Should Local Taxpayers Pay for an Incoherent English Curriculum?
Individual secondary teachers often have had personalized and idiosyncratic goals for the elective courses they prepared and taught. What is not clear is why local taxpayers should have supported courses years ago that contributed to an incoherent school curriculum. Or why they support a K-12 reading and literature curriculum today that is even more incoherent than ever. The problem may have its roots in the idea that English (called Reading in the elementary school) should be a required subject at every grade level from kindergarten through 12th grade.
There once seemed to be a consensus that the K-12 curriculum should require all students to take a full year of English every year (among other subjects) and that the school district should pay teachers and their supervisors no matter what they taught in such a course. Even when a school had no coherent curriculum in a subject, school administrators and teachers were to be paid.
