actu­ally talked to two teach­ers where this happened.

It is no secret that I have a class­room library and this has not hap­pened to me; my stu­dents are read­ing AND they are par­tic­i­pat­ing in the Louisiana Tier 1 curriculum.

I can only hope that there was some mis­un­der­stand­ing on the part of these two teach­ers and that the issues have been resolved.

Pat Austin blogs at And So it Goes in Shreve­port and is the author of Cane River Bohemia. Fol­low her on Insta­gram @patbecker25.